Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

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…)

One cardinal rule of email marketing: If you think everything has been checked…..check again.

This email from Heineken, “a frosty glass of beer from Holland” as Duck from Mad Men called it, most likely wasn’t meant for me:

The obvious error here is the “(TEST with Espanol link)” in the email subject line (Don’t get me started on the noreply@ email address). While these types of gaffes amuse people like me and Dylan Boyd from The Email Wars, they have to leave Joe Consumer very confused.

As I went to check my preferences….

Apparently I opted in to the “small_test” list. I am assuming they also think I may speak Spanish.

My goal here is not to beat up on Heineken, everyone I know in email marketing has made mistakes. The takeaway here is to be very careful with your test groups. Double check every aspect that a subscriber sees so it is seemless from their normal experience with your messaging.

If they know it is a test, it’s not a test anymore.

Yahoo! is introducing new email address domains – ymail.com & rocketmail.com. Good for users, bad for email marketers.

I have always hated my Yahoo! email address, so I jumped at the chance to get something better. Score! I got the same extension as my Gmail address (us email marketers have a lot of email accounts, and we actually check them all).

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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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Below are 2 very similar emails I received that are worth taking a look at. It looks like the ESP (probably the same one) lost some data, to the extent

What I don’t understand is why the only thing to do in this email is unsubscribe or ignore. I think a “profile update” or “check your preferences” option should have been added as well.