Return On Email Subscriber

As the holidays approach, the email marketing messages we all receive doubles and for some, triples.  With consumer spending grinding to a halt, marketers are going to have to get more creative.  A lot of times, with email especially, it not the deal per say, but how you phrase it and how quickly you can get you offer understood.

This email from Details Magazine contains a great offer, but I’m not sure they reached the full potential of the email.  While “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” is easily understood, the fact you could buy yourself a subscription and get a free X-mas gift for somebody else is a much better incentive for a subscriber.

This type of offer would be a perfect chance to A/B split your list and test phrasing of the offer.  For the B list on this email, I would try “Give your friend a Free Subscription to Details Magazine this X-Mas” or something similar.  Analyze both the click through and conversions, then launch the campaign.

When you come up with an offer for an email campaign, always create at least 2 versions.  It’s not always what you say, but how you say it.

How would you have phrased this offer?

“1 week only: Free Custom Cover Book”.  Awesome right?  No.  It’s actually a “Buy one Get one Free” offer. Semantics?  No.  Bummer?  Yes! These types of misleading subject lines do more damage to the brand than the subscriber.

Fool me once? Shame on you.  Fool me Twice?  Ask George W. 

Now maybe I misintrepreted this email from Snapfish, but it look like to me it says: “order one, get the second free with Coupon Book108″.  Isn’t that called “Buy One Get One Free”?

This tactic may work in other marketing channels but it’s not going to work in email.  We will find out the true offer the moment we open the email.

Be honest and your audience will trust you.  Trick them and they will stop listening. Or worse, they will unsubscribe.

Return on Subscriber HQ’s are in Portland Oregon, which is home to the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers.  The Blazers are a team on the rise, and the community is buzzing over the prospect of this team leaving the “junk folder” and returning to the “inbox” (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Naturally, email marketing is an important part of the mix for building buzz and driving revenue for the upcoming season. The last thing you want to take away from this buzz is email rendering issues (how your email appears across multiple email clients) and a confusing conversion process.

This particular email, which highlights single game suite options, appears fine above the fold in Gmail.  But once you get into the options, the bullet points strike right through the content. Unfortunately, the calls-to-action are right below this.

Did this result in a complete failure for the Blazers?  Probably not. But it had to have a negative impact on conversion. Similar to looking at your watch in a movie, you are not fully engaged anymore.

Instead of breaking down why this email rendered incorrectly in Gmail, I wanted to talk about 5 simple tweaks to this email campaign that would increase click through and conversion.
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TeNo, a manufacturer of some really nice men’s and women’s jewelry, sends image-heavy emails that are great for showcasing their product but in this day and age of image blocking, it can be…unreliable. This email I received from them last week is a prime example of why you use Alt Tags. The entire preview pane is blank. They did not even chop up the image into multiple smaller images to help in load time, so I sat and waited for about 5-10 seconds for the image to download (on a T1). When the average time an email is looked at is just under 3 seconds, this is totally unacceptable.

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I registered for daily email alerts from NYLJ.com, the website for the New York Law Journal. Below is the welcome email I received after confirming my subscription. While I commend them for using this welcome email as an opportunity to convert me into a paid subscriber, the attempt fell flat with me for a couple reasons.

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I know that I have commented before on this, but I have been let down again and again but consumer email efforts. Consumer email marketing has moved toward the marketing strategy, which the auto industry affectionately calls, “people moving.” It is all about how can I get people in (or on) my store ASAP. We can worry about next weekend next week. I have had to reduce my frequency or unsubscribe all together for a ton of email I am subscribed to because there has not been any notable value in their email programs. Everything from Nordstrom to Anthropologie to Ruth’s Chris to Circuit City to Ritz Camera is all about SALE, SALE, SALE. Yeah, I get it, you are having an amazing online sale this weekend. What happened to the days of your corner store providing great value and customer service? Because of that, you shopped again and again. You had quality product, quality customer service and always were willing to listen. Email marketing for consumers has turned into speed dating, I miss the days of being wined and dined.

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What better way to illustrate the importance of a email subscriber preference center than through real world examples, right?

After blowing past 1100 work emails last week, I decided it was time to move some newsletters off my work address, and over to a personal address. I imagine a lot of people have this need as well everyday.

So,the first two newsletters I tired this gave me wildly different results.

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Logitech is not what you would think when you consider cutting edge campaigns, but I was pleasantly surprised when got the email, even more when I saw the site, then it fell apart.

The Email
Solid creative, a great subject line, and good use of best practices (even though the whole email is images). The call to action at the top works great in the preview pane. The branding of “Remote Disasters” is solid - it does not make me feel like you are selling me something. The call to action to pass along to a friend is clearly either the agency’s or Logitech’s poor attempt at viral.

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We have been a Salesfoce.com user for a few years now and it is a great product, but the video on their site is a complete rip off.

Watch the Video

I swear that video looked familiar to theYouTube hit - The Machine is Us/ing Us. Now the question to you is, is this crafty marketing riding the wave of a popular video or is this just a lazy marketing manager/agency that couldn’t come up with a better idea?

Watch the Video

Use the inner circle

Don’t sell to just one customer, sell to their many friends and family, leverage their network, people typically have friends with similar interests and tastes.