Marketing pet peeves

Loren McDonald has a great post over at Mediapost listing his email marketing pet peeves. I particularly love this because he includes those things annoy him as a subscriber.
Most of what annoys me as a subscriber is sloppy marketing. Really is it so hard to actually check what you’re sending and who you’re sending it to?
elloIFNAME
This was a notice from Ello telling me that they’d get to my request for an account “at some point.” There were two fails here. The first is very obvious from the To: line. The second is even worse. I have an Ello account, I’m not waiting. Apparently they pulled their “current user” file and added it to the “waiting user” file and then mailed all of them a notice the accounts were getting turned on, albeit slowly.
The footer of the mail made it clear they knew they were spraying and praying:

PS: If you’re already using Ello and getting this note, you can unsubscribe using the links below.

Related Posts

Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October.
All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long discussion on the Only Influencers list about the new Hotmail filtering. There was even some discussion about why the ISPs were doing this.
I think it’s pretty simple why they’re creating new tools: users are asking for them. The core of these new filters is ISPs reacting to consumer demand. They wouldn’t put the energy into development if their users didn’t want it. And many users do and will use priority inbox or the new Hotmail filtering.
Some people are concerned that marketing email will be less effective if mail is not in the inbox.

Read More

What goes into successful email campaigns?

Campaign Monitor analyzed over 2.2 million campaigns and came up with some rules of thumb for effective email marketing.

Read More

More on spam traps

A couple weeks ago I had a discussion with Ken Magill of the Magill Report about spam traps. He had moderated a webinar about spam traps and I publicly contradicted some of the statements made about spam traps.  He contacted me and interviewed me for an updated article about traps for his newsletter. The next week he had a rebuttal from Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, taking anti-spammers (and presumably me) to task for pointing out that some folks use typos as spam traps.  This week, Derek Harding of Innovyx continues the discussion about traps and how they are a reality that senders need to deal with.
Spam traps are a reality and they’re not going away at any foreseeable point in the future. No entity that actually cares about blocking spam is going to give up the information that spam traps provide them. Not A Single One. They are some of the original tools in the filtering arsenal and they have proven their use and reliability for people trying to keep inboxes useable.
Dela focused on typos in his rebuttal to Ken, but typos aren’t the real issue. The real issue is that any address acquisition technique (and I do mean any) is subject to errors. Those errors end up directing mail at people who didn’t ask for it. If there are too many errors or mail to too many of the wrong addresses, that will result in delivery problems.
Yelling at the people monitoring the accuracy of your email marketing doesn’t make your marketing any better. It doesn’t stop mail from going to the wrong people. It doesn’t actually help anything.
My focus is on helping marketers market better. My focus is on helping folks sending email get that mail to the inboxes of people who want it. I don’t really care if my clients hit traps, traps are, as Derek said, “the canary in the coal mine.” What I really want is to make sure every person who asked for mail from my clients gets that mail. Every trap on the list? That is a lost sale, a lost touch, a lost opportunity. The traps are just the addresses we know are wrong. If there are traps on a list, then it is guaranteed there are deliverable addresses that belong to someone who is not a customer. This generally means two lost customers, the one who isn’t getting the mail they asked for and the one who is getting mail they never asked for.
Traps are a way to quantify missed opportunities, but they’re not the only missed opportunities. If mail is going to traps, it’s not going to your real customers. That is why marketers should care about traps.
 
 

Read More