Ask Nicely and I’ll Comply

By all measures email marketing is clogging our inboxes. But read this email:

Needless to say I renewed my subscription.

It’s Not Really A “Subscriber Exclusive” If Everyone Is Invited, Right?

This morning I got a special email from Wilsons Leather. The email informed me I was getting an exclusive additional 20% off for being a member of their mailing list. I was stoked.

But then, at the bottom of the promo I saw a link that let me forward the email to a friend. So I forwarded it to myself and discovered this offer was also valid for my friends who were not part of the mailing this.

But what really got me upset was when I went to wilsonsleather.com and saw, right at the top of the page, the same discount on their homepage, open to everyone!

It is true that the free shipping with the 20% discount was indeed only for email subscribers. Had I been the marketing manager for the site I would have only sent information about free shipping to my subscribers and prevented them getting upset to discover that the special 20% discount was open for all.

add to cart for email list:

add to cart for rest:

Yelp Is Not A Dating Site, But…

Email marketing, by and large, is a way for marketers to manage recall through saturation. Academically we all realize flooding is bad (unclassy) marketing but because it works we do it anyway. Fortunately, the good folk at Yelp.com have decided to try something different. Their editorial team actually parsed customer experiences and comments and created a well written, well linked Valentines day email for the Chicago market. If you think I am being biased know that I absolutely hate Yelp.com and believe their “open for anyone to rank and review” model churns out constant duds. That being said, I feel no shame admitting that their email marketing strategy is fantastic.

I Love You, But Please Slow Down

Amiestreet.com is a great music site I discovered through TechCrunch. But they send too many emails. I love them but I need them to slow down and it’s a pity their email only highlights an unsubscribe option when what I really want is an option that lets me reduce emails to once a month. Now I’m sure I could visit their website, login, go to my account and make those changes (may be) but I am far too busy and far too lazy to do that.

The Right Message For The Right Audience At The Right Time

I got an email from Amazon this morning promoting the TomTom GPS system. This was not a blast email but a very well calculated strategy. Amazon has probably noticed I’ve looked at several GPS systems over the year but never managed to pull the trigger. They know I am not a compulsive shopper. In the context on what they know about me I’d say this email will have a solid conversion rate.

I believe ‘relevant context’ is the secret sauce of successful email marketing.

Notice the content of the message, you’ll see Amazon has taken raw clickstream data and massaged it with good marketing practices. Instead of saying ‘Rishi, you looked at 12 GPS models and read 34 customer comments this year‘ which would creep me out they sent a generic marketing message giving me the illusion of an epiphany.

Email Marketing – Product Ratings

This isn’t necessarily a NEW strategy but I like the way Wal*Mart sends emails with ratings. Even though I was not interested I ended up clicking on the product because of the high ratings:

PS: I still didn’t buy.

Related post: The difference between good and great

Email sign-ups — How To’s

Daily Candy sends image heavy emails so they need to make sure customers add them to their address books. And so Daily Candy (unlike other etailers) tells customers how to ‘add to address book’ on the sign-up page. Great great idea. Observe section in blue……

This other example comes from daleandthomaspopcorn.com who, I believe, are the smartest food eTailers in the world. One would assume a shallow product-line like popcorn isn’t too exciting but boy did Dale and Thomas prove us wrong. Anyway, they have a neat little feature on their email signup page that allows customers to set the frequency of emails. It’s a very obvious idea but I cannot tell you how many retailers don’t bother asking…

Targeted Email Marketing Needn’t Be Complicated

Matthew Finch has written an excellent post on email marketing at the e-consultancy blog. You can read his article by clicking here.

Your Return has been Received

The same work colleague I referred to earlier got another email for a return confirmation. We both find this interesting because neither of us ever received a return confirmation before, please leave me a comment and let me know if you ever received such a notification from an eTailer.

Bill had an excellent idea: He believes the retailer could have added a line like “people who returned this ended up buying…”. I agree.

Related article: The difference between good and great

The Difference Between Good And Great

My work colleague shops at threadless.com. This one time he added a couple of tee-shirts to his shopping cart and then, like 33% of online shoppers, decided not to buy. Threadless.com still wanted his business, and so, at the opportune time sent him an email. This, dear marketers, is how it’s done.