E-mail marketing is easy, or so everyone thinks. It costs so little, and is so easy to start, that many companies don't take the time to think through what they're sending out.
From gathering the right list of people to send out to writing an e-mail that is clear on what they're selling to providing instructions on what action to take, e-mail marketers often miss the boat in their pitches, and those are the ones who aren't spammers.
Ian from Conversation Marketing got what he thought was a clear cut piece of spam, until he looked closer. It was an e-mail marketing piece from Clarisonic. Oops! Evidently Clarisonic (as seen on Oprah!) is pushing a new brush head product and used a traditional marketing campaign to attract an on-line audience. Unfortunately, the e-mail read a lot like it came from a spammer and could have been misconstrued as an elaborate scam from a competitor.
Ian describes the mistakes made it pretty elaborate detail, and takes this opportunity to educate us on how to improve upon it........
1. Change the tone. The writing style in this reads like it was sent by a spammer. I actually spent an hour trying to figure out if this was an elaborate scam by a competitor. Use a more personable tone.
2. Get rid of the all caps text at the bottom
and one more.
6. Check the code. Right now, the HTML code for this e-mail is a mess of Microsoft-generated gobbledygook. I'm not just being anal-retentive. This code makes most spam filters shriek in alarm. Cleaner, more standards-compliant HTML would create less of a red flag for these filters, and increase the odds that the e-mail actually gets to folks' inboxes.
I have made been the author of some very poor e-mail campaigns myself. When I first started, I thought that merely sending an e-mail was good enough, because it was me, and I was not a spammer. Suffice it to say, e-mail marketing is a sensitive topic, and Iearned quickly that if you're not writing to someone you know, they likely think it's spam. Check out Ian for some good e-mail marketing tips and suggestions before you push your product or idea to a world of Web 2.0 strangers.
And don't forget the technical side. Blast Companies helps you manage your e-mail marketing campaign.
Comments