Buddhist Marketer

Subject Lines Are Really Important

Related:

• Five Steps To Smarter Email Marketing - Nonprofit Edition
• I get shit done.  I do it well.  I don’t read your emails.

Scooby snack for devoted readers

Some of you [ahem] may remember my stealth marketing [credit] attempt to contact someone whose contact information I lacked.  I wrote a blog post hoping they would at some point Google themselves, thus leading themselves to my blog.

I am happy to announce that I was just now able to delete the content of the original blog posting.

Mission accomplished!  And it only took six months.

Next challenge: improving efficacy of Missed Connections?

Five Steps To Smarter Email Marketing - Nonprofit Edition

About to launch an email to your list, asking them to donate?  Make sure you’re taking advantage of this contact to improve your marketing approach.

Before you begin, ping your email service provider to see if you can do an A-B split. If you are able to track opens, clicks, and ultimate donations based on which “bucket” the person was in, this can help you hone and refine your messaging strategy.  If you can’t track anything, get a new email service provider immediately.  If you can only track opens and clicks, well, it’s not perfect, but it’ll do.  These steps assume that you cannot tie ultimate donations back to opens or clicks.

1. Randomly split your list into two buckets, A and B.
2. Figure out what you want to test. To make things easy, you could simply test one thing: the subject line.
3. Now you figure out what, exactly, you think might move the needle for the subject line. You may have a standard subject line that ain’t broke; set this aside for one of your buckets. For the other one, you can test into anything. Maybe you have a hunch, maybe a Board Member has been bugging you try something, maybe you want to test something timely.

I have found that there are some general rules regarding winning subject lines:

• Do not use the person’s name. This worked for about 90 days in the fall of 2000 and is now the strategy of low-grade email marketers. Do not do this unless you are actually a human directly emailing another human :)
• Questions work. Ask a question that the body of your email will deliver against. The idea is to use those precious few characters to pique curiosity and drive a [qualified] click onto the subject line.
• Timeliness works. Create some pseudo-urgency, or else folks could be inclined to open it later. (I still have emails from the fall of 2007 that I haven’t opened…)
• Leverage the focus-group-of-one. Take a look at your own inbox, right now. If you are bad like me you have a lot of unread emails. Out of all the emails, which ones make you want to open them? Why? Do you think the subject line that you have picked is a good one? Would you open it? Why? Why not? Use these insights to hone and refine your subject lines.

4.  Finalize your subject lines. Use the same body copy for both. Fire away!

5.  Once you deploy your email, watch and see if the open rate differs depending on the subject line.

In your next drop, you can then leverage your insights from your “winning” subject line to write your next email’s subject line. Then, you can turn your attention to the next variable: the body copy (or, the “From” line … This can actually make a big difference).

Don’t use anchor tags in emails

Note to emailers:

If you can link the copy in your email to an external web page, please do this rather than linking somewhere within your email.

Why?

A reader who clicks on the anchor tag will miss all the wonderful content in between the text that you linked and the text to which you linked.  This is no good for business; many readers will not think to scroll back up to their original clicking point and read whatever it is they missed.

An example of this is a recent email I received from the Rubin here in the City.

I clicked on a link in their top area, “Features and Updates”, and it brought me down to the bottom of the email.  “Well, perhaps this is because they have no content on their website about this?” I wondered.

Not the case.  In fact, they do have content on their website — really robust content.

So, I’m not sure why they’re using anchors in their email, but, I hope they stop!

“Buddhism” intersection “green”

From “Help Wanted“, an interview of Van Jones ‘93JD by Melinda Tuhus in the March/April 2009 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine (bolding mine):

Y: One of your key slogans, which comes out of your previous organizing work, is “Green jobs, not jails.” Is the large number of minorities in prison something you see as a rallying point, or is it too leftist or too maximalist to be effective?

J: I don’t think that most of America would sign onto that tomorrow, but there’s a logic here, with regard to the green economy. Fundamentally, the moral claim has to be that if you’re going to have a green economy you shouldn’t have any throwaway resources, you shouldn’t have any throwaway species, and you shouldn’t have any throwaway people, and that we shouldn’t just have a green movement about reclaiming thrown-away stuff. It should also be about reclaiming thrown-away lives and thrown-away communities.

Spotted: five recent marketing curiosities

#1.  Perhaps “Classic Joy” didn’t focus-group very well

Am I the only one who finds the non-ultra-ness amusing and curious?

#2. Oh, the products you’ll Obama-ize!

Spotted at an indie coffee purveyor in Hell’s Kitchen.  Everyone wants in on the action of the Obama cult. I wonder what they’ll think of next?

#3. I.M. Embarrassed

I’m guessing that all the other executives tried to get the founder to please, please not use this name, but he or she was so in love with it …

#4. Does this vodka bottle make my butt look big?

Certainly I am not the psychographic for the Ed Hardy line of clothing. But why on earth did they

• Come up with a branded Ed Hardy vodka
• Think it was a good idea to distribute it at a women’s clothing store

???

I can’t imagine that the efficacy throughput is very high for that distribution channel. This makes no sense to me. Then again, neither do full color body tattoos. So, perhaps this is genius and I’m missing out on the party yet again.

#5. It’s actually a secret society

I open up a box of clinical strength Secret (p.s. it’s awesome) and am intrigued to see that there’s a loyalty program. !

Unfortunately, I guess it’s a super-secret VIP rewards program.

Y’know, I was blackballed once during the whole Yale-secret-society thing. Now this?

Oh, that hurts. I.M. Sad and now I must go down some Ed Hardy vodka chased by Obama blend coffee in a mug which I will later wash using non-Ultra Joy.

Zoinks!

Sub-optimal user experience

I like to assume that websites aren’t lying to me, so when a form tells me that I can simply enter my email address, I figure I can simply enter my email address and not bother with the rest.

Sure, they also state that certain fields are required, but since the two messages are in opposition, I figure the stuff at the top in red font is more authoritative than the stuff at the bottom in quiet black font.

Clearly I was mistaken!

Dear Ilana Preuss, Outreach and Field Director for Transportation for America:

• Sorry, I couldn’t join Campaign for New York’s Future because your site messaging confused me
• Sorry, but if I am not in your database, then how is it that I received your email?
• You forgot to QA the UX

Please Make Changes and re-send your ‘Stop the Doomsday Clock for NYC’ email.  NOTE: I have 3200 unread emails, so your next email blast may be lost in the pile.

—

I will say this:  Transportion for America has a great website as far as websites in that category go.  A!

The liberation of my inner New York City housewife

I am not the target demographic for the recent email I received from ASmallWorld.  I find the name ‘billion dollar babes‘ as cloying as the branding for bliss products.

My first instinct is to suppose the the appropriate target audience for ‘billion dollar babes’ is the kind of girl who non-ironically sports velour tracksuits, French manicures, a perma-tan, and a highlighted blow-out.  I do not see myself as this kind of girl. Which of course makes me think about an article that a girlfriend of mine put on my radar this past week, Why The Smartest People Have The Toughest Time Dating.  A snip:

3. You don’t feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don’t act like one.

At some point in your life, you got pegged as a smart person. From then on, that was your principal identity: The Smart One. Especially if you had a sibling who was better-looking than you, in which case she (or he) was The Pretty One.

Now you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you’re both smart AND pretty and everyone hates you except for me — call me, like, immediately), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One. So maybe you dress frumpy and don’t pay a lot of attention to your appearance. Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman. Or your sexual aggression as a male.

Crumb, the more I think about it, the more I think I should click on that there link and unleash my inner billion dollar babe!

Related:  I am not the kind of girl who would want to admit to being on the mailing list for Frederick’s of Hollywood, let alone the kind of girl who would freely want to forward their offers to all of my friends.

No, I do not “feel free to forward this” to my friends, nor do I want to join a posse of “billion dollar babes”, and yes, this may all be connected to me historically being The Smart One.

And, yes.  Yes I did go to the tanning salon yesterday to maintain my Aruban glow.

Next up:  a velour-covered backside?

It’s not evil for Citi to hand out bonuses

Quickly, as I have a call in a few:

1. On Morning Joe this morning, the yokels who run that show were kvetching about additional bonuses given to top performers instead of the President’s Award annual trip to a sunny locale
2. To yokel-paraphrase, “Why reward the top performers?  Where are they going to go?  Lehman?”
3. Implicit assumption: people who work at banks are only qualified to work at banks.
4. Every single star performer I met during my time working at or with Citi went on to work for a company not equal to a bank
5. If you let your top talent go elsewhere, do you think that will increase or decrease your chances of getting out of a troubling situation?  Do you think that top performers or the average-of-the-average are more likely to be able to put government dollars to good use?

Of course, I’ll also note that none of the top performers in my mind were ever invited to the President’s Award trip to a sunny locale.  There was one woman who I liked and didn’t entirely suck who went, but on the flip side, one of the most perplexingly mediocre people with whom I’ve ever worked was also invited.

Look, the organizational culture at Citi is already one that encourages yes’m'ing and discourages declarations that the shivering, nude emperor is, in fact, naked as a jaybird.  Frankly, I wish they’d flown the top peeps to that sunny locale instead of handing out loot.  At least in warm weather it’s not so wacky to be tromping around in the buff.  Maybe in that pants-optional environment, someone would feel more comfortable stating the obvious.

Open source copy-editing

I really want another apostrophe in the word ‘writers’.  Am I wrong to want this?

From the Summer Writers Colony email:

From The New School’s landing page:

I mean, if it’s ‘Writer’s Life’, couldn’t it also be ‘Writer’s Colony’ or, better yet, ‘Writers’ Colony’?

Help a girl out?