The Direct Marketing Voice

Tag Archives: email

Dissection of an Email Done Wrong

Posté par Michele Shubert le December 15, 2011 – 4:40 pm

dans Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy

The world of email marketing is one of constant change. As spammers find ways to circumvent spam filters, the filters become smarter and more sophisticated. And email marketers who want their messages to make it to recipients’ inboxes have to stay up-to-date and make constant adjustments to their email marketing program.

There’s an email in my inbox from a company name I recognize. It’s from a large company, a national brand, one I have not given permission to email me. Studying marketing messages we receive from other companies and analyzing our personal reactions to them can help us learn and improve our own email marketing practices.

Let’s take a look at the email.

Here’s the subject line: “Connect 2012 – 5 Reasons to Connect.” Not super enticing, but there’s a smidgeon of interest. It’s from a Fortune 500 company, so I’m inclined to open it. But since I never signed up to receive emails from this sender, there’s hesitation. It’s probably spam. Spammers are smart like that.

Tip: Even though your recipients know who you are, if you send to them without their permission, they may think you’re a spammer. Read More »

Tips on Sending an Effective Apology Email

Posté par Michele Shubert le October 10, 2011 – 7:55 pm

dans Email Marketing

apology emails Uh-oh. You sent the email. And then you noticed the mistake. Oops! Now what?!

Mistake emails happen to all digital marketers. Even well-known, experienced marketers mess up. Of course, we don’t plan to make mistakes. But when a mistake happens (and it will), what is most important is how you respond — and how quickly you respond — after you realize the email is wrong.

Not long ago, I sent an email to a freshly uploaded list and noticed several replies come in within minutes after the email was deployed. The first was from Robert asking why his email salutation was to Stephanie. Another was from Victoria, wondering why she was being addressed as Anthony. Uh-oh. After checking the data, I realized what had happened — the entire list had been incorrectly sorted and the uploaded data was mismatched. Wait! Undo!

There’s no undo when it comes to email marketing. You can’t take it back. You can, however, apologize. And if you do it right, you can make it work in your favor.

Soon after discovering what had happened, the recipients of the blundered email received a follow-up with an apology explaining that the mistake was due to our (my) human error. What amazed me were the replies we received after sending the apology. One said, “At least now I know you’re human!” Another recipient admitted, “I didn’t open the first email you sent. But when I saw a second email from you with ‘correction’ in the subject line, I opened and read the message and was impressed by your honesty.”

What you do after a mistake is made is what matters. First, decide whether your mistake merits an apology. I mean, do you really want to send a second email because of a tiny typo that most subscribers will overlook? If the mistake is not a big one, it might be better to avoid pointing it out.

Here are some tips on sending an effective apology email:

Send the apology as soon as possible after you discover the mistake.
Indicate it’s an apology/correction in the subject line.
You may only need to add a paragraph at the beginning of your original email content; more serious mistakes may call for a dedicated apology.
Be sincere and true to your brand. You can use humor to poke fun at yourself or make light of your goof. Or, if that doesn’t fit your brand’s personality or the seriousness of the error, just be honest and admit you messed up.
Keep it simple. You don’t need to go into detail about what went wrong.
If the mistake inconvenienced your subscribers, make it up to them by including an offer.
Make sure your apology email is free of mistakes!

Have you found yourself needing to apologize for an email mistake? How did you handle it? Please comment with advice or tips you think might help other email marketers.

Access Multiple Email Accounts With Hotmail

Posté par Robert "Dude" Spellings, Jr. le July 8, 2009 – 2:10 pm

dans Email Marketing

Now, you can access multiple email accounts via your Hotmail account, provided that your other accounts allow POP access.

Of course, Hotmail is just now catching up, as Gmail has provided this functionality for a while now.

So how does this affect email marketers? Put simply, its going to make rendering HTML emails properly a little more difficult. For example, Gmail and Hotmail have slightly different HTML rendering practices. Gmail incorrectly renders the margin/padding/float CSS attributes, whereas Yahoo fully supports almost all HTML/CSS.

Savvy email marketers may be segmenting their lists based on the recipient’s domain, so that they can tailor the HTML for each domain to the inconsistent standards observed by each of the email providers and clients. The fact that recipients can now read Gmail email from their Hotmail account, and vice versa, now makes this kind of effort futile.

Progress is slow, but as soon as all email providers and client developers start abiding by the same standards, it will greatly facilitate proper delivery.

Why Is Your Marketing Email So Ugly?

Posté par Robert "Dude" Spellings, Jr. le May 1, 2009 – 11:42 pm

dans Email Marketing

Perhaps you have been tasked with creating a snappy-looking HTML email to send as a marketing piece to your company’s customer base. If you’ve been involved in web design and/or internet marketing, you are familiar with the concept of standards. The standards for building webpages have reached a level of acceptance that pretty much require the browsers to adhere to the overwhelming bulk of the standards, which allows web developers to build pages that are rendered consistently across most browsers and operating systems. The standards for HTML email are not yet at that level of acceptance. Thus, the life of an email marketer can be somewhat frustrating.

The main challenge in crafting an HTML email is trying to make your email render correctly in so many different email clients. Not only do you have to worry about desktop applications like Outlook and Thunderbird, you also have to remember that over 1/3 of all emails are read using web-based email providers like Yahoo and Gmail. This means that in addition to being read/rendered in conventional email clients that run on a desktop computer, many emails are read/rendered through a web application running inside a web browser, which is itself running on an operating system.

So, exactly what does this mean? What this means is that there are an astounding number of possible “email clients” that could potentially render your email. Even narrowing down the possibilities to Windows operanting systems, Internet Explorer or FireFox only, and only the five most popular web-based email providers, that is a whopping 100 different possible platforms that could render your email, and they will each render it slightly differently due to the lack of well accepted standards.

So what does that mean for you as an email marketer? It means that you need to keep in mind that any HTML email needs to be very simple in its design and limit some of the advanced HTML design techniques so that your email has a better chance of being rendered correctly in all browsers and email clients.

There is no complete list of things to do or things to avoid since there are so many possible combinations and no well accepted standards, but there are things that you can do to minimize the risk of a poorly rendered email, such as:

use only inline CSS (as opposed to CSS in the HEAD tag)
do not use background images since many web based clients do not render them
using tables for positioning instead of CSS in some instances
use CENTER tags and ALIGN attributes instead of CSS in some instances

As I mentioned earlier, there is no perfect list of things to do, so in addition to being prudent with your use of advanced HTML design, it is a very good idea to test your email design in as many clients as you can. You can easily sign up for accounts with Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL. And its not too hard to find Outlook clients since so many people use Outlook.

Until email standards are more widely accepted, using simplified HTML and doing lots of testing may save you some embarrassment and/or frustration. After all, experience is often the best teacher.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Bounces

Posté par Robert "Dude" Spellings, Jr. le April 24, 2009 – 4:54 pm

dans Email Marketing

Earlier today I needed to find out if a bounced email occurred synchronously or asynchronously. During the course of my research, the thought occurred to me that the difference between synchronous and asynchronous bounces is probably fairly unknown among email marketers, but knowing the difference would probably come in handy for them.

In order to explain the difference between a synchronous bounce and an asynchronous bounce, I’ll first need to explain the basics of how email servers communicate with one another while sending and receiving emails. First, the sending server contacts the receiving server and says “hey, I am server XYZ and I have an email to deliver to you.” The receiving server then checks to see if (a) it wants to receive email from the sending server, and (b) if it can deliver the email to the specified recipient.

At this point, the receiving mail server can do a number of things:

Accept the email message and deliver it to the recipient.
Temporarily refuse to accept connections from the sending server.
Permanently refuse to accept connections from the sending server.
Respond that the recipient does not exist and refuse the connection.

If any of the above responses, except number 1, are received by the sending server, the attempt to send that email is aborted and it is considered a Synchronous Bounce.

If the receiving server responds that it will accept the email message, then the sending server attempts to send the message. If the process of sending the email is aborted or interrupted for some reason, this may also result in a Synchronous Bounce, depending on the settings of the sending server (some of them will retry for a certain number of times for various types of interruptions).

If the receiving server indicates that it will accept the incoming email, and the process of sending the email message completes without complications, the receiving server will respond that the entire email was accepted successfully and the sending emails records a successful transaction in its server logs (actually, all of this is recorded in the server logs).

If after a successful transaction, the sender (the actual person sending the email) receives an email message from the receiving server indicating that the email message was not delivered for some reason, this is known as an Asynchronous Bounce. You are probably familiar with this kind of email because most people have received them. These are the emails that say something like “Your message could not be delivered for the following reason:” and then have a bunch of seemingly garbled text that supposedly explains the cause the failure.

Most email marketing systems have a method of capturing the messages from these Asynchronous bounces and then marking the message as “bounced” in their metrics reporting. Because the receiving server initially responds that the email message was delivered, and then sends the non-delivery message at a later time, this lag can cause the email reporting metrics to change and make it seem that “delivered” emails change and mysteriously morph into “bounces.”

It is important for email marketers to have a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous bounces so that they can effectively maintain their lists and interpret the metrics associated with each email campaign. One reason that email systems may return an Asynchronous bounce message after initially accepting the email is because the email system may run the email message through some content filtering software and other tests to try and determine if the email is spam and should be rejected. If this is happening alot in your email campaigns, this may be something you want to check, so that you can ‘despamify‘ the language in your email, and/or otherwise figure out what it is about your email message that the email systems don’t like. Correcting this will help get your message into your recipients’ inboxes.

Hopefully, this information will help you become a better email marketer. If you have other technical questions about email marketing, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will do my best to provide answers. Thanks for reading.