It's easy to be a sloppy marketer

Sometimes marketers are just sloppy.
Take, for example, an email I received today from a company.
I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1).
I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to.
The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but whomever wrote the copy didn’t actually proof read it (sloppy #3).

Use this area to offer a short teaser of your email's content. Text here will show in the preview area of some email clients.
Clearly, no one actually took the time to proof the email or even send it to themselves. Otherwise, they would have noticed the teaser text wasn’t changed.
Sloppy email marketing is a major cause of delivery problems. In this case, the error was more user visible than machine visible. But if they failed to check the machine visible information as well, that can trigger bulk foldering.
For some mailers the bulk filtering isn’t that huge a problem. The major consumer ISPs track when users go into their bulk folder and pull email out. If that happens, that improves the reputation of the sender. In this case, though, the mail is unexpected, so the recipient isn’t going to look into the bulk folder to pull it to the inbox. And even if the recipient did look in the bulk folder, it’s unlikely they would recognize it and remove it to the inbox. The sender is new, the preview text is unedited and it doesn’t look like “real” mail.
None of what the sender did here is unrecoverable. It’s not a good introduction to recipients, but it’s mostly fixable. That’s assuming the majority of recipients didn’t unsubscribe or complain. If they did, the sender probably squandered a prime marketing opportunity simply by not taking enough time to proofread their copy.
 

Related Posts

Skywriting to market email?

I’m so busy today getting caught up from the whirlwind of cousins this week. Yesterday, we took them to SF to do some touristy stuff. While sitting outside having some food and a drink, we noticed a ton of people staring up into the sky.
Livingsocial had hired some (very talented pilots) to do dot matrix skywriting as advertising.
Skywriting for living social It was quite impressive, actually. Mostly because the pilots were so technically precise, but also because they were conveying useful information in short phrases.
Besides the “Livingsocial loves you” shown here, we also saw deals and even a URL at one point. There was enough breeze over the bay that messages didn’t hang around long (the blur going from top left to bottom right is writing from the pass about 5 minutes earlier). But it was eye catching and there were tons of people taking photos.
It would be interesting to hear how effective a campaign this is. Does Livingsocial see signups as a result of skywriting? Or is this just general brand awareness on their part?
As an aside, the cousins said they received emails from both Livingsocial and Groupon, but that Groupon just sent so much mail it was getting annoying.

Read More

Marketing or spamming?

A friend of mine sent me a copy of an email she received, asking if I’d ever heard of this particular sender. It seems a B2B lead generation company was sending her an email telling her AOL was blocking their mail and they had stopped delivery. All she needed to do was click a link to reactivate her subscription.
The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how their mail is accidentally blocked by ISPs and businesses.

Read More

A recipient's view on engagement

I found a blog post from a technical type talking about email engagement. This is a  non-marketing way to do things, and probably won’t work for many marketing programs. But I think good marketers should be listening to what their recipients say, even if it’s counter-intuitive.
Edit 9/15: the website seems to have expired so I changed the link to the google cache of the article.

Read More