Bad practice in email marketing is bad business, according to Chris Marriott. Companies making mistakes in marketing via email is like shooting themselves in the foot. He gives us a short list of 5 mistakes and missed opportunities many companies make on a daily basis:

1. No welcome message

Acknowledge that I have signed up for email newsletter, or notice of special promotional offers. If companies fail to do so, it is as if they don’t care about who have signed up.

My comment: So true. Sending welcome message ensures that new subscribers are not confused about the process. Sometimes, when requesting an offer, I tend to doubt if I have missed something if I didn’t immediately get a message in the mail. “What have I done wrong? Did I enter the correct email?”

2. Ignore information entered during sign-up

If companies ask for preferences and other information, they should use them. Don’t ask for company name if all they want to personalize is my first name.

Hendry: If I opted in to receive specific information, please don’t send me others unless they are relevant. I expect companies to use the preferences I set during sign up.

3. Treat me the same as everyone else in the email file

Retailers are the worst offenders in this regard. Email marketers should segment their recipients by interests, product they currently bought, etc. This increases response and clickthrough and conversion.

This is exactly the thing I commented on in the second point above about segmented information.

4. Let everyone in the organization mail to me

Unless the company has instituted strict email touch governance rules around the frequency of email communications to its customers, I’m likely to receive too many emails (maybe two in one day) from that company.

Coordinated effort in email marketing ensures more control in messages received by recipients and their experiences with the companies.

5. Send me ugly transactional emails

It has been proven that transactional emails are great oppotunities to offer related products.

Why immediately offer other products? Because the greatest open rates belong to transactional emails. Customers also are more likely to buy because they have just bought something.

My comment: Mr. Marriott complained about using plain text and unbranded emails in transactional emails. While it is great to have HTML emails with all the bells and whistles, plain text emails are less likely to be filtered. I should say at least companies should clearly brand emails, although they are sending in plain text. And yes, don’t make it appear so garbled!

Dear Hendry,

Can links on email ads reduce the deliverability rate? Do spam blocking filters block emails with links as they automatically perceive the email to be spam?

Mark Strobel

Mark,

Spam blocking filters don’t work the same. But, generally the occurrence of links in the content doesn’t indicate that the email is spam.

However, some content filtering software or scripts do check the most common URLs in the body content and automatically increase the spam score of the message — the likelihood of a message to be considered spam.

So, to answer your first question, URLs in body content could possibly affect your deliverability rate, but spam blocking filters don’t block emails only because they have links in the message content.

Also remember that email deliverability depends on a myriad of other factors. Message content is just one of them. Many email marketers think that if you avoid the most common spam trap words or phrases such as “free”, “business opportunity”, etc., you are more or less safe.

Nothing is further from the truth.

Besides content, email deliverability also depends on the sender, ISP reputation, email authentication, ISP and third-party filters, software settings, internal/external blacklists, and a bunch of other factors.

Make sure you don’t spend your time too much on things that matter less.

Good luck.

Based on the survey by The Outperformance Marketing Review about email marketing plans for 2007, it is concluded that email is going to be used more frequently in 2007.

The majority of respondents (72 percent) plan to increase marketing budgets around email this year. Almost all expect to see an increase in ROI from email, making email as the most important advertising medium for 2007. It even comes before search marketing, contextual targeting and display ads.

Specifically, 70.5 percent reported plans to increase spending on email acquisition and 63 percent on retention campaigns. This emphasizes the importance of email marketing as a CRM and acquisition channel.

The survey also reported that:

• More than half of the respondents outsouced email marketing.
• Email optimization techniques, including landing pages, subject line testing and triggered messaging, were unanimously ranked as “very important.”
• 83 percent of respondents indicated they were confident that email ROI will increase during the new year.
• The most important reasons why people will use email marketing is 2007 are (in order of popularity) drive incremental revenue (55.3 percent), reinforce brand position (19.1 percent), improve customer loyalty (10.6 percent), reactivate customers (8.5 percent), and drive increased customer purchase frequency (6.4 percent).

The survey involved 1,500 marketing professionals, including KPMG International, InfoUSA, QInteractive and Art.com.

[Datran Media]

Reid Carr has written an article about a different approach to using e-newsletter. Instead of using and email newsletter to build brand awareness, trust and get your prospects to know you, he proposes to implement it post sale.

Using e-newsletters to manage post-sales process focuses to battle buyer’s remorse. Additionally, marketers could get feedbacks from satisfied customers, build credibility by having the customers submit their positive experiences and also get them to talk about the products to their friends, family and colleagues.

Here is how the writer suggests you to approach this strategy:

• Capture their names. Prove to them that they are going to receive useful information related to the product they purchased instead of promotional pieces.
• Know what they bought. Personalize the message you send related to what they buy.
• Know your product’s lifecycle. First you want to address remorse issue. But, soon it could progress to customer service and for some cases re-sell once they get close to the replacement date. Knowing the lifecycle allows you to create relevant messages accordingly.
• Understand their concerns. Address their concerns in the mailing you send after the initial purchase. Use the blogosphere to monitor conversations.
• Toot your horn. Consumers want to learn that experts agree with their purchase. It also helps them spread the right and specific information around your products.
• They’re not alone. Let them share their stories, enrich their use of the product. It can also be used as a marketing tool to blow concerns away from the prospects.
• Give them a soapbox. Offer tools to let them share the information with their friends and family and colleagues. Example: forward to friend, online version of the newsletters and offer additional content to share.

The first purchase is just the beginning of your relationship with your customers. Continually connect with them and help them use the product. That way, you not only can provide better experience but also battle buyer’s remorse and in turn let them be your own sales force.

[Chief Marketer]

David Baker shares a true story about his client. It is a perfect example of how sophisticated technologies don’t have to be the winner for every occasion.

In fact, a good strategy doesn’t start with creative or any technology that supports creation of such creative such as through dynamic content and other data. It starts with understanding your customer.

There was a retailer who sold items through catalog and e-mail. E-mail was then an emerging channel, and their program was in its infancy: no segmentation, terrible creative, no list management or controls, and barely able to test subject lines. Their programs were relegated to offer strategies driven by the product teams.

They agreed to allow us to pilot a performance improvement program whereby we’d use our best practices and technologies to build the foundation for the next generation of their program. We did just about everything you could think of: sophisticated targeting, dynamic content, RFM analysis; we threw in seasonal trends and then every deliverability and e-mail tactic there was. The e-mail looked beautiful and it was as optimized as you could get, yet … we barely moved the needle.

Timing and frequency are the only factors that matter much in this case. Using targeting technology, for example, is not helpful because it doesn’t improve timing and frequency.

The morale of the story: Even if it is simple, email marketing still works as long as it caters to the heart of the problem you face when keeping in touch with your list.