5 Things to Never Do In Email Marketing

Today will be sweet and simple. Here are 5 things to never do in email marketing. And when I say, "never," I'm freaking serious. Bend or break at your own risk.

1. Don't tell someone to follow you on Twitter or Facebook but then fail to provide a link to these pages you speak so highly of. This goes for all links. Test them. Make sure they work.

2. Purchased lists are the devil. Avoid them like E. coli. They destroy your credibility and integrity, and worse, you end up with a bunch of angry subscribers and a raging attrition rate. Not. Worth. Your. Money.

3. NEVER USE ALL CAPS. -- It's annoying and it always feels like you're yelling. Making something all caps doesn't ensure that the subscriber is going to read your email any more than if it were in a normal case.

4. Don't complicate the sign up or unsubscribe process. A complex sign up form is like punching someone in the face for wanting to come talk to you about your product/service. And a three step unsubscribe process is like kicking them after you've punched them in the face. (Plus, it's not CAN-SPAM compliant.) And cease and desist signing people up to your email program for the sole reason they purchased something from you. At least tell them that by submitting their order they will be added to the email program, and then give them the option to decline your generous offer.

5. Stop writing novels for content. No one has time to read it all. Point your subscribers to your website/blog/article so they can read if they'd like. Give your subscriber an action to take. Not only will your subscribers thank you for being direct and to the point, you can use their clicks as a metric to gauge success.

Email Overload: How many is too many?

Today, I want to cover the frequently asked yet not so easy to answer topic of how many emails are too many? The short answer (in question form): How many times in a row can you listen to a mediocre song? How about your favorite song?  If my witty analogy just confused you further, never fear. I won't leave you in the dark. Keep reading.

Long answer: Proper frequency can be determined by two factors. 1) Activity of a particular subscriber, and 2) relevancy of content to this particular subscriber. I'm talking about segmentation, people. Sending a daily email to your entire list will appeal to some, but turn off most. Are you having trouble growing your list organically? Are you losing 'em faster than you're bringing 'em in? Then you may suffer from Too-frequent-itis. This disease is more common than you think. It seems easy, right? Hey, these people signed up to receive my emails. They want to know about our soup del giorno or the latest polish color of our VP's toenails.

A delicious restaurant here in San Diego called The Wine Vault & Bistro has caught the bug. And to top it off, their emails are all text and super wordy, so it's hard to find the info I really want. So far, I've received 10 emails in the month of September, and here we are with a week and a half to go in October, and I already have 8 more. Here's a picture of my flooded inbox (filtered):

You'll notice their subject lines are often similar indicating they are sending many messages about one event. So maybe I wouldn't mind this high frequency if I wasn't so overwhelmed when I actually open the email (highly unlikely). Here's what I mean. Don't say I didn't warn you:

Most of "War & Peace" here can be found on the website. I don't have time to hunt and scan for dates, times, and menu options. I want instant gratification and I'm sure I'm not alone. So what's to stop me from unsubscribing and just checking the events calendar every so often?

Tips for WV&B:

1) Work on your subject lines

2) Use links to your website vs. displaying all your website's content on every email

3) And for crying out loud, do some segmentation. Get a preference center. Ask your subscribers what they care about and send them what they want. I guarantee a bigger return on your investment.

For the record, I'm working on a new post that discusses how not everyone can afford fancy graphics and pretty pictures for their email, but there is a way to send your long winded ramblings (a.k.a. blog content) via email and it doesn't involve copy and paste.

Double Trouble

If I called you to tell you a secret, then five minutes later, called you again to tell you the same secret only with colorful adjectives and different action verbs, you would think I was crazy, right?

So Gap and Groupon teamed up to send an email. Maybe they didn't discuss all the logistics or maybe it was a true and honest mistake, but I got the same email twice. There are few things in this world I despise more. Gap, I heard you the first time. Groupon, where are your manners?

Worst part is that this could have been avoided. Two companies want to partner together to send a message to each of their subscriber base, right? No big deal, this is frequently practiced in many marketing departments. Here's the key though: Identify the crossover group. Sift out the people that are subscribed to both companies and send these people only one message.

Anyway, I'm boycotting the offer out of principle.

Monday Morning Mystery

If you take the time to build a new website, please take the time to QA it properly. Hey, M Theory, your email sign up form doesn't work, your home page logo isn't linked on any of your pages, and some of your pictures are broken. I wonder how many emails you've lost, how much $$ you could have made, and how long will it remain in this poorly functioning state. Perhaps I'll alert you if your Contact Us page works.

M Theory
915 W. Washington Street
San Diego, CA 92103

Here's what happens when you try to subscribe:

If you guessed "ridiculous" ...

In my previous post, I asked if you could pinpoint the wrongdoings of a particularly heinous email. If you were thinking that it was too long, too wide, poorly thought out, badly designed, or just plain "ridiculous" then you guessed correctly. Hey, Half Price, the year 2000 called. They want their untargeted batch-and-blast email strategy back. Subscribers from 2010 expect greatness. We want personalized offers just for us. Collect my city or zip while I sign up and then only send me offers that pertain to me. In the case of AlwaysHalfPrice.com, they sent me an email with every city they work in plus three offers for each of these cities. Total time wasted: about 3 minutes I'll never get back for reading all the offers being doled out in Texas. 3 minutes in online terms is a lifetime. (Remember dial-up internet?) Who cares about the urban pet resort in Austin when I live in San Diego? An unsubscribe is surely in the near future, but I'm going to give AHP one more chance to redeem themselves, if they can get their act together and actually send an email. It's been two weeks and no sign of a weekly email from them. I better check my spam folder.

Excuse me, I believe I ordered the extra large email creative.

This will be one of many posts on email faux pas as there are so many people out there that either don't know what they are doing or simply forget the basic rules of the game. Even my husband knows a faux pas when he sees one. He forwarded this email to me earlier in the week. Can you spot its major malfunction? (Took me four screenshots just to get the whole enchilada.) Stay tuned for next time when we rip this email a new alt tag, if you know what I mean.

Mimi and me

The center of North Park is home to many restaurants and shops, plenty of which could use some help in the email marketing department. One boutique clothing shop in particular is at least trying. Mimi and Red, located at 3032 University, went all out and got themselves a fancy eCommerce platform, meaning you can purchase items through their website. Even more exciting, you can use information gathered from this shopping traffic to market further into the life cycle. For example, if someone fills their online cart with a few items and then suddenly abandons ship, you can send an email a few days later reminding them that they left said items in their cart. A previous blog post mentions that this very thing happened to yours truly, and I liked it. Very good practice if you can afford the eCommerce platform plus the analytics and have the resources to be able to identify the items the customer was so close to purchasing. But I digress. Back to my main topic...

So upon sign up to Mimi and Red, I received not one, but two sign up confirmations. The first simply read "Newsletter subscription success." The only good thing to note was that I received this almost instantly after sign up, but clearly, this isn't an email that needs to be sent to the subscriber. Dislike.

The second sign up confirmation was a welcome letter, also received rather quickly. Ahh, much better. This has a nice large header but doesn't take up too much precious above-the-fold real estate. Also, they kindly sent my username and password (my pw has been censored in the below image for privacy reasons -- get your own!) for future reference, along with a list of benefits I can access if and when I log in. Good job, Mimi.

Ways to improve upon this welcome letter? Add an image, stop centering all your content, and for god sakes, add a little bonus discount to use when I go shopping online or in store. If not a discount, give me something. A piece of candy, a gold star, I don't care. I just want to feel special because I gave you my personal email address. What are you gonna give me in return?

To add insult to injury, Mimi has yet to send me an actual marketing email. I signed up a month ago (June 14). Today's date? July 14. Nothing, nada, zip, zero. I actually almost forgot I signed up at all. What gives?

Word to the wise: Do not bother adding an email sign up form to your website if you don't plan to deliver emails. Or if you only plan on sending monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual newsletters, then say so in the first place.

Emailology for Anthropologie

Received my weekly/biweekly email from Anthropologie today. This store is amazing and they have amazing emails to match, but I must warn you, not everyone can pull this kind of amazingness off. Here are three risky things you can try once you've established your brand and you're ready to move your creative to the next level.

 

1) It's an extra wide email. Previously, they've sent emails in the 650-700px range, but this one is definitely on the plus side of 700px. This isn't terrible, but not all ESPs are created equal and somewhere someone is wondering why they are scrolling horizontally. A good rule of thumb is about 600-650px.

 

2) There is no "header" because they've cleverly tucked their logo into the creative. The creative itself is nothing to shake a stick at. It's a lifestyle image photo, made to look like a drawer filled with odds and ends. It's a testament to their brand and style. Love it.

 

3) No text (short of some required and best practices verbiage, but we'll point out that error in a second). Not including text is for the bold and well branded. If you're having deliverability issues, you need to ensure that you're using a good ratio of text to images. Chances are most people aren't seeing your images and without any text to read, the email will look broken. Worse, your unsubscribe rate will begin to climb. Who wants broken emails?

 

Here's the email. Isn't she beautiful? Makes me want to break out my glue and button collection and go nuts. 

 

Now on to the bad parts. Two things.

• Broken view online link
• No snippt/intro text

Maybe you've been living in a bomb shelter until now and you don't know what a view online link is. It's the little link you click when your email looks messed up. Well, I clicked Anthropologie's and it was a relative URL instead of an absolute path, meaning it didn't take me anywhere. Ooops. I'm going to go out on a limb and blame CheetahMail for this one.

 

As for the snippet text, maybe Anthropologie didn't want to "clutter" their creative by adding a simple line of text at the top of their email, but this is what their email looked like in my inbox.

 

 

The subject doesn't allude to any sale or special deal and it might not get as many opens as it could have, but more importantly, the precious real estate to the right of the subject line, also known as the snippet text, was completely wasted with the "Having trouble viewing this email?" line. They could have easily said something about the new summer line being available. But no. They sacrificed the extra sell for their creative. Overall, the email gets points for creativity and standing out, but didn't score so well in the standard best practices category.

 

Stay tuned for later this week when I discuss a neighborhood clothing boutique. Watch out North Park!

The Loft's Loft

Today we're going to name a big differentiator between rookie email programs and the big dogs. It's called cart abandonment.

On Tuesday, I received an enticing email from Ann Taylor's Loft. $10 bucks for a shirt? I'm always on the lookout for deals like this, so I clicked the Shop Now link.

I found a few things, guessed my size, threw it in my cart and even used their nice promotion code to get 40% off already reduced items. Well, if you can believe it, two $10 shirts and a little clutch purse turned into a $70 order, even with the promo code. Shipping and taxes were almost $20, so I abandoned my cart with full intentions to drive the two miles to my local mall and see the goods face to face. 

Two days later, after all memory of wanting to purchase new duds and accessories had faded, I received an email with a subject line that read, "Come back: your shopping bag is waiting for you." Oh yeah, I think to myself. What did I want to buy again? So I open it:

A friendly reminder. Thanks, LOFT, for helping me remember that I wanted to spend money at your store. (One con: I removed the sweater (left image) from my cart before I abandoned, so not sure how this data is captured and stored, but it should be looking at the details right before the abandon action.)

Not enough companies are doing the above, even with the knowledge that open rates are extremely high and the ROI will knock your socks off. It's truly like stealing candy from a baby. Other ways to execute this plan include adding a bonus promotion code to sweeten the pot. The company recognizes that there's a reason the subscriber abandoned in the first place, would free shipping tip the conversion scale? 

As I see it, yes

Your beer is good, your weekly newsletter...eh.

At least one Saturday a month, I venture out with husband and dog to a local watering hole named Hamilton's Tavern on North Park's well known 30th street. They have a laid back vibe with a very loyal following for various events. Plus, you can bring in your pup as long they are of the housebroken non-barking variety. Here's a screenshot of their website. Branded, organized, informative, not bad for a bar.

Now let's take a look at an example weekly email from Hamilton's Tavern (The screenshot below depicts only what is "above the fold" in Gmail):

 

What is this? A text based email? Someone horsing around with bordered cells and tables? No offense, Hamilton's Tavern, but this is bad. Really bad. You can do so much better. The first thing I have to point out is your large header. You list all of this info week after week, but that's all I see when I open this email. What do you want to tell your customers? Put that at the top. And no logo? Really? You're all over Twitter and probably make a killing on your second Saturday events, but you don't even have a logo in your email. That's just crazy.

Good news. There's an easy fix to rocket launch your emails into the 21st century. First, take your website shell, navigation and all, and use it as a new email template (some code modifications may be required to ensure ISP rendering and best practices). Now your email is branded and you're linked up to your website. Next, edit your content. What's the weekly beer special? What's new on tap? Any upcoming events? Place this info neatly into the main content space. And please, PLEASE don't go overboard with the bolding and underlining of various words and phrases. This only confuses us. We will find the information we are looking for. Trust. Below is a mockup of what your emails COULD look like. Good luck and happy conversions.

Modus Operandi

I receive a lot of email. A lot. And because my 9-5 revolves around email management, I tend to be overly critical about layouts, rendering issues, and functionality. My biggest peeve is a shady unsubscribe process. Or when I simply want to receive less email, but giant corporation X doesn't have a simple preference center. What could they possibly be spending their marketing budget on? Banner ads? Ha!

So I want to blog about the emails that arrive in my personal inbox. I'll describe what I think are industry no-nos and what I think works. I'll be both email critic and subscriber. And hopefully, if you're lucky, I won't give you the big middle finger and unsubscribe from your email program.

I'm not claiming to be all-knowing or the best, but my opinions and thoughts may help you do a better job at giving people what they asked to receive in the first place.