| |||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSSThe conversation has been fast and furious lately about email marketing's future in the Digital Age. I am a firm believer that email is the marketing channel most able to adapt to shifting modes of communication, even as we trade the desktop computer for the handheld and the inbox for the personal page on the hot new social network.
While we look to the future, however, we're still plagued with marketers bent on ruining email's good reputation by ignoring best practices and doing business like it's 1999 all over again.
So, we go over the same ground -- permission, email design, content, list management, deliverability, the customer experience -- to the point where some industry thinkers complain we need to get past the basics and tackle more strategic issues: like how to generate a higher ROI.
A wonderful thought that I fully support, having written more than my share of "Email Marketing 101" articles over the last five years. But I also must disagree. As long as we have marketers out there doing their darnedest to ruin email marketing's hard-won good reputation by failing to upgrade their programs to reflect generally accepted best practices, we need to keep having the conversation and insisting that all the players hold them.
These folks aren't spammers huddled in dingy apartments in Beijing or Boca Raton, either; they could even include you in your brightly lighted cubicle or cushy corner office of your Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley high-rise if you're the person whose email campaigns violate every best practice from opt-in to unsubscribe.
You're one of those marketers who are holding us back from keeping email as a trusted channel for consumers and on the front lines of communication innovation, if your email programs look like these examples from my hall-of-shame Stupid Email Tricks:
The Unsolicited Surprise Trick: Why, a decade after email has proved itself as a viable marketing channel, is this an issue? Because I still get emails sent to an address that clearly was scraped off my company Web site. Or take this token stab at transparency with this explanation about why the email's in my inbox: "Your subscription was initiated because you requested it, you've attended one of our seminars, we've had some professional contact, or someone you know forwarded it to you." Yeah, that will help instill the trust that's so key in our relationship with our customers.
Meet Loren McDonald at Email Insider Summit Utah!
Loren McDonald will be there speaking during "Looking Past Email Measurement" on December 09 at 9:45 AM. Top executives will be there. Will you?
Register today and save.
Register today and save.
The Pestering-Email Trick: Your CFO, who signs your paycheck, tells you to send more email because it's cheap and you're a long way from meeting your quarterly numbers. Your customers have said they only want to hear from you once a week. Who's gonna win? Probably not your customers -- who will get fed-up being bombarded and opt out in droves,
The Portable-Permission Trick: OK, so you actually get permission from subscribers for Newsletter A. But you then launch Email B and C and automatically add Newsletter A subscribers to these new lists. "Heck, why start from scratch or get permission from our existing subscribers when it's so easy to add them to a new list?" Well, because they didn't ask for your new newsletters. Don't be surprised if subscribers suddenly opt out of all of your emails and hit the spam complaint button -- causing an ISP to block all of your emails.
The Exclamation-Syndrome Trick: What's wrong with this subject line? "Save up to 50% & Get Free Shipping!" The exclamation point is not needed and makes the email look spammy. That's all it takes to prompt your recipient to click the spam button even on your permission email. Email is not direct mail - you don't need to shout to get people to open it. Email Marketing 101 lesson? Don't use "free" and "!" together in the subject line -- that double combo may get you filtered.
The Old Bait-and-Switch Trick: You entice people to download your white paper or a "partner's offer," or similar promotion. Then. after they complete the form to receive what you got them interested in, you tell them, "By the way, like it or not, you've now just agreed to receive emails from us or our partners." Ugh, hey folks, thanks for the gift, but guess what - I'll never visit your site again or trust anything you say. Say adios to your brand.
Email marketing has a brand, and a public perception of that brand. Are you doing your best to keep email the No.1 ROI marketing channel and the single digital communications channel most used by consumers? Or are you one of those whose actions keep email from moving firmly into its place in the digital conversation?
RSS FEEDS
Welcome to the new Search Insider Section Two. In addition to the MediaPost Insiders you know and love, we're adding a daily overview of some of the best of the rest of the smartest voices and debates about search marketing happening on the Web.
This daily newsletter will be edited by longtime new media journalist Rebecca A. Fannin, author of the upcoming "Silicon Dragon," a McGraw-Hill book that profiles leading Chinese entrepreneurs in search, e-commerce, wireless communications, Web 2.0 and the Internet. Fannin has covered new media trends as an editor at Ad Age, Red Herring, Asian Venture Capital Journal and Digital Magazine News.
If you like what you see (and we think you will), don't do anything. Search Insider Section Two will come in your email every weekday. If you'd prefer not to receive it, click here.
Enjoy!
Laurie Petersen Executive Editor
Mark - Great point. In some other columns I've written on another marketing site, I chalked much of this up to an ROI/Resource imbalance. Many marketers do read these columns, go to seminars, listen to Webinars - and still don't take action, generally because they simply don't have the time or resources. Others are told by their bosses to ignore best practices. And yes, there is that last group that isn't reading all of our collective wisdom. Once they (or their bosses) figure out that their email results are dismal compared to competitors and their brand is being damaged - they'll at least start reading how to change their ways.
Hesh - No comment.
"Business has to stretch the truth in cyberspace"
I don't own a BlackBerry. But my clients don't know that. They're impressed when they receive an e-mail from me with the tag line: Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld. It shows that I'm available 24/7 and always responsive to their every need.
Am I lying? Literally, yes. However, in the world of business we are always stretching the truth to impress our customers. We want to give them a sense that we're successful, and never let them know that they're the first serious prospect we've had in a month.
A generation ago, sales reps did it with gold embossed business cards, Gucci shoes and monogrammed French cuffed shirts. And of course the obligatory Cadillac.
Back then, if you worked out of your basement you still had an answering service that responded with a real human being saying, "Reinfeld and Associates, could you please hold?"
And your mailing address was always a fancy downtown address (even if it was your brother's dental office).
Today, however, when you often never meet a prospect face to face, what can you do to differentiate yourself? Obviously it has to be in the world of cyberspace. Let me offer some examples.
1. Have every e-mail of two lines or less say it's sent via your BlackBerry. Don't try it with longer messages. No one is going to believe that you typed a 200-word message from a BlackBerry keypad.
2. Have a long confidentiality statement and disclaimer at the end of each e-mail. Make sure it has a lot of legalese about intellectual property rights. (I actually paid a second-year law student to write mine.)
3. On your Web site, add a page of "white papers." This proves that you take an intellectual approach to your business. Now you actually don't have to write these white papers. What I do is write one paragraph and then inform the reader he/she must sign up and get a 12-digit password to read the entire document. I know I never sign up for other people's Web sites, so I assume most people won't take the time to sign up for mine.
If someone actually signs up, what do you offer? Obviously you are not going to take the time to write these white papers. So just have the page say 'under construction.'
4. Make sure your photo is from 20 years ago, when you still had hair (guys) or when you were really a brunette (girls).
5. Add a few testimonials from satisfied customers. You don't have to offer the name of a real person. Just say the quote is from a "CFO of a Fortune 100 corporation." You know the drill, make it up, but please keep the hyperbole to a minimum.
6. Never have a "visitors" counter to your Web site on your home page. Why would you want someone know that he's only the 43rd visitor to the site since it was updated five months ago? And imagine if he actually returns in a few days and sees that he is now number 45.
The one addition to my Web site that I am having trouble faking is a blog. I have nothing new to say every day. Most probably I would find it hard to find something new and insightful to say every two weeks. My current solution is to say that my blog is on hiatus because I am working on my book.
For you newly minted MBAs, don't be disillusioned. How many of you really believe what you read on those matchmaking and dating Web sites?
As I say on my macho-male profile, "Amicule, deliciae, num is sum qui mentiar tibi?" ("Baby, sweetheart, would I lie to you?")
Second, just because Loren and I like to disagree with each other, except when he's rapping at an industry event, I will take some slight exception to your last point. Certainly the idea of allowing partners to send unsolicited email without permisssion after downloading a promotion is one thing. But to say it is not alright for a company to create a whitepaper for the purpose of lead generation is pretty harsh. It is a quid pro quo in my book: as a company, I've spent the time, trouble and money to put together a valuable white paper that is somehow related to my business. Is it too much to assume that if the person downloading said white paper might be interested in my company and its products. And is it too much to ask that I be allowed to send them a follow up email, all can spam compliant and with a working unsub link, to tell them about my products? I don't think so. I know of no company that spends the time putting a white paper together without some sort of lead generation or pr activity in mind.
Since a large number of marketers are not following basic best practices, how do you get their attention? Because if they were assiduously reading the email marketing media and blogs, they'd have got the message by now. So I wonder if we're not all preaching to the converted, and the people who need to get the message aren't even seeing it.
Who should take responsibility for reaching them? How can they reach them? Any ideas?