Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

One of the bread & butter stats of Email Marketing, the “Open”, is really only the beginning of the story. The company Quantivo, who sent me the email that inspired this post,  could never know the damage this “Open” did to my perception of their brand. All they know is that there is a good chance I saw this email and possibly read/scanned it.

But why did I open it?  Because they played a trick on me.

I only do “Name & Shame” posts when I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned. This is definitely one of those moments.

While this was a clever trick to get me to open the email, the ramifications of this action are much worse. Now I don’t trust the salesperson or the company, and have unsubscribed. They got their “Open” using this trick, but lost an email subscriber and a potential customer/partner/referral source.

The funny thing is, if I would have recieved a personal email from the rep instead OR if they used a Quantivo branded “From” addresss that used a subject line like “Make better decisions with our new Whitepaper”, I probably would have downloaded it.

One of the core principles in email marketing is that your subject line reflects the content of the email and is not misleading. Build trust, create great content, and respect your audience – don’t trick them into opening your email with a shady tactic like this.

If you think I am off base here, I would love to here your thoughts in a comment below, or send me a Tweet.