Anatomy of an Apple Email

Source: Flowtown

Where is spam originating? - Google Postini

Google Postini has a great feature that shows you in real time where spam messages are being born.  Each red dot on this map shows where spam messages are originating in real time. Saturated areas show high concentrations of malicious IPs. 

The surprising thing is that countries with spam legislation in place like the USA and Australia (where penalties are in the hundreds of thousands and up to the millions for repeat offenders) are still generating spam.  But the most surprising aspect is the fact that France, Spain, Brazil and the UK are still major spam sources.

And here I was thinking that China, Russia and India were the main offenders...

Whose preferences?

As you may have gathered from previous posts, one of my pet peeves is marketers that don't listen to their customers.

For a long time now, the two that I would consider the worst offenders are Ticketek and Grays Online.  Not just because they batch and blast with no segmentation whatsoever, but because both like to highlight their extensive 'preferences management' sections on their websites. They point to these in their emails and all over their sites and seem to be quite proud that they ask you stuff that they both promptly ignore.

The funny thing with this is that both publishers use the term 'My' to denote these sections, trying to lull me into thinking that these preferences are actually mine.  To be fair, when I actually check these sections, those checkboxes are actually highlighting products and events that I have actually chosen. So what's happened to these when they go to communicate with me?

Who knows?

The best examples of ignoring me has been when Grays tried to sell me a boat mooring (I don't have a boat and haven't told them I'm interested in marine auctions) in Queensland (they know I live in NSW), earthmoving equipment (pickup) and food processing machinery.  Yeah, just the stuff I needed!

Ticketek likes to send me offers to see events that they know I'm not interested in.  I don't have kids and don't want to go sit in the audience with a thousand 4 years olds to watch the Wiggles - in Victoria.  Nor do I care about Fashion Weekend (but at least they got the Sydney part right)

But it's not just these two retailers that do this.  David Jones does a good job of ignoring me too. The most humorous was where they emailed me about some new vibrating mascara!

I'll put it down to that CERN particle accelerator. It apparently hasn't destroyed the universe as the tin hat brigade predicted, but it seems to have slipped us into an alternate dimension where preferences don't matter.

It's either that or the effects of the ash cloud from that unpronounceable volcano (why not leave some consonants for the rest of us?)

They're someones preferences, but they're definitely not 'MY'.

Inbox roundup: Rags to riches

Miss Money Penny is a great Australian online small business success story. Their model is pretty simple, the site is designed to help people sell their unwanted designer clothing and accessories.

In the style of ebay, upload your product photos, the description & price and when it sells, the site gets a cut.

Putting aside the issues that I have with the usability and user interface of the site itself, I'm going to look at their email communication for now.  It's ripe for some tweaking.

First up, the subscription process is an interesting one.  While the form is pretty standard and concise, the resulting email is not a subscription confirmation or a welcome at all - rather it's an inquiry confirmation and seems to be a product of a questionable CRM.  Secondly, it's from Vanessa D, rather than MMP.  Lastly, this email states

Campaign Newsletter Subscriptions
[Miss Money Penny Newsletter] - requires you to verify your subscription.

There's no link here so I don't know what the purpose of that copy is at all.

So, about the email itself, I think there's a lot of things that can be improved.  Let's start at the top, the subject line (Just In Designer Resale Finds) is missing a hyphen or a colon or something after Just In.  Is re-sale hyphenated?

There seems to be a bit of a waste of space above the header with a few lines of blank white before the read online and unsub text.  Trimming this down would help get more content above the fold considering that the header is so big.

Next up is the centered text. What's up with that?  There's a reason why GeoCities doesn't exist anymore and this is one major one.  If this text blinked and the background was a repeating pattern, I could swear I was back in the early 90's!

Grammatically, this is a little epileptic, with the random use of capitalisation and the repetition in the "Click here for our Fave's our Fave's".

To improve the aesthetics and overall effectiveness of this email, I would put this feature item first and re-write the copy to be a short, personalised intro.  I'd crop this photo so as no to suck up so much real estate. Then I'd stick the first four images at the top of the email below this feature.  I think that layout makes more logical sense to the reader and flows nicer.

As for the last third of the layout, I get the idea of having a quirky image to sign off with but I think this section can be improved a little.  The whole site is about buying and selling desirable designer brands.  Those brands mentioned in the copy below the photo should be much more prominent and hyperlinked to the site.  It's a great CTA, use it!

I think there's a great opportunity for testing and optimisation of this email.  Guaranteed that whatever clickthrough stats are being achieved now could be improved with a bit 'designer alteration'.

Inbox Roundup: To test or not to test?

Clearly, as an email marketer for 7 years, I firmly believe in the medium.  Email is the epitome of direct marketing - incredibly customisable, timely and measurable.  And it's also incredibly simple to execute.

This power and simplicity is obviously a recipe for disaster.  In a matter of seconds, you can not only make your brand look silly, but also cause PR nightmares (or dreams, depending on how you spin it).

I think there's really no reason to send your email campaign without testing it - aside from laziness.  Maybe when people think email testing, they think about the more complicated optimisation excercises such as A/B split and multivariate testing etc and their eyes glaze over.

But here all I'm going to focus on is something far more fundamental and simpler to understand.  The layout and design.

With the plethora of tools available online such as Previewmyemail.com, Litmus and Return Path, to name a few, it's a wonder that things like this from Wotif can still make it through to my Inbox.

Clearly someone hasn't bothered to take a look at this in Gmail and see that it's all over the place.  A quick look points to the fact that someone wacked in a extra vertical blue border to the right of the banner which has blown everything else out.

Using one of the tools above would have identified this very quickly and not made the Wotif people look silly.

To test or not to test?  Is that really a question?

Dear F@$*face

A while ago I was working with a client who had an issue with their data capture process.  The problem wasn't exactly with how the data was captured but what type of data they were collecting.

They specifically had a problem with the fact that there was no obscenity filter applied to some of the fields.  They thought it a problem that if someone signed up and called themselves "fuckface" for instance, that they would take issue when they received an email addressed to Dear Fuckface.

This raised a discussion around what's deemed offensive and to whom and whether a name such as this would cause damage to the brand.  Well that's a whole other discussion.

We finally installed an obscenity filter, which we advised wouldn't be the best solution due to false positives.  What if Dick Chaney wanted to sign up to their list?  Sorry Dick, no offers for you, you're name is too, well... dicky.  The only real solution would be to use a combination of the automated filtering and human checking - which is what they settled on.

So the reason for this post is that during this exercise, I decided to sign up to a bunch of newsletters using offensive names.  Only 1 out of 10 retailer newsletters rejected my offensive name.

I'm still getting regular emails from the others without alteration.  I wonder if they know and don't care or if they're oblivious to this?  In any case, it's something worth thinking about next time you look at your subscription process.

Inbox roundup: Empty promises?

It brings a tear to the eye when you get an email like this one from the gang at Cameras Direct.

It's not exactly setting the email marketing world alight for a few reasons.  Firstly, it features a pretty redundant subject line - Camerasdirect - New Canon 550D.

Remember kids, there's no point mentioning your brand in the subject line when it's sitting in the 'from' field just a few pixels away.

BUT this is completely forgiven by the fact that they seem to know this and want to fix it.  Check this out

Just the promise of wanting to know more about me and using this in the future is good enough for me.  So on I go to fill in their preferences form by clicking on the link and I get a nice and simple pre-populated form to complete and send.

Thanks CamerasDirect for taking the time time to put together a simple and effective data enrichment program.  Now here's hoping you'll actually use this next time you speak to me :)

For more great ideas on improving your email marketing, check out The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

Digital amnesia or just don't care?

So imagine you're in a store and the shop assistant comes up to you and greets you then asks you what you're looking for.  You give them your name and tell them what you're after and hand over a few other bits of info too, like where you live and what you like.

The assistant looks you in the eye and listens to everything you say.  They make a note of everything and tell you that they're sure they can help you find that perfect product.  They tell you that they might not have anything right now but they'll send you a letter or catalogue the second they do.

You've had a conversation.  They've listened and taken notes.  You're happy they've taken the time.

Then you go home and get a letter from them a week or so later with their latest offers.

As you read, you realise that they must have made a mistake.  The letter you got must be someone else's, because not only does it list products that you're not interested in, it also features services and events in completely different geographical locations!

Surely this is a mistake right?  The shop assistant took all your details, they wrote them all down and even asked you to confirm it before they saved it.  They stored the information in a secure location and assured you that nobody else could touch it.

So why did they send you something that has no relevance to you at all?  Why did they bother to waste your time?

Why did they pretend to care?  Why did they lie? :(

You wouldn't put up with it in a bricks & mortar store, so why put up with it online?

Email marketers do this all the time - it's like a virus spreading throughout anyone that runs an e-commerce website.  Get as much info as you can - then ignore it... but get it anyway cause that's what we're supposed to do.

So here's a simple list of rules for anyone that wants to capture customer data.  4 very simple ideas that will get you thinking about how you treat customer information.

Data capture golden rules

1. If you don't plan to use it, don't ask for it.
2. All fields should be mandatory.  If it's not, don't ask for it.
3. Validate client-side - in the fields as you go
4. Verify server-side - by using confirmation pages and emails

Basically, don't pretend you care when you don't.  Nobody likes a liar.

email newsletter basics

It's a bit general but this guide by Smashing Magazine on email newsletter design is pretty comprehensive.  I particularly like the section to do with data collection.  It's definitely one area that most marketers fall over on.

Being Smashing, the main crux of it is very design focussed.  It's a good read regardless.

enjoy

crying wolf in your inbox

Here's a great article on three things you can do to try to establish a sense of urgency in your email subject lines.

There is nothing more annoying than receiving an offer one day then an even better offer a few days later (when they clearly haven't achieved their sales target).  

Go on, cry wolf.  Good luck!