Yes, you read that right.
Britney wants more followers in her quest to the be the most followed person on Twitter. So instead of buying billboards or doing a PR blitz a la Asthon Kucher, she used her most effective channel: her email list. (Why am I on Britney Spears’ email list? We’ll save that for a different post.)
Here’s the creative (click to enlarge):
Here it is, your April Email Marketing Calendar. April is an interesting month. From April Fools to Tax Day to Earth Day, the emotions run the gamut.
Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in April and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.
April Fool’s Day is the one day of the year you have free reign to play practical jokes and pranks on family, friends, coworkers, and most importantly your email subscribers. I will warn you, this is very dependent on your product or service. If your content is heavy and serious, you will want to consider whether a joke is appropriate. On the other hand, it may be the perfect opportunity for you to loosen up your tie and connect with subscribers on a different level.
The nice thing about Easter is that you have multiple angles you can work from a marketing standpoint. Easter bunny, Easter eggs, Easter basket, etc… One idea to consider is to add a hidden element to your email layout, which is essentially a hidden item that is only accessible by discovering a hidden link (known as an “Easter Egg”). Since users don’t typically spend a great deal of time with an email, you need to make sure the hover isn’t to difficult to locate – think 20x by 20x pixels instead of 5px by 5px.
Think of all the great products, services and locations that can be enjoyed instead of housework. Procrastinators world-wide will rejoice with your No Housework Day special!
Push your edgy content on Walk On Your Wild Side Day. Some fun creative of your staff or some of your more eccentric content will do the trick. Lou Reed approves.
For the procrastinators out there, April 15th might not be the day. It might be the 16th, after a good night of sleep and dreams of refund or less worry about payment just paid. If you want your subscribers to blow off some steam and celebrate, it might be interesting to A/B split the 15th & 16th and see what works best for future campaigns. Stay away from politics and focus on the value your content of offer provides.
National High Five Day originated at the University of Virginia in 2002, and has since spread across the globe. Anything and everything can be high-fived, and gives a perfect opportunity to focus on the social/viral side. The official website gives some great ideas. Can you adapt them to your email?
The goal of this holiday is not to sit on a couch, it’s to educate communities about energy consumption. National Hanging Out Day was created to demonstrate how it is possible to save money and energy by using a clothesline. Can you come up with a list of ways to save energy with your product or service? If not, maybe just in general?
This year is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, and a chance to provide the tools and structure for individuals and organizations to organize around environmental issues. The official website offers ideas and tips to take action.
We all know how important the administrative professional is, don’t we? Celebrate them, empower them, reward them, or spoof them (in a fun way). Think about your list…how many of them consider themselves “Administrative Professionals”?
You can find the official date for your state here. Continuing on the environmental kick in April, how do you reward your subscribers for planting a tree? How can we prove that they did it? Easy: through user-generated content on Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube, etc. Sounds like a perfect chance to seed a social campaign through email!
See you next month for the May Email Marketing Calendar… in April.
Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.
Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in March and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.
It doesn’t have to be a book does it? How about blog posts, white papers, or customer reviews?
I’m sure there quite a few things you have in mind for your subscribers to do, don’t you? This day is also used as a celebration of goal achievement.
Lots of folks getting together on this Sunday night, if your site or product or location can enhance their experience, get out in front of it.
A perfect opportunity to ask and engage your loyal audience to refer you to their friends, write a review, or send a gift to a friend from your store or site. Make sure to make the process easy using forms or social sites. The official hashtag on Twitter for the week is #marw10.
Green Email. ‘Nuff said. (more…)
In email marketing, if you aren’t planning a week or two ahead, you’re too late. If you really want to plan a successful campaign, and avoid “blasting”, you need to give your self some time to create content, creative, landing pages and the like.
That is why we are starting a new series of posts this year called the Email Marketing Calendar. Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in February you can utilize to develop a timely and relevant email campaign. We will post this list a week or two ahead of the next month.
If a groundhog fails to see its shadow, winter will soon end. If the groundhog sees its shadow, winter will continue for six more weeks. This would be a great theme to use for consumer campaigns, from apparel retailers to ski resorts to restaurants. If weather is a driving factor in your business, more winter or less winter is most likely something to take advantage of.
Due strictly enforced trademark infringement, you can’t use the words “NFL,” “Super Bowl,” or “Super Sunday” in your marketing campaigns. However, you can use colloquialisms such as “The Big Game,” or other generic descriptions for Super Bowl XLIV. Aside from the game itself, you also have the commercials and the half time show which have a lot of cultural currency as well.
A tounge-in-cheek brand might be able to get something out of boy scout day – Scouts Honor!
You are free to create unique artwork of a US President’s likeness, but you are not allowed to use anything that has “authorship”. Abe Lincoln has one of the most iconic and trustworthy brands in American history. How can you buddy up to Honest Abe?
If this is a big day for your company, hopefully you already have a plan. If you are B2B, here’s an idea: “Will you be our Valentine?” with a link to update their profile or take a survey. Maybe you can use Cupid’s spell to clean up your subscriber data or ask a few questions without having to give something away. Or you could play against Valentine’s Day and ask a subscriber to be selfish and by something for themselves.
First off, it’s spelled “Presidents Day” not “President’s Day”. This is a federal holiday and many are off work. It is also known as much for big sales at stores as it is for honoring US Presidents. Creatively, you can really use iconic American symbols and imagery. But make sure to work on your subject lines and copy, as their will be considerable activity.
Here’s a day you could really have some fun. Mardi Gras is a great day to have an event or a sale. The opportunities for fun creative don’t get better than this. From a charitable side, you could also send your subscribers to donate to the Katrina reconstruction efforts.
Random Act’s Of Kindness Day is an unofficial holiday in order to encourage acts of kindness. This is an opportunity to give something back to your loyal audience of readers. Maybe it’s just to say thanks. Maybe it is a no strings attached coupon for something free or at cost. Don’t send your same old 20% coupon, do something original and kind. Your subscribers won’t forget it, and it could really work to lift your next few emails.
This one may be a stretch, but here me out. We are always looking to humanize our companies. How about you send out a link to a flickr gallery or blog post of all of the employees pets? Or, offer a link to the local humane society to adopt or volunteer. We all love our pets, don’t we? This may be a connection you never knew you had with your subscribers.
This one I am leaving up to you guys, aside from companies that sell children’s products or dentists, I got nothing. Give us an idea in the comments section.
Good luck and happy emailing! Stay tuned for the March Email Marketing Calendar…in February.
I have been a loyal Gmail user for along time. Lately though I have been frustrated with Gmail, mainly due to the images in my HTML emails not displaying correctly. Well they have announced some changes that shed some light on the image issue.
From the Gmail Blog:
Now displaying images in messages from your contacts
Monday, July 20, 2009 5:58 PM
Posted by David de Kloet, Software EngineerWhen an email references external images, Gmail usually doesn’t display them automatically. Instead we show placeholders and present you with the option to “Display images below” or “Always display images from” that sender.
We do this to help protect your privacy from spammers, who can use images and links to verify that your email address is real.
But often the messages you get with images are from friends or family and there’s no reason to worry about your privacy — you just want to see the photo of your newborn niece or the invitation design they’re sending you. So, in these cases, we’ve decided to start displaying images by default. Now, whenever someone you’ve emailed at least twice sends you a message containing images, you’ll see them right away. Note that we picked this threshold of two messages to start with, but we may tweak it if it doesn’t seem right going forward. And we only display images by default for authenticated messages (using SPF or DKIM). Gmail and other big mail providers usually authenticate their mail, but other services might not, so it’s possible you’ll get an email from one of your contacts where images aren’t displayed by default.
If you prefer to go back to the way things were, you can choose not to display images from certain senders or from anyone. To disable images from an individual sender, click “Don’t display from now on” under the “Show details” link of an email from them with images. To disable images from everybody, select “Ask before displaying external content” under “External content” on the general Settings tab.
Gmail will display images by defualt for emails from addresses that are in that person’s Contact’ list. It will also display images if you have sent that address at least 2 emails and that the address in question is authenticating using SPF or DKIM.
I am surprised every email marketing program doesn’t allow subscribers the ability to change the email address they receive campaigns at. According to Pew, ”More than half of working adults (53%) have both personal and work accounts.” (You don’t want to know how many I have). You can’t expect that the email address someone used to subscribe to your email program will never change. If you are only giving them the choice to unsubscribe, that is the choice they will make.
What do you think I did? If your ESP doesn’t give you the option to allow subscribers the ability to change their email address, you might want to investigate one that does.
If someone wants to unsubscribe, just let them unsubscribe.
Making the unsubscribe process difficult or confusing will just aggravate your (former) subscribers and cause real damage to their perception of your business or brand. Don’t make them log-in or make the text confusing. Your not only delaying the inevitable, your making it worse. And why? If they can’t figure out how to unsubscribe, they might stay and turn into a more engaged subscriber? Doubtful. The next time your name comes up, that bad experience will be their first memory. Just let them go, it will actually improve your program. (more…)
I unsubscribed from Ruby Tuesday email list today after a number of clearly untargeted messages. After checking the unsubscribe box and clicking on “submit” I was greeted with the page below.
Apparently Ruby Tuesday thinks you are part of the “in crowd” when you unsubscribe – is this self-admission that their email program is in DIRE need of assistance? Maybe their lack of “listening” is the reason I unsubscribed in the first place.
Piece of advice for Ruby Tuesday, I would urge you to not only personalized your email experience, but also the opt-in and opt-out process as well (at least with a relevant theme like “Hate to see you go” or “Can’t we still be friends?”).
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. (more…)
The economy is bringing the timeless art of coupons back to the forefront.
A few recent statistics:
34% of female consumers are using coupons more frequently today than they were six months ago, & nearly 70% of the 4,500 respondents said they would print and redeem Internet coupon for products they would be interested in purchasing. - Burst Media
Google searches for the term “coupons” last month for the first time surpassed those for “Britney Spears.” – Ad Age
51% of 18-24 year-old shoppers indicate that they would be very likely to use coupons presented to them online – Platform A & IRA
While historically ambivalent to traditional coupons, younger couples are the most likely life-stage group to use online coupons, indicating an opportunity to influence product choices within this segment – Platform A & IRA
Young couples without children are among the respondents most likely to use a coupon they found online, followed by shoppers with younger children – Platform A & IRA
Like it or not, coupons are moving purchases in the current economic climate. Email Marketing provides the unique ability to hyper-target offers to specific subscribers based on past activity and past purchases. For example, the Burst Media survey found that three-quarters (75.2%) of women ages 35-54 indicated they would print and redeem an Internet coupon, compared to 62.2% of women ages 18-34 and 67.7% of women age 55 and older. Do you have those segments? Are you using them? (more…)
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