The Email Wars

I was growing tired of my subscription to MarketingExperiments from Marketing Sherpa. It was not due to the frequency or content as whole, but that the stuff that they kept sending did not feel relevant and I was not ever engaging it. So it was not a break up but more like a “It’s me, not you” type of thing. Well maybe it was a little bit of them. Still love the Sherpa.

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I have seen quite a few opt out pages. I could wager that you have seen your fair share as well. I have never seen one that takes this approach in the email marketing break up. Have you? Take a look at the copy and the image. Not only is the image a classic one and on brand with Thrillist, but the submit button is titled “Fire”. Is this like take a shot at us fire? Or The Donald’s version of your fired? Not sure but either way it stood out.

Now I am still getting this daily as I love it, but I wanted to share the humor that they placed out on the line only to show you how different people approach the same situation. Heck they got me to post it and maybe that will drive a few more subscribers of only to be able to unsubscribe for yourself.

I would assume that your brand would not be able to pull this approach off, but props for them to staying on brand.

Just a little email marketing food for thought that I saw last week from David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007).

This bit of news today only highlights that email marketing has power and is one of the best channels. First we had Jason Calacanis taking about how he was ending his blogging and moving to a controlled newsletter and now this news. We also had Disney scoop up a daily newsletter we love called Ideal Bite a few weeks back. IS there a move to reinforce the power of email marketing as the prime communication channel underway? What happened to everyone jumping on the bandwagon of RSS and thinking how to sell ads in RSS? Well the fact remains that no matter how hard we try to force a new technology into middle america (aka the masses) we end up seeing middle america move slower than we ever though that they would.

Or is it just a move to increase ways to drive revenue, ad sales and traffic with all of these 2.0 properties? I think a healthy combo of all the above.

Here is the story from CNET

When you are using dynamic content in email, you better make sure that you have data in all the fields you are going to use for ALL subscribers. Often times I see people trying to get to a one to one relationship and they fail to check and test their data sources before they send. And what a bad impression as well as impact it makes on the brand. Especially when they send it to someone in email marketing. This example was passed on to me from Maddy Hubbard (whom we adore) at another ESP. Yep it is okay to like someone else at the competition.

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Yes, we have reached and passed a milestone. 

For the record, there were 275 days in 2005 that I was blogging. Of those to present there have been 82 in 2005 were weekends. In 2006 there were 105 weekend days. There were 104 weekend days in 2007. And in 2008 there have been 56 thus far. That makes 347 days. Why is this important? Well I typically do not post on the weekends, just the week days, but this is when I do a majority of my writing. So out of 1201 days I have reached over 1000 posts on this blog. Quite a milestone for me and a lot of time and thought for one person alone. Here is to more posts, more comments from the rest of you lurkers, the great work, the bad work and news worthy finds to rant and rave about. The best part is the majority of the content is original and not just email news regurgitated.

I really want to thank all of you for consistently reading it, even with rushed thoughts sometimes my typos, I blame the latter on fat fingers and a racing brain. It is more of a place that I use to journal things for myself and let them be shared with everyone else. I get asked all the time how I keep up the pace. I can tell you that truthfully it is not easy to keep up the pace. It takes constant clipping of emails that float through some of my inboxes (yes I have more than 2 and less than 8) and remembering of why I wanted to save them. 

So here it to you and to me as a collective community of knowledge. Here is to more posts from me and more comments from you!

I am a big fan of the use of images to tell the stories in email. I know you will bash this as well images can be suppressed, but when it works and it done right pictures can evoke a click often times more that too much text. Copy, although important, is so often over used and truly just creates more things to do and drives less impact on the desired action to delve deeper into the story, item, purchase, conversion, etc. 

This example of Adobe is their newsletter which connects with people on so many levels. Not only for the fact that it is outright sexy, but that it can tell the stories quicker with images than it would with text. Simple layouts like this are growing and evident more in the movement to simplify our web interactions with the 2.0 design philosophy. 

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