Chris Marriott over at iMediaConnection talks about all the reasons email is a non-starter as a replacement for direct mail. This is something I have been telling clients for a while now. Chris mentions a number of reasons for why email is not an acquisition tool. Today, banks can flood your mailbox with all the credit card offers they want, but they can’t flood your email box with the same...
The Email Experience Council is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association. They recently sent out a mailing that demonstrated what not to do when sending email, including: sending out multiple copies of an email to the same recipients sending offers from a third party to recipients who did not opt-in for third party mail sending mail from a unrecognized address sending an offer...
One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms. As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a...
Many of my clients come to me when they end up with delivery problems due to the actions of affiliates. These can either be listings in some of the URL blocklists (either public or private) or escalations of IP based listings. In many of the cases I have dealt with affiliates, the affiliates have sloppy mailing practices or are out and out spammers. Recently the FTC settled with Cyberheat over...
Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system. Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a...
Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.
Cam Beck on Marketing Prefs has a post today about presenting users with confusing choices in an opt-in process. Bank of America followed the letter of the law, but they did so with a method that can only be described as misleading since people typically don’t read those sorts of messages, and the action required to opt out changes from one email message to the next within the same form. I’ve...
Marketers measure a lot of metrics about the email they send. But are they measuring the right metrics? Mark Brownlow talks about how marketers may not always know what their measuring. He also links to Email Insider where the Email Diva talks about what metrics can be measured. More importantly, she points out that asking questions and determining what you want out of your email marketing...
Matt talks about a new marketing report from the ThinData Newsletter. The Newsletter offers the following recommendations on using viral marketing as part of your next email campaign. State Your Purpose. Be very clear about your intentions with your viral program and about what you plan to do with the email addresses that you will be collecting. Respect Personal Information. Keep in-mind that the...
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