Integrating your email channel

I saw a nicely done example of integrating email into other marketing channels over the weekend.
I was helping a friend pick out a receiver and speakers for their home theatre system on Saturday afternoon. As we were chatting over IRC there was a lot of pasting URLs back and forth, as we tried to juggle speaker components to get a nice, balanced setup on a budget that was fairly tight for a separates system.
I like Polk speakers, and NewEgg are offering some nice deals on them right now, so a lot of the URLs were for bottom of the range Polk speakers at NewEgg.
Mid-morning on Sunday, around 16 hours later, this showed up in my inbox:

It’s mail customized for me, triggered by my browsing the site the day before with a web cookie in place that identifies me as someone who has a fairly long history of ordering from them.
I think it’s “just” targetted mail about home audio speakers, triggered by my browsing in that category and not purchasing immediately. But it’s possible that it’s cleverer than that – it’s listing solely Polk speakers, and it’s showing both the ones I was looking at and the higher end ones in the same product line. It’s nicely done, either way.
It’s a great example of an email that’s been prepared for a specific recipients interests, sent at just the right time. Even though I know that it’s a semi-customized boilerplate, sent by a piece of software in response to my browsing a web site it’s good enough that as a recipient I feel like it’s the company I have a relationship with being helpful, rather than it being intrusive upsell advertising.
It might not work so well if I were a brand new customer, or if it wasn’t quite as well tuned to my interests of the day, but it’s done well.
Nice job, NewEgg.

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Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

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Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The text of the email told me why I was receiving the email and what I could expect.

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