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: Wishful thinking?

I got this one from Wotif this morning.

Now seeing as the long weekend was last weekend, I'm trying to work out which of the following is true:

1. This is a poorly worded attempt at trying to state that you should create your own long weekend any weekend.
2. That they somehow got the dates wrong and think this next weekend is the Easter long weekend.
3. That the campaign scheduling is out of whack (they didn't send a long weekend promo out the week before last)
4. That it's just a mistake.

In any case, they got my attention so I guess it's mission complete in that respect.

Wotif they actually got things right for next week?

Inbox roundup: Spell (Un)check

We all make spelling mistakes now and then.  But when you have a spell checker button staring you in the face, there's really not much excuse for not writing the Queens' English the way she intended - especially when (supposedly) a bunch of people have read and checked the copy before you publish it to thousands of recipients.

Slightly more forgivable is leaving out some punctuation...

The travel sector is the main offender for today.  The winners are:

Qantas - "Pernter" in paragraph 3.
Travel.com.au - Missing "$" in paragraph 2.

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?

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