Buddhist Marketer

This Is Not A Blog Post

Just ordered some Amtrak tickets.  The confirmation email:

Okay, well … maybe you could change your “from” email address to reservations @ amtrak.com … ?

Just, um, tossing out ideas.

B2B Email Recipients Are People Too

Let’s say you’re a bidness that markets to other bidnesses.  Do the principles of marketing change as a result?

Negatorz.  Think about it:  bidnesses are run by bidnesspeople, and as one puppet said to another in one of the Muppets movies, “Peoples is peoples.”  What does shift are things like psychographic insights and push/pull-points, but the marketing fundamentals are, well, fundamental.

In this corner, we have an email from job search site Monster.com:

Not bad, right?  Subject line mentions that the offer won’t be around forever, which is a great “act now” motor-vator.  The sub-optimal part of the “stuff that helps people decide whether to open an email” includes:

• I’m not sure who Monster is.  Is it a truck rally?  An adjective that describes the scale of my friend Tommy Fitz’s barbecues?  Now, Monster.com I know.  I’ve seen the ads and had a drink or two on their dime at an online marketing industry party or two.  But neither the from nor the subject lines refer to a Monster.com; they simply refer to an unknown Monster.  An email recipient should know exactly who’s sending them an email and their tolerance for doubt is very low.
• I’m not sure which Anittah Monster is looking for.  Is it potential-job-searcher Anittah?  Small biz owner Anittah?  As a human, even one who thinks about her biz 25/8, I tend to assume that emails are meant for me as a human.  Thus, even if I knew it was Monster.com, my assumption is that they’re looking for the potential job searcher, not the small business owner.  And since I already have a job, in a way, I assume that Monster.com has nothing to offer me.  Delete!
• ‘Limited Time Offer’ is good but not great.  How limited, yo?  Non-glittering generalities need to be avoided in the “stuff that helps people decide whether to open an email” (or, for that matter, “stuff that helps people decide whether to click on a Google AdWords PPC ad”).

Spot The Boob Boob

Can you spot the errors in the BUST boobtique email below?

Here are some thought-starters; add your own ideas in the comments, you scampin’ little lurkers, you ;)

1. No clear call-to-action above the fold
2. “Your gonna get a heart on” should be “You’re gonna get a heart on”
3. “your loved ones heart melt” should be “your loved one’s heart melt”
4. “your loved one’s heart melt” is uni-partner-normative; what about polygamists and “your loved ones’ hearts melt”?
5. Ditto re: “what makes your boo swoon”; cannot players also make their “boos swoon”?
6. Should be pricing on the products, unless this was some kind of test.  Do you really want to pay for the bandwidth of click-throughs for people who don’t want to pay $? for a What Would Joan Jett Do? t-shirt?
7. Iff there was a “title=” rollover tag on the images that contained the prices, then BUST should accept my apologies
8. Brunette chick in email.  Bad idea.  Everyone knows that blonde chicks sporting glasses garner the highest CTRs.

Actually, It Was Cialis That I Helped Launch

But thanks anyway, Viagra spammers, for sending your lovely marketing message with my email address as your “from” address.

* sigh *

Three Things To Help Your Email Kick More Ass

Everyone and their mom is hitting their in-house customer email file in these economic times.  Who better to help you stay afloat than folks who already know you?

So you’ve written some draft copy for your email and you’re ready to fire it out.  Before you hit send, here are three things you can do to help your email kick more ass than it otherwise would:

1. Put a nice big obvious “Click here to blah blah blah!” link somewhere above the fold. The readers will know exactly where to click without having to scroll down in your email — or even read your email for that matter!  Your email shouldn’t make the reader work.
2. Make sure the font of your email ‘pops’ against the background color of your email.  If there isn’t enough contrast, it’ll be hard for readers to scan your email.  Your email shouldn’t make the reader work.
3. Tweak your copy such that it is just one column. If you really want to use a sidebar, make it a sidebar, and not an actual additional column of content.  [Click here for more on the use of columns in emails.]  Columns are confusing and make the reader unsure of where their eyeballs should go.  Don’t make the reader work.

If your email already satisfies these three elements, then you rock.  Figure out what your subject line test will be, make sure your post-click userflow is on point, and fire away.

Woo hoo!

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.

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).

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?

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?

Not as sexy as Westin - Philly, but …

The below email doesn’t have as compelling an offer as the recent email I received from The Westin in Philly (okay, it lacks any offer whatsoever), but I do appreciate how the look and feel of the email from Le Meridien - Paris (where I stayed in April 2007) differs so markedly from the Westin email.

Someone at Starwood is awake at the wheel.  Hooray!