So when we came across this video, posted on email-marketing-reports.com’s blog, we laughed our asses off and couldn’t resist re-posting it here.

Email-marketing-reports.com explains the premise:

“Newsletter expert Michael Katz is fond of describing B2B email newsletters as the electronic equivalent of having a coffee with a customer.

Which got me thinking…what if emails could walk and talk? Here’s one vision of the message typically communicated by a corporate email newsletter. Enjoy.”

We love this video because not only is it hilarious, but it also hits on so many points of generic email newsletters. Most newsletters you get in your inbox are all — and ONLY — about the company sending it, even if that information is dull and irrelevant to you. They do no work to scout out what might be going on in your world that you’d want to hear about.

Second is something we always stress to our clients — consistency. Stay in touch with your subscribers on a regular basis and form a good, communicative relationship with your clients.

Whether our clients are writing their content, or we’re helping them put it together, we emphasize including things like local events in their area and always getting out a message once a month.

People aren’t always going to want to buy a car or a house or even a bottle of shampoo. But in the meantime, you can say hi and recommend an upcoming local festival or some favorite Valentine’s restaurants. They’ll be excited about the relevant information, and will remember that it came from you.

Related posts:

1. How To Build Your Email List – the Right Way

So, here’s what you can learn from Salesforce.com:

1. The first mistake is that they send email from a “No-Reply” address. This is a fundamental mistake and email marketing 101. The whole idea of email marketing is to engage your customer. If you cant accept replies to your outbound messages then you shouldn’t be sending them. Some companies make this mistake because they get a raft of replies that have nothing to do with the email sent – and the company therefore considers it a waste of their time. But what’s really happening is that customers are reaching out hoping to find a human being to help solve their problem. I’m not sure anything is more important to a company’s future than helping their customers solve problems, yet it is deemed an annoyance and that customers “should go through the right channels.” In these cases little regard is given that the customers may have already tried that approach and failed. Bottom line is that if you can’t respond to your customer’s replies – you shouldn’t be using email regardless of how big you are.

2. They do not have an opt-out link on their “customer” emails. This is in violation of the CAN-SPAM act, and subjects them to an $11,000 fine per email that they send out. Apparently someone at Salesforce.com has made the decision that since these are “Customers” (or apparently FORMER customers in my case) that they should have no choice than to receive these emails. This is another mistake at creating a one-way communication channel with customers. Ultimately, your customers should have the choice whether or not they want to hear from you. That includes you Microsoft!

3. Since they can’t even take someone off their lists when asked – multiple times, it’s highly doubtful that Salesfore.com is segmenting their audience for targeted emails. The message I received today was to alert me to the upcoming changes that are taking place on their platform and how that will affect me. Well, if they did any kind of segmentation at all they would see that I have had ZERO activity with their platform in the last 9 months, so making me aware of their changes is a waste of both of our times. What they could have done (had I not already asked to unsubscribe!) is send me some kind of message that says “Hey Ken, we’ve noticed that you have not logged into the platform in over 9 months. We want you to know about some helpful videos that we created in helping customer like yourself get started.” That kind of message is targeted and might be relevant assuming I HADN’T ALREADY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT.

4. Another common problem with companies like Salesfore.com that integrate their CRM with an email platform is that any silo of your business (marketing, sales, customer support, etc) can easily broadcast an email to contacts in the database. This can lead to anything from mildly annoying your contacts with too many emails, to complete disaster like sending directly conflicting information or overlapping offers. Large companies need to have an email marketing individual leading a thoughtful campaign with highly relevant email messages instead of the free for all that can exist when everyone has access. I suspect that this is the case with me and Salesforce.com – they can’t figure out where else my information exists to keep people from emailing me and don’t have central control. Or they apparently can’t figure out how to completely delete my record permanently in their own heralded platform.

5. By the way, if you are curious on why we abandoned Salesforce.com it was because of the complexity of the application and it’s steep learning curve. After signing up, and watching my 4th video tutorial and completing my 4th skills test, it was still difficult to figure out the basics of entering a lead and setting a reminder task. And as a former corporate sales champion I have had my share of experience with CRMs. If you are considering Salesforce but don’t need a lot of the advanced tools check out Highrise at 37Signals.com For us it’s the right amount of information, takes about 15 minutes to master, and has all the tools that we need.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
2. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key

This weekend we followed through on one of our hair-brained guerilla marketing ideas. Hatched months ago, we could barely wait for this day to arrive.

If you are a Mariners fan, or just a baseball fan in general you probably hate the Yankees, unless of course you live in NY. And no one is more loathed than Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) who left the Mariners and the fans that beloved him all in the name of cash. The $120 million or so the Mariners were offering was not nearly enough to buy Pay-Rod’s loyalty.

My personal run-in with his greatness, was outside of the Washington Athletic Club when as I was walking up the street towards him I witnessed him unwrap a piece of gum and just wad up the wrapper and throw it down in the street in front of him and me as he stared off into the distance. In his mind I wasn’t even there – I was nobody to be concerned with anyway. The thing that struck me, other than the incredibly bad manners, was the giant ego one must have to act so rudely right out in the open. I’ve rarely witnessed somebody litter – let alone a superstar. This is exactly the kind of attitude that has nicknamed him “The Cooler” because every team he joins gets better after he leaves.

This year A-Roid was caught taking steroids and finally admitted as much – very awkwardly, a couple of times. You can see the various confessions on YouTube. He also earned a new moniker this year: Stray-Rod when he was caught cheating on his wife who claims he emotionally abandoned both her and his children while philandering. It’s widely reported that he’s now dating Kate Hudson. Run Kate Run.

So with a fresh new batch of ammunition we decided to put a spin on a Mariner fan tradition of throwing out play money when he comes to bat. Our spin – we’d use real money. Of course, we also had to put a sticker on each dollar bill with a clever message (and our logo!). Here’s some of the messages that were used:

• Hit LEGITIMATE marketing home runs.
• Put your marketing on steroids.
• All the marketing power without the acne, needles, or shrinkage.
• Great marketing results, no asterisks needed.
• Cousin recommended email marketing.
• Legal in all 50 states, and the Dominican Republic.
• You can call us E-Broad.
• Marketing that actually hits when it counts.
• Even Scott Boras can’t get you a better deal on your email marketing.
• We’re willing to play for less than $33 million per year.
• Recession put a “Cooler” on your business? Call us.
• Email Marketing so good, your clients will feel “touched for the very first time.”
• Results so good, even YOU can afford the material girl.

We also put a more serious message on every note about Fighting Spam with a web URL. The lack of prosecution for spammers is pathetic – but I’ll leave that for another post.

So what could you do to get noticed that’s a bit outrageous? Think about it.

No related posts.

You and I are in agreement that email marketing rocks, right? Once you make that conclusion, the next logical step is to start thinking about your email list. For our new clients that haven’t collected email addresses before, or have a very small list, this becomes an immediate concern and the question “How do I build an email marketing list?” is raised. Today I hope to answer that question for you.

Just Start

Some people I talk to want to wait until they “build up a nice list” before they get started in email marketing. These are the same people I talk to a year later who are still “getting ready.”

The trick here is to just get started with what you have. If you start digging you’ll actually be able to put together 50 to 100 names and email addresses just from people you know.  You might be thinking – hey, this isn’t my target market. Don’t worry, they are your friends and want to support what you are doing so they’ll be happy to read your newsletter. Besides, they may not be your target market, but they may know people who are. If your friend is not willing to get an email from you, get some new friends!

Then grab that stack of business cards you have in your desk and contact those people one-by-one asking for permission to stay in touch via email more regularly. Next, immediately schedule yourself to attend a networking event or two in your neighborhood where you know you can make 20 or 30 new contacts (get a business card) – asking each person for permission to stay in touch. Now book yourself a speaking engagement if you have good content to share and ask attendees to sign up. Before you know it, your list will feel like it’s growing very fast.

The other reason you need to get started with what you have is that email addresses age and die.  If you are in touch regularly, it allows people to update their email address with you. If you start “next year” many of your email addresses will already be dead. Follow Nike’s advice here – and Just Do It.

Look for Contact Points

One of our clients sells deluxe automobile roof top tents and collects maybe 2 new contacts per day from his website’s “join our email list” form. While all website owners should have a join form, that’s about the only place he was adding to his list.

During a phone conversation with me, Mike put the receiver down and talked to a prospective customer on the other line. He spent a good 5 minutes giving free advice on how one of his tents could be supported by the prospects particular vehicle.

I could tell from just one side of the conversation that the person was very grateful for the information. After Mike hung up and returned to me I asked, “How many conversations like that do you have on any given day?” and he responded, “Maybe 15 or 20.”  I just about fell out of my seat. I not-so-gently urged Mike that at the end of these conversations he should ask – “Are you getting our newsletters on topics like this?” and if not, ask those people for a name and email addresses. I guaranteed him he’d get the email address 80+% of the time. Then to make sure he’d act, I built and sent him a nice form he could keep by his phone on a clipboard.

Mike just sent us a spreadsheet with about 800 new names on it, and I’m guessing many of those were from phone calls.

Where else are you contacting your customers? At the Point of Sale? During outbound calls? If you are attending trade shows you must collect names and email addresses or you shouldn’t bother even showing up. Give away a prize in exchange and then tell everyone in your first email who the winner was. Are you speaking at events or trade shows? Figure out how to give your audience an easy way to sign up for more information via email on the spot. Do you do deliveries? That’s another time to ask.

Think about your business processes and the number of contacts you have with a customer throughout the cycle, and make sure you are asking for it when appropriate. Why not make a list of contact points right now while you are thinking about it?

Measure and Reward

If you own a company you know that your people only pay attention to the things that are measured, recognized or rewarded. Since collecting email addresses may be another new thing they are expected to do – make sure they understand the importance of it.

With some clients we have advised kicking off the email campaign with an email collection contest. We measure the percentage of emails gathered from the number of opportunities and rank the contestants. This worked in a competitive sales environment, but maybe you need to measure it as a team.

Since you know that email gathering is an important task long term, make sure your employees see the big picture. If you use MBO (management by objective) in your review process, you may want to include email address collection as one of those MBOs or even “spiff” your people for each email collected. For this we recommend a “random” contest. As you measure your email collection effectiveness, randomly announce a winner for “last month’s contest.” People will say “I didn’t know there was a contest last month” and you can reply that it’s always important, that your always measuring it, and they can expect a random contest to occur anytime – so keep asking for the email address.

Name your Newsletter

It’s a small thing, but asking people if they want to sign up for your email marketing newsletter isn’t exactly compelling. “Do you belong to our Savvy Insider’s Club?” however, which is the name of one our client’s newsletter, has much more sex appeal. Mor Furniture calls theirs the VIP List and who doesn’t want to be a VIP?

Should you Purchase an Email List?

I have conversations all the time with new or prospective clients asking if they can buy an email list from me. The answer of course is absolutely not – but it’s important that you understand the reasoning behind the answer.

A purchased email list is a completely worthless investment, is not allowed by us or any other legitimate email marketing agency, and is against the CAN-SPAM law. Even if you’re promised by the slick salesperson at Lists’R'Us, “It’s a completely opt-in, CAN-SPAM compliant list” you should know they are a liar or at best incredibly stupid.  Do you really think that there are people out there who willfully signed up for something and checked the box that said “Yes, it’s OK to sell my email address to anyone on the planet?” Of course not. Though that may be buried in the fine print legalese of some privacy policy that nobody reads, you and I both know the truth – nobody would agree to that.

I understand that this whole email thing would be a lot easier if it was possible to buy a quality list of prospects eager to hear from you, but it’s a fantasy. The sooner you let go, the better. People usually want to buy a list so they can have a “big” email list. Focus not on the size of your list, but on the quality of the contacts. Would you rather have a list of 1000 people where nobody cares about your information, or a list of 100 people who are eager to get your email? The answer should be obvious. I’ll take the smaller list all day long.

Sponsor an Existing Email Newsletter

One technique where you can use someone else’s list is to be featured on an email list that is already going out to people in your industry or target market. Owners of large lists will often allow you to advertise on their email piece, or even allow guest “writers” for content. That’s a good way to build some buzz. Make sure to ask if you can have a link to your own sign up form so the investment pays long term dividends by garnering you new list members. Offering a free white paper or something else of value can be a great enticement.

Focus on Content

Many people are concerned for me when I write Blog posts and articles like this one that seem to give away important company secrets on how we “Do Email Marketing Right.”  I tell them to relax because I know that content is king. You can build the biggest and best list ever, but if you don’t give people what they want to read – why bother? I know that if I can deliver valuable, relevant content for my readers it will pay off in the end.

Besides, we’re looking for 100 great customers at Email Broadcast, not a million. If we provide the best information available, companies that want the best will seek us out. I also know that if our content really hits the mark, our recipients might even forward the message and those people may sign up to receive their own copy of our newsletter – helping us grow a quality list.

Think about it for just a second. Is there anyone you know who might enjoy this article? Thanks in advance for forwarding it to your friends.

Get Relevant Details from the Start

Relevancy is a giant topic that deserves it’s own Blog post and newsletter (coming soon), but with regards to building your email list, knowing that relevancy is your end goal will help you build your list correctly from the beginning. If all you have from someone is an email address, you have to treat them like everyone else – and that’s hardly relevant.

When you are collecting people for your email list, make sure you get enough information from them to treat them like they are special – because they are. This varies depending on your business – but it’s pretty easy to figure out what to ask for. First, always ask for someone’s name. Then dig into the industry specific information.

If you sell computers maybe you should also know if someone is a Mac or a PC, or uses both. If you offer guided fishing and hunting tours maybe you should know if your clients are purely fisherman, purely hunters, or do both. Sell clothes? Maybe Gender is important for your future emails. Yacht Broker? Maybe sailing vs. power boats is important for you to know. Florist? How about asking for an anniversary date or spouse’s birthday? Think about it and start collecting that information from the beginning.  It will be much easier to deliver relevant content using list segmentation and trigger messages down the road.

Hopefully these tips on how to build an email marketing list have been helpful – here’s a quick review:

• Just start with what you have, right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Really.
• Consider all the points of contact you have with prospects/customers and use the best ones to consistently collect email info.
• Get your people on board. Measure and recognize good performance.
• Always ask permission before adding anyone to your list, and give it a cool name.
• Build your list correctly, and disregard temptation of list buying as fools’ gold.
• Deliver great content and your list will grow virally.
• Collect more than just an email address so you can make content relevant.



If you have more questions about “Email Marketing Done Right” or are ready to get started, give us a call right now at  Email Broadcast at 206 965-8114. And if you haven’t already – why not get our “Top 5 Tips on Email Marketing” as a free gift for subscribing to “Rock the Inbox”

Related posts:

1. “If B2B Email Marketing Videos Could Talk”
2. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
3. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key