We did it again! Click here to see last years video for a full explanation, but in Seattle we hate the Yankees and especially Alex Rodriguez. So for the past two years when the Yankees have come to town, we’ve shown our disrespect by throwing money at him (and the Mariners fans). Watch the video, and don’t believe when the papers say that “fake dollar bills” were used. These were the real thing….

Related posts:

1. Mariners Fans Showered with Real Dollars During A-Rod at Bat at Safeco Field

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
2. How Salesforce.com is Mangling Their Email Marketing Efforts & What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes
3. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize

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

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Watch this video and then ask yourself how we can make the mundane parts of your business more fun? How can we use FUN to modify people’s behavior and deliver the unexpected? How can we use fun to be remarkable?

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Please comment below on what your business is and some ideas that you came up with – even if they are crazy.

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Here’s one of ours: We ask for a birth date in our demo and we’ve just come up with a daring and hilarious email to send people on their birthday. You’ll probably agree that it’s very unexpected if you get it.

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No related posts.

However, it’s always a good idea to confirm this. You wouldn’t want to design your email marketing campaign around people 40-60 years old if your subscribers are all 20-35. By now you should know that buying a generic list is both illegal and a dumb marketing move, so you should have a pretty specific group of subscribers that you can analyze.

These are the people who have come to your website and were interested in more information, or people who were interested enough in what your company does to attend one of your events or come into your store. By looking at the kind of people who subscribe to your emails, you should be able to see clearly what kind of groups your subscribers fall into. You have a target market, you just need to determine who that is.

And once you do, make sure that your email marketing campaign is geared toward that group of people. Not everyone is the same.

Is your list mainly prospective clients/customers or are they people you have worked with before? Are they interested in information and tips, or did they subscribe for products and deals? Knowing this information is going to be the key to creating relevant messages and keeping your “list churn” (the amount of people who unsubscribe) down.

Prospective clients and customers want to hear how and why what you offer will benefit them. They want testimonials and incentives. Previous or return clients and customers want to know you care about following up with them — asking how their product or service was and if there’s anything further you can do for them.

Each company’s incentives will look a bit different. Sometimes it’s appropriate to incentivize with monetary deals, like free or reduced-price products and shipping, or a buy-one-get-one-free service or coupons. Sometimes your target market may benefit more from tips and tricks or advice. Think about what is most relevant for your subscribers, and you’ll find that you have a happy list full of people who actually enjoy getting your messages.

And isn’t that the most you could ask for in an email marketing campaign?

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
2. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital
3. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

Here are our tips for making sure your content is great every time:

• Consistency trumps creativity — ultimately, you’d love for your campaign to be both consistent and creative, but sometimes you just don’t have the time that month to find the perfect balance. And the worst thing you can do for your branding is have emails that are off the wall, irrelevant or unrecognizable.
• Match your branding – that means the logo, colors and content in your messages should be similar to, if not that same as, your website and other marketing materials. If people can’t match you up with other contact they have with you or they can’t even recognize that the email they received is from you, they’ll probably think you’re spam.
• Plan ahead, not last minute — if you’re pressed for time and struggling for content, you may throw something totally irrelevant into your message. Remember the saying, ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it at all’? Well, that goes for good content too. Your subscribers aren’t going to want to read something that has nothing to do with you or your business. It’s a great way to end up in the spam pile.
• Brainstorm your ideas & use a list – we recommend setting aside a designated time for brainstorming content for your messages. Think of as many as you can, without edits. Write them all down. You will need to go back later to make sure that the idea is consistent, but brainstorming provides you with a great way to come up with a bunch of creative ideas and keep them for backup. Don’t get stuck trying to think of one thing to say a day before you want your newsletter to launch — get a whole bunch of ideas that you can come back to and draw on.

Content is a way to hook a reader in and make them want to read what you have to say. Don’t spoil that or spam subscribers with bad content — you’re only harming yourself.

Related posts:

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

Other than a boring email, why would you want to spend extra time to personalize? Because it is yet another way to develop a relationship with your customers and clients. We’d hope that building a relationship with the people you serve is a priority to you and your company — it should be — and that your goal with email marketing is to further this relationship. There’s almost no better way to do this than to personalize your messages.

Personalizing will provide you with a two way connection. First, you’ll know more about your customers, and second, they’ll see that you took the time to include some information about them and reach out.

Now that you know why you should personalize, here’s how.

First, of course, you will need information about your customers. Basically every piece of data you collect about those on your email list can be used to personalize a message. The important first step is to make sure you’re getting permission, of course — meaning, in this case, that each person is supplying their information to you. Like we mentioned in the last Email Marketing tip, Get Permission, it’s important that the people receiving your messages have given you the go-ahead to use their data.

The easiest way to gather information within the rules is to include an Update Profile link in your emails. This does a couple of things.

1. Initial sign-up is easy — just an email & name — so that there aren’t a thousand boxes to fill out to get your newsletter. This will make sure that you get the highest initial opt-ins, while still giving each person the chance to enter more information later. The less initial information one has to give to sign up, the more likely they are to subscribe. Some studies have shown that even just one extra box can reduce opt-in rates by 40%.

2. If at any point a subscribers information changes, they can easily find and update their profile.

This profile information can be used inside an email message, such as referring to a subscriber’s first name in the greeting or title, or to their company name in the message. It could also be used for segments to send out different, highly relevant information and deals, for example by using their zip code to let people know when a nearby store is having a sale.

The second way you can easily gather information is when customers interact with you. You can document when they purchased an item, when an item was delivered, and even the name of the sale associate that helped them.

This information is great for adding in details to your messages, or to use for triggers. Want a message to be sent to a customer if you haven’t seen them in 60 days? You can do that. Want to send a special thank you to someone for purchasing an item? That’s possible too.

Of course, you can always use Profile information for triggers too — the best example being happy birthday messages.

There’s almost no limit to the categories you can create to personalize your messages.

However…

You don’t want to go overboard. There’s no set maximum amount of personal information to use in a message — that’s a judgment call — but we would recommend you keep it to just a couple key pieces. If you include too much personal attributes, it may distract from your message or be overwhelming to the reader. It’s also a bit Big Brother, and could creep your reader out or turn them off from giving you information.

The best strategy…

Would be to sit down with your team and discuss what the most relevant, useful data about your customers would be. Is it their zip code because you have multiple stores? Is it their birthday so that you can provide special incentives and deals? Is it just who last helped them in the store so they know who to ask for in the future?

Figure these sort of things out, and decide on the methods you’ll use to collect that data. Get to know the people you serve and personalize your messages for them. The benefits are greater than you might imagine.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key
2. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital
3. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

A recent study by The New York Times reported that up to 94% of all email traffic is SPAM. That’s hundreds of millions of emails clogging one of our most important communication channels and it’s getting worse. Though each of us may only spend a few minutes a day dealing with it, the collective drag on productivity is astounding. The National Technology Readiness Survey says it costs us 21.58 Billion per year. That’s $131 per year for every Internet user in the US.

As ISP’s have become more capable at filtering SPAM, and an entire hardware industry has been created to fight the problem, it seems that our government has taken a back seat in its enforcement.

Robert Solovay, aka the “Spam King” was finally convicted last year by the state and sent to prison for a mere 4 years. Microsoft successfully sued Solovay as far back as 2003 and his exploits were widely known according to SpamHaus. Why has it taken the state 6 years to track down such an obvious offender even with him mocking the legal system? Before this conviction, the state’s last legal victory, according to the Attorney General’s website appears to be in 1998. So for 10 years our state has not been able to prosecute a spammer even though the problem has grown exponentially?

Similarly, the Federal Government’s record is not much better. While they did just receive a guilty plea from a 5-man SPAM operation lead by Alan Ralsky and his son the penalties seem to be quite light. While the spam induced pump-and-dump stock scam they ran reportedly raked in millions, the sentences sought are only “up to” 24 to 84 months, and the corresponding fines from only $30,000 up to 1 million dollars. Sentencing occurs Oct. 29, 2009.  The CAN-SPAM act says that offenses are supposed to be subject to $11,000 fine per email incident. At billions of emails sent by this ring, the math simply doesn’t add up. And that ignores the wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and lying to the FBI charges that are included in the guilty plea.

While any conviction is laudable, is this the best we can do? For a major player in the 21 Billion dollar problem (not counting victims ripped off by scams) we get a couple of years behind bars, and a penalty less than the amount swindled? That might even be palatable if these convictions occurred regularly, but it is years between major convictions. It seems that the government (we the people) are not angry enough about the problem, or are not directing our ire in the proper direction.

It’s time that we aggressively punish those that punish us with their time-wasting email. Prosecution needs to be extended to those selling email list and companies that are paying spammers to advertise their wares. Below is our list of things you can do to help can spam:

1. NEVER respond to a spam e-mail, or even “download images.”

2. Click the “This is Spam” button, if you have one. This alerts your ISP and allows them to refine their proprietary spam filter.

3. Forward all spam to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov BUT:

4. If it’s an e-mail you signed up for, don’t use the spam button. Just click unsubscribe and you should be removed. Be fair!

5. Reply to legitimate “over-senders” and tell them to reduce their frequency. If they don’t, unsubscribe and warn your friends about them.

6. If you are not willing to take the time to read the sender’s privacy policy, don’t give your e-mail.  If it’s more than one paragraph, forget it.

7. Use two email addresses. If the content is good, use the “update profile” and give them your real email address.

8. Use your own e-mail filter. A free, personal version is available at cyberdefender.com, but there are others. Check frequently for false positives, especially when first installed. Your legitimate mail may be getting trapped.

9. Write to your Congressional representative, and insist that they introduce legislation intensifying pursuit and prosecution of spammers and their business partners.

10. Reward only email marketers who “Do Email Marketing Right” with your business.

Related posts:

1. Disasters Of Spam
2. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

Spam. You get it, I get it, and we all hate it. Did you know that 94% of all email is spam (New York Times)? It’s insane how much of it is floating around in everyone’s inbox.

With so much spam around, here’s the most important thing you can do when setting up your email marketing campaign:

Get Permission

No one likes getting newsletters in their inbox that they don’t remember signing up for or agreeing to. These days, getting one of these unprecedented emails is enough to make readers immediately unsubscribe before reading what you have to say — or worse, flag you as spam.

Even if someone wrote down their email when buying a product or attending an event, if you didn’t mention that their email would be added to a newsletter list, then you don’t permission to add them to your email marketing list. You need to be explicit, not sneaky. Here are some of the things to avoid when developing an email marketing audience, and ways to grow your email marketing audience legitimately.

Bad Examples

• Buying your list off someone else
• Stealing or randomly generating a recipient list
• Adding everyone who has bought a product from you online or has given you their email for some purpose other than subscribing to your newsletter
• Automatically adding and check-marking the “subscribe” button on a sign-up form for something other than your newsletter

Good Examples

• Adding a newsletter subscription form to the front page of your website for visitors to use
• Adding an optional checkbox for newsletter subscription to info forms at events
• Using a double opt-in method, like a confirmation email with an opt-in link

Why We Recommend Getting Permission

Besides being annoying and very similar to spam mail, here is why some of the bad examples are particularly bad. They are against the CAN-SPAM Act requirements.

“The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.”

CAN-SPAM prohibits:

• “Harvesting” email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email
• Generating email addresses using a “dictionary attack” – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations
• Using scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email
• Relaying emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization. (Federal Trade Commission)

Here’s the bottom line:

You want your readers to WANT to read your emails. Getting permission will insure you don’t annoy your readers or get marked as spam.

Plus, wouldn’t you rather have a smaller group of dedicated readers than a massive list of readers who don’t care and/or feel spammed by your email? We thought so.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key
2. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
3. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital

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.

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