Recently Emailblog.eu celebrated its 1-year anniversary. After a full year of posting, tweeting and discussing all that happens in the world of email marketing, it’s time for a break. Posting will recommence in October: until then, take care. See you in a few weeks!
Remy
To persuade companies to have do their email hosting externally, GMail is playing the green card: showing that they do it much more efficiently than companies do individually. The example:
The claim is not small: almost 80 times (pdf) more efficient than in-house email. Email hosting services like corporate email might be an attractive option, but there are some pitfalls. What about things like backups, security, maintenance and such? The platform as such might be ‘out of your hands’, but if the service goes down you are dependant on an external company.
Next to that there’s the factor of the internet connection: when a company’s internet connection goes down, internal email will still function. The outside world can still contact them by phone. However when email is hosted in the cloud, not even internal email will be working, making companies lose money on inefficiency and lost hours.
Even so, I think it’s a good thing Google is promoting this: for several companies it will be great to lose the hassle and energy bills of managing their own corporate email services.
Earlier on I posted Writing an email for people, not addresses. That still counts, but what I didn’t put forward in that post is to be genuine. The reason that it’s important to be genuine in your email marketing messages is that the content will be much more natural and a joy to read for subscribers.
If no love has been put into the messages and all you’re doing is trying to sell something, you’ll be in for a lukewarm response at best. People will just think “hey there’s another of those gazillion product-pushing emails”. That kind of response can always be prevented.
If you believe in the quality of your service or product and you know how to put it in writing, you’re already halfway there. When you can make sure your promotional emails are written and designed in a way that comes across as having a genuine message, you’ve got it nailed.
Like I mentioned in the earlier post, if you’re not a good writer don’t hesitate to hire one that knows your products and understands your audience. Bad or inconsistent writing can break your message no matter what you are trying to tell the subscribers.
UGG Australia has been here before – with a summer lovin’ email. This time they’ve made it to the email winner’s category with a boots email design winner:
Just like the before UGG winner, the color coordination between photograph (which is a very cool Venice canal shot) and the text panel below is great: it gives a sense of cohesion and continuity. The UGG Collection promotion tells about being handcrafted in Italy, so what better way to promote than with an image on an iconic location in Italy? Following the Keep It Simple Stupid principle, there are no distracting price tags, deal logos or dates: this earns points too for this email design.
Again, like last time, a nicely photographed and color coordinated email design which is a winner.
