 Any one of these five - poor permission policy, irrelevant content, spamlike content and design, failed unsubscribes and a lousy user experience – can send your email marketing program to the giant circular file in the sky.
One of the greatest crimes you can commit with email is using it like an electronic version of your other direct-marketing media, such as catalogs, postal mailers, radio/TV, even brochures and newspaper inserts. A world-class brand-builder can morph into a sure-fire brand-killer if you mistreat it through carelessness, ignorance or laziness.
This brand-killing capability is closely tied to email's unique relationship with its recipients. It's more personal, perhaps because of the more intimate relationship between the reader and his computer. This intimacy encourages positive or negative feelings generated by your email to transfer to your brand.
Yes, people can complain about the junk mail they get, but they don't get as agitated about it as they do about junk email. And, the penalties are much stiffer for email. Asking the Direct Marketing Association to get taken off print mailing lists won't snowball into an entire shutdown of that marketing channel the way spam complaints can shut down your email program.
You can see email's tremendous utility in building brands, from its low cost to its flexibility, a near-universal adoption and ability to create one-on-one relationships with a million buyers or more. Now it's time to look at the top five actions that turn this brand-builder into the Godzilla of all brand-killers:
1. Poor permission practices
2. Irrelevant, inconsistent email messages
3. Spammy-looking messages
4. Failed unsubscribes
5. Poor customer experience between email and Web site
The common thread that ties all five brand-killers together is lack of control for the recipient. With email being as personal a medium as it has become, the recipient needs to be the one in charge, deciding who can send email, what gets sent and how to stop getting it. An email program that takes the reins away from the recipient will create enough antagonism, directly or indirectly, to inflict severe damage on your brand.
Now, an in-depth look at each of these brand-killers:
1. Poor permission practices
If you get this one wrong, nothing you do after this will make up for it. Simply put, you do not send a commercial email to any anyone who did not give you permission. But naturally, it's not that simple.
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Can you send your newsletter to someone who registered at your Web site but "probably forgot" to check the email box? No, unless your privacy policy clearly states on your registration page that sign-up includes an agreement to receive email. Even so, you may still receive a high level of complaints if the opt-in process is unclear.
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What about the person who downloads a brochure or whitepaper? Not if she didn't also agree to receive email from you. Make sure to use a separate check box to allow for the choice.
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The guy at your trade show who stuck his business card in your fishbowl hoping to win the free iPod? Still no.
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Are you ultimately responsible for how your affiliates send email on your behalf? Yes, yes and yes. That's why you must police your affiliates vigilantly to be sure they follow your email policy.
Insist on being added to all of your affiliates' mailing lists they use, and patrol their email practices. A rogue affiliate, or anyone who appropriates your brand identity for their own purposes without your permission, can quickly pollute your brand.
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2. Irrelevant, inconsistent email
Email recipients have demonstrated time and again that even when they give you permission to email, they'll go right to the "report spam" button if they don't want your email anymore or if they don't trust your unsubscribe process. These are the areas where emailers most often run afoul of user preferences:
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Format: HTML or text? Don't give readers a choice and then fail to honor it. Someone who asks for text (no colors, images or rich media) usually has a reason. Tech folks, for example, generally prefer text.
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Content: Did your subscribers request sales announcements? Then don't send company news, unless it affects their customer status with you.
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Frequency: If your user signs up for a weekly news digest, don't send daily items. You can make an occasional exception for news or sales bulletins, but use them sparingly, not more than once in a publishing cycle. Online shoppers told a Return Path survey in 2005 that one of the biggest problems they encountered with holiday-season shopping was receiving too many emails. Exercise restraint, and pack more value into each email you do send.
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3. Spammy-looking messages
It isn't just what's inside the message that can look like spam. If the recipient can't tell who sent the message or doesn't trust the sender to be authentic, out it goes. Watch out for these three traps, in both your own content and anything your affiliates email on your behalf:
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Vague sender or subject lines. The Intevation Report readers told us in 2005 that they use these lines, appearing in the inbox, to decide whether to open or delete an email. Make sure the identity your readers would most expect to see shows up prominently in either location.
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Content that doesn't match your image or personality. If your brand represents a financial business – bank, investment firm or white-shoe corporation – racy copy and wild graphics could lead readers to doubt the authenticity of your emails. Also, content that's riddled with errors or rendering problems looks amateurish and phony – not the image you want to project.
If your brand is vulnerable to "phishing" – fraudulent email that tries to elicit sensitive personal or financial information such as Social Security or account numbers by mimicking legitimate brands – you need to be extra careful. But any brand that appeals to a specific segment – women's clothing, computer gear, sports equipment – needs to be represented by compatible graphics in the email.
If you use affiliates, set clear guidelines for what can and cannot be used in an email, or furnish the creative content yourself.
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4. Failed unsubscribes, or repeated contacts after processing the unsubscribe
These not only help kill your brand but can block your email program if readers complain in sufficient numbers to their ISPs or to anti-spam vigilantes.
Unsubscribes are a fact of life in email, and people unsubscribe for many reasons, not just because they're unhappy. In fact, you're lucky if they unsubscribe at all; more often, they just abandon their addresses, allow your emails to pile up or delete them unopened.
Unsubscribing should be as fast and painless as possible but also give departing readers a chance to change their preferences or tell you what went wrong. Offer them the chance to stay in touch with you through another channel, such as postal mail or an RSS feed if you have one. And test your unsubscribe process frequently to make sure it works.
Finally, once they're gone, they're gone until they ask to come back. Begging an old girlfriend to come back doesn't usually work in real life, and in the virtual world of email, it can drive your enraged users right into the arms of your competition.
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5. Poor customer experience between email and Web site.
Users have certain expectations when they click from your email to your Web site. Namely, that they'll be able to find what they want immediately and get the information they need without having to search through page after page. Failure to do so can lead to frustration, and frustration leads to unsubscribes, abandoned shopping carts and user sessions, spam complaints, and ultimately an ex-subscriber.
These are some of the leading frustration points to avoid:
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A landing page that doesn't match or advance the email content or offer.
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Dumping the reader onto the homepage instead of the landing page.
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Email messages that don't reflect the look or personality of the Web site.
Before you send out your next campaign, test your click paths to make sure they work as you intended and take your users where they intended. Minimize the number of clicks required to achive the action you want your recipients to take.
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