If your site is down and you send out an email, does anyone see it?

The answer is yes, and shame on you. I'm most likely not going to go back and click again on the emails up for insult today because I don't plan on monitoring when the sites will be available, not to mention how buried those emails will be by the time I remember that there was a sale with a pretty hefty discount. There goes your revenue stream. Best part? It happened twice. I received an Ann Taylor email, clicked through to their "down for maintenance" website, then received an email from Loft, Ann's younger, more casual sister, clicked through (mostly out of curiosity) to their "sorry for the inconvenience, check back soon" website. At the very least, the websites had pretty splash pages instead of broken images or blank pages, but still a bad user experience.

Side note: The leak strategy topic has come up a lot lately around the water cooler, and now I'm skeptical that any mistakes are real, although I can't really see the added benefit of this type of mistake. Bad press is bad press. If I'm understanding the concept right, you want, at the bare minimum, a neutral mistake, one that doesn't reflect poorly on your brand, but gets people talking about you via all the major social channels. The goal there is to get a message to go viral and watch acquisition and engagement increase on your email program. Side-side note: Make sure you have a somewhat well-rounded email program in place for this. "Batch and blasts" only work in the short term, and all your effort will be for a spike that you can't repeat until next year -- read "these don't make an impact if you do them all the time."

Holiday Emails: Too Soon?

I'm not going to tell you when's the best time to start sending holiday messages, but I will share my experience with one of my more visited websites, Land of Nod. I receive their catalog now, too, which is somewhat bothersome to me because A) I never requested this, and B) it's a waste of paper. But just the same, I received my first holiday email of the 2011 season from LOD on 9/27 with the subject line "We're getting decked out." While this was a pretty email, well branded and with a nice layout, I couldn't help but question if it was a mistake. I mean, September? We have yet to do the Halloween costume bit and Turkey dance. And here they are, boldy expressing love for their new ornaments and tree skirts. If it was a leak strategy, they were missing the "shh, don't tell anyone, but we're doing X" part. It was strange and, frankly, felt out of place, especially here in California with the sun shining and remnants of summer still in the air.

So how soon is too soon? I'm expecting some early bird holiday messaging to start trickling in in the next week or so and definitely by the beginning of November. To get a jump on your competitor, you should be collecting data on when they started their holiday campaigns over the last few years and send yours a week sooner. Or maybe you don't beat them to the punch, but you recognize the need to stand out, so you change up the creative to be less traditional red and green and more like the above. A clever subject line wouldn't hurt either. Try not to do the over done "Twas the night before Christmas" rhyme. I can't begin to tell you how so fifteen years ago that is.

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.

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.