Bad subject lines

I tend not to blog too much on subject lines as they are really a marketing issue and a subscriber relationship issue. The subject lines a particular mailer uses should be directed and developed with an eye towards making the mail relevant and useful to the recipient.
What subject lines shouldn’t be is deceptive, either intentionally or inadvertantly. How can a subject line be inadvertantly deceptive? Take this: “Today only! One day sale!” The email in question was a printable coupon to get a discount at a bookstore. Unfortunately, the sales was not “Today” – the day the email was received.
On the one hand, I can sympathize with the sender. Sometimes email takes a while to get delivered, particularly for large mail drops. So you want to send before the mail needs to be in the inbox and in front of the recipient. But, that means that some of your recipients may get the email before “Today.” A much better subject line would have been “Friday only! One day sale!”

Problems at Excite
Modifying RP managed FBLs

Related Posts

How to devalue your mailing lists

This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam.
Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.
Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.
I’d prefer not to receive college sports spam from anyone, including Adobe, so I click on it and find a big empty white webpage with this in the middle of it:

Read More

Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email.
I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

Read More

Sending mail from unread email addresses

Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.

Read More