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How to make sure your mail is read

ThinkGeek have a bit of a challenging audience to connect with. Many of their customers are, well, geeks. And many geeks have a reputation for being suspicious of marketing. I’d even go so far as to say that ThinkGeek has a bigger marketing challenge than other popular retailers.
One of the challenges all marketers face, though, is getting people to actually open and read an email carefully. ThinkGeek have addressed this challenge by turning reading email into a competitive game.
In June they sent out an email with a hidden coupon code in it. The first person to redeem the code received $100 off their order. What a creative way to get people to actually look through an email and make a purchase.
This, of course, is not a new marketing technique. I have at least 2 different Sigma t-shirts using the same style of marketing. This was in the dark ages and we didn’t have online forms, but the new catalog came with a postcard of questions to answer and return and the first 100 post cards got t-shirts. It was actually kinda nifty. As head tech, I got catalogs all the time. But answering the questions got me to look through the Sigma catalog and see their new products. Plus! T-shirt!

What new an interesting ways have you seen marketers use to engage recipients?

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Non marketers speak

A couple quotes from different folks, who aren’t actually in marketing, but have insightful comments on marketing.

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Opting customers in to new programs

Recently, I started getting “1 sale a day!” emails from buy.com. I’ve made purchases from Buy in the past and generally have been content to get emails from them. They’re not always relevant, but hey, it’s relatively non-intrustive marketing.
When they started this new program, they just started mailing: no warning, no introduction, nothing. So I decided to opt out of this mail.
Buy.com has a preference center, and while I was there, I opted out of all email marketing. Why? Because a company that is going to randomly add me to new (daily!) marketing lists is a company I don’t trust any more.
A lot of folks have complained about Amazon doing the same thing. Amazon started a daily deals program and opted in a lot of people without warning, without introduction and without permission.
I get why companies do this. It’s a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It lets them sell things to people who might never opt-in to that program. And in many areas of direct marketing, consumers have no rights to make the marketing stop. They have no tools to make the marketing stop.
Email is different from many direct marketing channels, though. Many consumers have the tools to make mail stop (filters, this is spam buttons, changing their email address completely) and they do take advantage of them.
Given a marketers job is to extract as much revenue from customers as possible, they can’t respect recipients. They have to treat them as money dispensing machines. But at least in email recipients have some ability to opt-out of the transactions.

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