Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

David Baker wrote a very good article in the Sunday edition of Email Insider. I thought the information in it was very insightful and worth posting here.

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE you come across a great article that just spurs your intellectual juices. One such article was written by Paul Gillin in BtoB magazine’s print edition last month, titled “New Technology, New Media and New Paradigm.” If you have not read it, I highly recommend you do.

We read a lot about strategy, issues, trends and client work, but rarely do we see anything written about the future of e-mail and its dependence on the rest of the digital world. I don’t have time to wait for the analysts to make their predictions. I need a far-reaching vision of how this channel fits into our business and consumer lives now and in the future.

So follow this logic and let me know what you think. A couple of passages from Paul Gillin’s article rang particularly true, not least for the sheer simplicity of how he laid out his thesis. He said:

“We hear a lot about blogs, but blogs aren’t important. What’s important is personal publishing, or the ability to communicate a message to a global audience almost instantaneously. Personal publishing will permeate electronic media, providing counterpoint to mainstream sources and adding depth and color to the conversation.

“We hear a lot about podcasts, but podcasts aren’t important. What’s important is time-shifted media. The phenomenon that started with TiVo has spread to digital audio and will soon capture portable video. Information consumers will no longer be beholden to program schedules or even their living rooms. Our TV shows will travel with us.

“We hear a lot about RSS, but RSS isn’t important. What’s important is the ability to subscribe to information that really interests us. RSS is mainly used to subscribe to blog posts and podcasts. But in the future, they will use it to subscribe to ideas.”

So, as someone who aspires to effect a change in the paradigm of digital communications and consumer behavior, I put my spin on the future of e-mail using this same logic. I conclude that we hear a lot about e-mail, but e-mail isn’t important. What’s important is our ability to communicate in a synchronous and asynchronous fashion in a mixed media world. E-mail will be our notification agent, alarm clock, Post-it

I stop once a day, 7 days a week, for a Venti cup of Joe from the Green Siren herself. I know that they are hawking everything else under the sun from cups, to cakes, to clothing, and now music. I enjoy the tunes playing there, and yes I even bought a new Dave Mathews Band CD there one morning for the drive in. But I want to know about one to one marketing here and not mass marketing. I come for coffee everyday. I have a Starbucks card tied to my email address. I buy coffee. I buy others coffee. I want to hear about moving me from a standard cup of coffee to a larger transaction item beverage rather than music.

I would think that they would really be data mining up there in Seattle about who the customers are, how to segment them and how to drive more value from each, or to each customer.

Is my line of thinking out of reach? Could they maybe send a “Thanks for spending a chunk of change with us each anc every day for the past 7 years, could we offer you a cup on us?” Right?

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As many of you are frustrated (we all are) with the rising costs of gas and getting the most out of your dollar, I went out to find out where I could look at a new Smart car from Mercedes Benz. Now I was upset that they still have not worked out who is going to sell this in the US, but I signed up anyways hoping to hear soon. I mean 120 some miles to the gallon and a roll cage that might stop an H2 from crushing me on the way to work is appealing, right?

I loved the site and the email trigger that came out, but I wanted some “smart” icons to represent the brand and take me to an action rather then a text link. I know that most of us are smart enough now to know what an underline word link looks like, but a button or arrow or something would have completed this for me. Must have put that creative budget item in the car design and not the email budget.

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This email from Shop.org blew me away. It is done by a technology that creates personalized images and adds them to emails or ecom sites based on the database information. Now this is just my name, which rocks in lights, but I have seen it done in many other ecom sites lately. Really connects the user to the experience.

Something to think about, the impact of your name in lights.

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Now I have been rocking North Face for years and find them to have some amazing sites and gear, but the emails frequently let me down. I might be banging the gong lately about the use of area in an email, but it only makes sense. When you have an opportunity in a limited amount of space in an email client preview window… use it all. Use what you ahve created to maximize the delivery as well as the content.

Keeping it simple and creating some icons that would drive me to move forward with the click, other then the text links, gives me that 3 second idea of what you want me to do.

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Konami, whom we love, dropped this email a few weeks back and I like it. the only thing I would have done differently would have been to add COLOR to the action link in the creactive. The BW email is good and on brand with the new UMD email, but using color to POP out at me and drive my eye to learn more, buy the UMD or even know what to do in less time would have made this perfect.

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In the retail fashion world I am a big fan of simplicity and wanting to learn more. Metropark does a failry good job in creative and driving me to click though to see more. Where they let me down is on the click and site itself. The click always takes me to the home page and not the line itself or item level page. And when you get into the site they don’t actually house any of the product info on the site. Sure this will drive you to the retail offline store and keep them top of mind, but I find it odd that they link out to allthe brand sites to look at items once in thier site. And for this email, they did not even have a functioning link to the brand site. The link just went back to the home page.

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Now this isn’t a true example of personalization the in real sense of the word, but they did follow some ideas we mentioned in our last meeting. We talked about putting the idea together so that someone could get an idea of what they could create when combining all the elements together instead of just showing all the items alone.

I like this as it should result in a higher sale per transaction by showing what a complete outfit could look like. Anyone could see this layout with thier own head at the top.

Lucy.com has done a good job lately in mixing up the looks of the emails from simple sale emails, to multi product emails to this that brings it all together.

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Now the button use gets an A Grade. But it should have been moved up to the top right to keep me from scrolling down farther in the window below the fold in the preview pane in my email client. And then I was shocked again at the abundance of white space that followed the message. Once again they could have increased the font size, or shrunk the size of the text area to keep it cleaner.

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