Mobile Sign-Up in Direct Mail

Here is a direct mail example from Dick's Sporting Goods where they promote their social media and Mobile Sign-up.  This is a great example of using direct mail to promote online endeavors.

Do you have other examples?
What has worked and not worked for you?
Do you use mobile for your marketing Campaigns?

Quality Check – It's a Dirty Job But Someone's Got To Do It

As any serious marketer knows, quality checking your products is imperative.  This could be an email, a billboard, a catalog, an online advertisement or anything else that is public facing.  Quality checks are not glamorous but they are necessary.  Don’t neglect this important step!

Here is an example a friend of mine sent me.  Cutting off the tags from a recent gift from the Disney Store displayed a missed text addition.  Oops.

Here is the front of the tag – Nothing wrong here.

Here is the back – the manufacturer (or someone along the production process) neglected to add logical text to this valuable product space.

Do you have any other examples of marketing mistakes? If so, please share them with us!

Give Your Emails Some Personality

For many email marketers the number one goal of an email is to generate revenue.  If an email does not perform, an opportunity can be lost.  This is great – but can also lead to stagnant emails.  Once in a while it is nice to mix things up.  

Send an email that is not about generating sales but about building relationships, passing along a funny story, or telling your subscribers more about who you are as a company, as an email marketer, and as a person.

Your subscribers might be interested in hearing more about your employees, the city your business is in, about the models you use in your emails etc.  Give them something to talk about.

Here are two great examples.  

The first is from Eddie Bauer.  They introduce their company dog, Eddie, and talk all about him on their Facebook page.

The second is from TheLadders.com.  This email is all about the company and includes pictures.
The Subject Line of this email is simply Photos of us.

Do you have any examples of emails that take a break from marketing and send a new message?  What are your thoughts on emails like this?

Ready, Set...Reactivate!

It is no secret that email marketing lists can get stagnant.  Your subscribers are not responding to your  emails at the rate you would like and you are not sure what to do. 

The answer is run a reactivation campaign. You can reactivate your inactive subscribers!

Here are some interesting reactivation related stats, tips and tricks:

1. More than 80% of email marketers send the same content to all subscribers.
HINT: Use creative segmentation to send your subscribers what they like at the cadence they like.

2. 30-60% of most subscriber lists are inactive.
HINT: Be sure to identify your inactives and reactivate them.

3. Nearly 30% of most subscriber lists re-engage during the holiday season.

4. Not all marketers define inactivity based on the same criteria. 
HINT: Create an inactive definition for your email list and test it frequently.

5. We Miss You campaigns have proven to be effective in reactivating recently lapsed buyers.  Messaging Tactics for inactives also include Aggressive/Unconventional Subject Lines, Aggressive Offers & Creative Treatments, Reactivation Series, Polls or Surveys and Changes in Frequency.

6. Include click data into your strategy to incorporate recommended items based on click inference into the content.

7. Define and analyze your Inactive subscribers to gain an understanding of their past behavior with your program (especially for any seasonal purchase behavior).

8. Re-Integrate reactivated subscribers back into the email message stream.

9. Don't let subscribers become inactive in the first place– create lifecycle messaging.

10. Be relevant – keep subscribers engaged from the start of the customer journey.

Here are some reactivation creative examples:

Share your reactivation stories with us!  What has and has not worked in your reactivation campaigns?

Top-Performing Advertising Channels

In a recent survey, marketing executives reported that email is the strongest-performing advertising channel. Behind Email was Search, Offline, Affiliate Marketing, Display, Direct Mail, Social Media and Mobile.

 This data is from Datran Media's 4th Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 2010.

Share your thoughts on what will be the next big marketing channel.   Can Social Media be number one in the future?

Yahoo! Mail Is Turning Links Blue By Default: Get The Fix

There is a new issue occurring in Yahoo! Mail.

What's happening
In some cases Yahoo! Mail is turning links blue by default

The solution
The workaround is to overwrite the Yahoo style by declaring it with an embedded style within the section like this:

Here is an example of the pesky blue links:

Here this is fixed:

Here is an example of how to fix this:

Original:
< a href=" http://%%track%%/dyn598" style="padding:0 8px 0 16px; color:#FFFFFF;" title="Mirrors" target="_blank" >Mirrors< /a >

Updated with Changes:
< a href="http://%%track%%/dyn598" style="padding:0 8px 0 16px; color:#FFFFFF;" title="Mirrors" target="_blank" >< span style="color:#FFFFFF" >Mirrors< /span >< /a >Mirrors

This example will set all links as black:
   < style type="text/css" >
    .yshortcuts { color:#000000; }< /style >  

If you need to change more than one link color you will need to create classes.

In this example there is a class created for the links in the header and for the links in the footer.

.header .yshortcuts { color:#666666; }
.footer .yshortcuts { color:#FFFFFF; }

The class name would need to be added to the table tag or tag that contains the links.

Here is an example of the header class added to the table tag.

< table width="619" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="header" >

If there is text that is being highlighted as a popular search term by Yahoo! you can place an < a > tag around it to stop the underlining and blue box.

Here is an example of how you can do this:

< a style="color:#000000; text-decoration:none;" >System text copy that is being underlined by Yahoo!.< /a>

 Please note: I added spaces before each < > in the above code. This is so the code displays correctly in this post. Remove the erroneous spaces when you try this in your Emails HTML.

As always, be sure to test your mailing after adding these snippets of code to ensure that it isn't causing any new breaks in other mail clients. Let me know if this update works for you. 

Header Redesign: Simple Changes Can Make Big Differences

Header text is a must have best practice for any serious email marketer. This text will display in an email even when images are blocked and formatting is not quite right. This actionable area, at a minimum, should deliver the point of the email and have a link to the online version. Header text should be clear, clean and actionable.

The specialty kitchenware retailer and culinary mecca, Sur La Table, recently updated their email header text. The new text not only follows header text best practices, but it also conserves precious email real-estate, and looks great.

Here is the updated header text. Notice the links are all click-able and are in one line at the top of the email.

Here is the original header text. The text is not all click-able, is a bit long-winded, and takes up valuable, above the fold, email real-estate.

What do you think about these updates? Have you updated your header text? Please share your experiences and thoughts with us!

When Your From is Done: Updating Your From AddressPart II

In March 2010, I had a similar article to this about updating a From address. Here is another example of updating ones From address. 

There comes a time in most email marketer’s life that the email address he or she sends from needs to be changed.  This change might be warranted because of an IP update, a change to a new email marketing service provider, a hosting update, for ascetic purposes, or other reasons.

When a change like this must be made, what should be done? Two of the most critical goals are, one, to do your best to be sure deliverability does not suffer when the new email address is used and, two, that subscribers recognize that the email is from you and do not hit the spam button.  After a thorough white listing process what’s next?  Do you alert your subscribers about the new email address, if so how?

Diapers.com recently tackled this issue.  In their case they were updating their ‘from’ email address, diapers@diapers.messages4.com, to the easier to digest diapers@baby.diapers.com.

This retailer of all things baby sent an email to their subscribers explaining that to better serve them they are making some ‘technical upgrades’ to their website including changing the address that they send email from.  The message requests that the subscriber does one of three things.
 

1. Right click on the from address with the email, select "add to contacts."
OR
2. Right click on the message before opening it, select "add to contacts" or "add to people I know.
OR
3. Click "add to address book" from within the email next to the from address.

This message is clear, simple, and sincerer.

One update that Diapers.com should make to their creative, however, is add the new email address to the header of the email.  Here is a good example from Current Catalog.



This way the subscribers will be more conscious of the change since it is in the top of the creative and top-of-mind.

Here is the creative from Diapers.com.  The subject line is: We're updating our email address‏




Here is another example. This one is from Kenneth Cole.
The subject line is: Add our new email to your address book

Two Email Tools That Every Marketer Needs

I found two great email marketing tools on Email Expert.org.  These will come in handy for anyone who works with email marketing data and email addresses. 

The first is an email validation tool.
The second is an an email extractor tool.

Email Validation tool
This tells if an email address is real.

Email Extractor Tool
This does lots of data organizing and extracting.  Let's say your client sends text and emails combined and wants us to pull out the emails.  This will do that.

Features also include:

1.    Extract emails without repeating the same email
2.    Display total extracted emails
3.    Select different separator for each email (or enter your own)
4.    Group emails by number specified by you. Each group is separated by new line.
5.    Option to sort emails alphabetically
6.    Option to extract or exclude email containing only certain string
7.    Option to extract web addresses instead of email addresses

How will you use these tools?  What other email tools do you use?  What other email tools do you wish you had?

Data Append Mishap

I am a fan of quality steak and well run email data appends.  In this example the high end steakhouse, Fleming's, is batting.500.  They serve some of the best steaks in the world and unfortunately had a misstep in a recent data append.

I have been a Fleming's email subscriber for some time. I diligently open each email looking for the next delicious deal. Recently I received an email from Fleming's with the subject line: Email Communications from Fleming's. Interesting, I thought.  When I opened the email I instantly recognized this as an email append message.  I was being auto opted in to receive emails from Fleming's even though I was already an active subscriber. Oops...

This screen shot shows the append email, and past emails I have received.  As you can see I regularly receive their emails.

How did this happen?  My guess is that they ran a data append, acquired my email address from some database, but neglected to exclude already subscribed email addresses from their final list.  They not only emailed subscribers but paid someone for this match!  Double ouch.

For those who do not know an email data append is typically ran like this:  You take non-email address customer data (name, address etc.) and run this against a database looking to match an email address.  Once you acquire an email address you send an email notifying the person that you are opting them into your email list because you have a past relationship with them. This newly acquired subscriber must be given the option to opt out in the append email.

One positive, however, is that the email append creative Fleming’s used is really sharp.  They explained why I was receiving the email, provided ample ways to opt-out, and also told me more about who they are and what they offer their customers

Is Email Dying?

For some reason people are getting more and more concerned that email is slowly but surely going away.  Some feel that social networking sites and text messaging will completely replace email.  This is simply not the case.  Email is here to stay.  Here is why.

10 Reasons Why Email Is Not Dying

1. People still send hand-written letters via snail mail. They could easily  make a phone call, send an email, text message, or status update.  Email is familiar and useful.
2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address.
3. Email notifies you of updates from social networks.
4. There is not any evidence yet that Google Wave really is the next big thing and will catch on a large scale. Plus you need an email address to sign up for Google Wave.
5.  Email is universal, and social networks are not. Nearly everybody on the web has an email address. Also, most places of employment give employees email addresses. Meanwhile, a great deal of employers are banning workers from accessing social networks while on the job.
6. There are plenty of people who have no interest in joining social networks. Frequent news stories about security, privacy, and reputation issues do not help convince them.
7. Email is still improving and evolving. It hasn't screeched to a halt with the rise of social media. There is still innovation going on, and integration with social media. Email and social media complement each other. They do not rely on each other.
8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email. Never mind that they update users about community-driven happenings via email. Recently MySpace launched its own email service. 
9. More social media use means more email use.  The people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email.
10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well, as many companies continue to struggle to find the right social media strategy to suit their needs.

What are your thoughts on the longevity of email?  

Deliverability Update (and maybe a Game Changer): Yahoo!, Gmail and others create new commercial email folders

Yahoo!, Gmail and other email providers have started moving commercial email into separate non-Inbox folders, even organizing it by categories such as ‘shopping’, ‘travel’ and ‘finance’. 

This means that by default, email will no longer be delivered to the Inbox at those domains.  Some good news is that it appears when this occurs, it will also no longer go to the ‘spam’ folder either.  There also does not appear to be a whitelist workaround except for address book entries, not even for SenderScoreCertified or Goodmail Certified Email senders.

Does this mean the end of all of our deliverability problems?  Will it dramatically decrease domain performance to those email providers?    I can’t say now, but we’ve begun tracking it more closely and you should as well.  

What do you think about this technology?

Here's the screen shot from my Yahoo! account showing the new ‘Shopping’ folder:

This is an application developed by OtherInbox that users have to download to ‘sort’ their email.  It’s available only for Yahoo! And Gmail right now, but the other webmail and software providers will get added soon.  It doesn’t seem to catch ‘all’ commercial email yet, but the vast majority is identified and moved and I have verified clients who were in the Spam folder also got moved to the right commercial folder.

More details on this application can be found here.

Yahoo! describes and promotes it here.

It's important to remember that since it’s an application, it requires users to agree to separate terms.  As a result, it won’t reach critical mass anytime soon.

REPORT: Google share of searches at 72 percent for May 2010. Beats Yahoo!

Experian Hitwise announced that Google accounted for 72.17 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending May 29, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.43 percent, 9.23 percent and 2.14 percent, respectively.

The remaining 74 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 2.03 percent of U.S. searches.

Click Here to View the Entire Report.

Five Minutes With Jordan Lane - The Exclusive Interview

Click Here to read an Exclusive Interview with Jordan Lane!  The interview is featured on The NetElixir Blog.

• Discover New Trends in Email Marketing
• How will Mobile Marketing Affect Email?
• Where can you go for Help With Your Email Campaigns?

Grow List Via Automatic Opt-In: Is this a Good or Bad Idea?

Email Marketers are always trying to find new and effective ways to grow their email list.  This can include noble and unscrupulous tactics.  One tactic I have noticed more and more is having an automatic email opt-in at purchase.  

It is a great practice to have an email sign-up box at checkout.  It is an acceptable best practice to have this sign-up box pre checked.  But now purchasers are being opted-in without even seeing a check box.  This is called an automatic opt-in.

The fact is that the check box can be removed and still CAN- SPAM compliant.  I have seen some retailers experience a 25% or more increase in email sign-ups from checkout.  These are already engaged customers.  Many of them might want to receive email from you.  But many of these new subscribers might not expect to be added to your list.

You will want to check with your internal legal and privacy council before making this live on your site. Also, you will probably need to make a change or revisit your privacy policy. Expect slight increase in opt-out from initial welcome email (you do have a Welcome email, right?).

So the question is: Is Growing Your Email List Via Automatic Opt-In a Good or Bad Idea?  

Share your thoughts with us.

Here is an example of a common checkout page.  In this case the email sign-up box is pre-checked.

Here is the same checkout page with an auto opt-in. There is not an email box at all. But once you enter your email address in the checkout form (anywhere on the form) you are opting-in to receive email.  This is not a question of legality but a question of good business practices.

Love Your Customers

Lurking somewhere in your email list and hiding among your web analytics data, your best customers are waiting to be discovered.

This Saturday I received a letter in the mail.  The envelope was nondescript and the return address was a P.O. Box I did not recognize. It looked and felt like the type of envelope that contains a new credit or ATM card. When I opened it up I was pleasantly surprised — inside was a letter from the Director of Customer Care at The Home Depot and a $50 gift card. The letter was thanking me for my online business during the past year!

I have to admit, I did spend a lot of money at The Home Depot over the last twelve months. I was in the midst of a variety of large scale home improvement projects that required the purchase of a washer, dryer, refrigerator, barbecue, sinks, cabinetry plus much more — all bought online. Before I received this letter I did not feel especially loyal to The Home Depot, despite having spent a lot of money with them. But if something better came along, I would not think twice about purchasing from a competitor.

I put some thought into it and determined that I bought from The Home Depot for four main reasons:

1. They have competitive prices.
2. They have a strong online presence.
3. They offered free shipping and other great offers in their emails.
4. They have online ratings and reviews. I want to read what others think about a product before I purchase it.

What is the moral of the story?

1. Know your best customers.
2. Thank your best customers often and appropriately. The Home Depot not only thanked me with this letter, but they gave me a gift card, a VIP email address and VIP phone number to their customer service if I ever need it.
3. Don’t assume that your best customers will always be your customers. Give them a reason to continue to do business with you.

Here is the letter I received from The Home Depot:

The Great Gender Debate

Online and offline marketers should always try to keep their marketing databases and lists updated whenever possible. This data can include current email address, postal address, name, age, and gender to name a few. Having this data is one thing. Using it successfully and appropriately is another. Sure, first name personalization is great. Geo-targeting is awesome. Age appropriate marketing rocks. But what about gender? 

Do men only want to receive content geared toward men? What if one of these men wanted to purchase something for a lady in his life? What about those whose gender is not known? What should these people receive?

There is a particular retailer that I used to love. I usually purchased items from them in-store. This past Christmas I purchased something for my wife from this retailer online via an email. From that point on I have only been receiving the female version of the catalog at my home. In this case this retailer assumed that since I bought one female item that I am an exclusively female shopper. This is a risky and potentially costly assumption - partly because of the way they have treated me since then, this retailer is no longer my favorite.

I recently saw an Express email that helps alleviate gender misunderstandings. There is a link towards the bottom of the email which links to the other gender. The female version of the email that links to the male version while the male links to the female. Brilliant!

It would be great (and maybe lucrative) for Express to highlight this feature and move it up in the email. This is like sending two emails to your list for the price of one! A simple test should tell if moving this link has any positive or negative results.

Here is the complete female version:

Here is the complete male version:

Think You Know CAN-SPAM? Prove It!

CAN-SPAM, officially known as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, is one of the most important online marketing topics. Take the CAN-SPAM quiz by clicking this link.  Let's see how good you really are.

Share your results with us. You can email them, tweet them, or post them here. GOOD LUCK!

TAKE THE QUIZ NOW!

Creative Standout: Men's Wearhouse

Recently I found this email from Men's Wearhouse in my in-box.  I really like the way the creative compartmentalizes and categorizes the various parts of this email. This helps with the fact that this creative is really, really long.  This reads more like an online newspaper than a email for men's wear. 

The various topics in this creative are:

• Editor's Spring Picks
• Coupon
• Sizzling Savings
• Products
• Style Tips
• Survey
• Etc.

Timely, Personalized and Appropriate Email – Go Team!

To the chagrin of Dallas Cowboys fans everywhere, the Minnesota Vikings recently advanced in the NFL playoffs. A friend of mine is a diehard Vikings fan and received the email below just as the game ended. (For the record, I verified that my friend is not a bandwagon jumper or Favre follower - but is a 100% certified and valid Vikings fan.)

NFL shop.com did a great job with not only the creative, but the subject line, the time they sent the email, and the segmentation. As far as I can tell only those with a preference set as being a Viking fan received this email.

The subject line was: Your Minnesota Vikings Just Won - Order Now & Get Free Shipping Over $75