I’ve been sorting through many New Year’s email campaigns, and so far two trends are (expectedly) visible: telling subscribers that everything is X percent off or part of a clear-out sale after the expensive holidays, or trying to tie in with people’s New Year’s resolutions on living a better life. One company that did something different is one that makes cases for devices: see the Otterbox thank you email below.
Otterbox uses the closing of 2011 and start of 2012 as an opportunity not to try to sell something, but to thank those who are part of their business. Read More
In the closing of 2011, the New York Times did a bit of an email marketing oopsie: a total of 8 million people were emailed instead of 300.
According to an article at The Next Web, an offer about subscription continuation was supposed to be sent to 300 people. Instead, the target group was a little bit bigger: 8 million.
At first the official Twitter account tweeted that it wasn’t from them:
If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.
In the end, to clear things up, New York Times sent out an apology mail stating the error and apologizing.
This just goes to show that absolute care and checks should be in place when putting together target groups for email campaigns.
Also, this might affect their inbox placement as quite some people will have marked that first erronous message as spam, meaning that the apology email arriving later was put in the spam folder as well.
In a report by BBC News, Volkswagen notes that all Blackberry work email will be turned off outside office hours. This move has been executed by Volkswagen Germany earlier this year, following complaints about the division between work life and private life fading.
Quoting the report:
Under the arrangement servers stop routing emails 30 minutes after the end of employees’ shifts, and then start again 30 minutes before they return to work.
The staff can still use their devices to make calls and the rule does not apply to senior management.
“We wanted to take a preventative approach to tackling the issue,” said Gunnar Killian, VW’s works council spokesman.
I’m actually interested why the rule would not apply to senior management of VW: do they receive so little work email it’s not a problem as such? Are they not a member of the trade union? Or are they ‘always on’ anyway and have no separation between work life and private life?
Is your company actively managing the email load for you to give you ample time to enjoy your private life? If you don’t have a Blackberry or other company smartphone, are you obliged by job function / task description to handle email outside office hours? Let us know in the comments.
Just like last year, I took the liberty to photograph my cat Pumba (he can be a monster sometimes) for our digital holiday wishes card. Here it is (click for full size):
Put in a little mouse and Christmas dog and a tree as backdrop and voila: great digital holiday wishes card.
This time, I shall not be listing people to thank for everything they’ve meant to me these past 12 months: there’s just too many of you! Let’s just say that I’m happy to be part of the email marketing community – it really is the cool club.
I do want to thank the few of you whom I’ve been finally able to meet in person, however brief those meetings were.
Loren McDonald, thanks for the chat and discussions at the dinner in Amsterdam. Ryan Phelan: very nice meeting you, we definitely had some great laughs! Jim Ducharme, we met in March: great to talk to you and experience the event together. Andrew Kordek – our meeting was sadly short but still great: it was amazing to see you so pumped up after being up for so long! Last but not least, Justine Jordan. Being your tour guide in Amsterdam was good fun (hope I did well…) and settling down on the square with some drinks and nice weather was awesome. Great talks about our fun and frustrations with email
Thank you! And to the others in the email marketing community: maybe we’ll meet in 2012
Finishing up the last days of 2011, we have an infographic about the usage of email (finishing with the just words ‘ email is here to stay’ ) compared to Facebook and Twitter.
The infographic is courtesy of visiblegains.com, and gives some insight into the main numbers. Some of those numbers: while Facebook has 750 Million accounts (now about 800 Million), the number of email accounts is 2.9 Billion. That’s nearly one in every two persons worldwide who has an email account! Expectations are that by 2o14 some 3.8 Billion people will have an email account.
Furthermore, a staggering 107 Trillion emails were sent in 2010 – up 19% from 2009. Here’s the infographic – click for the large version:
Some people declare email bankruptcy in their working and/or private communications. In their time, something went wrong and their inbox is swamped with a bajillion emails – an amount no filter, SmartScreen or Priority Inbox can handle. They delete everything and start over, or even delete their email account completely – hence email bankruptcy.
Others consider email something of the past, like this entertaining post on TechCrunch called Remembering Email. The post notes that social is the answer: we should pursue all our communications through the social platform channels. Instead of having one or two email addresses, use several social networks to communicate. Yaay! I say a bad user blames his tools.
Mastering the ways of email can be daunting when you send and receive a lot, but you can learn in time.
A quote from that TechCrunch post:
Our kids already understand that email is fading.
No they don’t – they just don’t use it as much as the 20+ demographic group because they don’t have (serious) jobs yet. As soon as they get a job, they will start using email. In some cases, heavily even.
Let’s get one thing straight: you own your inbox. You and you alone are responsible for your email address(es): both the receiving and sending of email. If you receive a lot of email and the important emails get drowned out by all the non-important ones, kill off the stream of non-important email. As much as I love email marketing, too much simply is too much. Cut down on any type of notification emails which are unnecessary. A more extensive list of tips to cut down on inbox load can be found in this post about crowded inboxes.
The point of this post is that there really is a solution, and you alone can apply it. Be happy with your inbox again. Make the “Ding! You’ve got mail!” sound a happy sound again like 10 years ago:
Go forth and own your inbox – never let go!
(title of this post is based on an old internet meme – aybabtu - all your base are belong to us.)
Currently Hotmail is in the process of rolling out a new release (would this be Wave 6?), the latest version of its webmail service which includes separate filters called categories, like the Newsletter category. This latest version was announced early October by the Windows Live team. Here are some screenshots of the changes:
When selecting the Newsletters option on the bar, only newsletters that fit te category will be shown: it will act as a filter on the inbox – it will not be a separate box or folder as some have believed it would be.
Here’s how the categories work:
We use the same SmartScreen™ technology that helps us fight spam – a machine learning engine that gets better over time. Right out of the gate, we’re 95% accurate with the mail we categorize as newsletters, and this will only get better as you help us build the feature by categorizing or un-categorizing your own mail. In fact, every time you categorize an email as a newsletter, you help make our filtering better for yourself and every other customer.
The Schedule cleanup option popup looks like this (this has been there for some time now):
This can help in keeping your inbox tidy, especially if you receive a lot of emails in your Hotmail inbox. Daily deals like Groupon emails anyone? Together with the recently introduced flags, you can win back your inbox by tidying up its contents and using flags on messages that really matter.
Videos explaining the new functionality:
Schedule Cleanup:
Flags done right:
Custom categories:
Hotmail has started to roll out all the new features of the new release to the public last Friday, but it will be some time before all its 400+ million users can enjoy the new functionality.
Biggest sources for spam worldwide is still the USA with 28%, while india is at 9% and Russia at 5.7%. Overall spam has dropped to 70.5% of total email volume, down 3.7% from last October.
Some very effective ways of bringing spammers and complete networks sending spam (called botnets) down have been to make sure computer systems are better protected or cut off from internet until they are, and getting credit card companies and banks to stop do business with spammers.
The trouble with spammers however is that they will always find other or new ways to reach an audience that will participate in their schemes. Both comment spam and especially spam on social media networks has been getting bigger in recent years: for instance Twitter is plagued on a daily basis with spam accounts doing useless mentions with links on the platform.
Hotmail has re-introduced an old feature: flags to keep messages on top (click for larger):
The content of the email from the Hotmail Team reads:
As the Hotmail flags email notes, you can choose to show other actions in the Options page. The flags feature can help in managing inboxes with high daily or weekly volume to keep the messages that deserve more attention on top of your inbox. This new/old feature seems a lot like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, launched in August last year.
For those who know some email marketing people it would seem funny that we are so enthusiastic about email. It’s our job, we earn a living with it, we thrive with email but this cheerleading? Why would we? Simply because it is the best performing online marketing channel around. No other channel gets such a high ROI compared to email. The DMA has put the ROI of email marketing on just over $40 this year – big win!
Still there are people in online marketing who feel email marketing is not sexy and not something to be enthusiastic about. They are all over this new thing called social media (while email has already been the social channel for decades – remember the forward option in every single email client on the planet? Yeah.) or are very busy with Google SEO stuff.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with social media or SEO as marketing channels but email wins on so many levels it’s not funny anymore: it’s dead serious. Think of analytics and reports all the way. Think of dynamic content and personalization all the way. Think of automated campaigns with separate steps for target groups all the way. Think of perfectly timed messages in the inbox all the way. Think of the biggest conversions you have seen from any channel, ever.
Is there a catch? Is it really easy? Yes, there’s a catch, and no it will not be easy. The catch is that you have to do it right to succeed (as with any marketing channel, hah!), and because of that it won’t be easy. But it will be worth doing right. Over $40 in return of every dollar spenth worth.
