MindComet

Poll: How Do You Deal With Unwanted Messages?

I’ve always wondered how people handle unwanted marketing messages. Now, keep in mind I’m not singling out SPAM either—these messages are usually taken care of automatically by your ISP— I’m talking about any email that you’ve subscribed to that you don’t have the time for at the moment. Do you delete them? Do you leave them just sitting in your inbox unread (this would drive me absolutely crazy)? Do you mark them as read?

If you’re anything like me, you treat your inbox with a fair amount of respect—not allowing it to get too cluttered or mismanaged at any one point. Personally, I mark all unwanted emails as read, but I’m curious to find out what my readers do when they want to blank out their entire inbox quickly.

I’d assume from the outset that the results will show that most people mark as read or delete unwanted emails. But a part of me wonders just how sophisticated the average person is becoming in terms of their inbox and other sources of information online. It’d be very interesting to see if many people have filters setup for their inbox.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 03, 2011

Crispers: Audio Double Opt-In Instructions

So this is a first for me… After I submitted my email for Crisper’s newsletter, I was driven to this landing page (make sure your speakers are on before you click).

Pretty nifty, right?

If for some reason you don’t have working audio on whatever machine or device you’re reading this on, find the transcript of the audio below:

“In a moment you’ll receive an email message asking you to confirm your email address and activate your subscription. Please check your email inbox now. Open that email and click on the confirm link. Once you do, your subscription will immediately be activated!“

It’s interesting to note that the recording doesn’t mention Crispers by name. Which means this is clearly a default or a templatized audio clip. The domain isn’t a vanity URL either. Instead of it being hosted directly on Crispers’ site, it takes you off-site as it’s hosted by their ESP, AWeber (Hi, Crystal!).

At any rate, I think this is implemented very nicely. It was a nice surprise to hear this coming through my earbuds when I opted in. It was a cool moment. Generally speaking, I think it’d be nice to see more multimedia implementation for instructions to users who are freshly opted-in. Do you think this is a trend that will catch on? Please feel free to leave your comments below!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 24, 2011

Borders’ Death Rattle In Email Form

If you aren’t already aware, Borders Books & Music are closing all of their stores for good. Call it a sign of the times or a changing of the guard with web stores replacing brick & mortar shops, it’s undeniable that Borders certainly won’t be the last corporation selling media to close up and go out of business. But this post isn’t all about them folding, its about how they’re reaching their subscribers with news of massive sales.

Look at this email:

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Now look at an example of what their emails USED to look like:

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I discussed this with Jeremy Carrus, one of MindComet’s designers, about the inconsistencies and stilted nature of the design. Here’s what we came up with…

Just cause you’re going out of business doesn’t mean you should change your brand or hide it.
Even if your doors are closing you can still go out with some dignity and use the look everyone remembered you for. I had to look closely to see who this email was from at first. It almost seemed like a knock-off, spammy email.

Why have social media links if you’re company is going under?
Why would anyone want to connect with a brand that is about to die? Is this due to the fact that social media buttons are a standard element like a forward button / link for any and all emails no matter what the subject or condition the brand is in?

Give users direction and a call to action.
If your goal is to get users into the store then put the locations link at the top of the page and not in the footer. Maybe even employ geo-location methods for users (not too hard to pull off nowadays) and dynamically insert the location closest to them.

Give users a deadline.
There is no time associated with this email so I could probably go in a few weeks and get the same deal. But if they said “Our Doors Will Be Closed On…“ it would result in some urgency, which might get me into one of their stores sooner rather than later. Even if they’re not closing they could prolong the sale and make me want to go later.

Show off the good.
Show users what you have to sell. Simply listing discounts associated with the categories of items isn’t too compelling. Sometimes folks need a visual to get excited. Images help support the sale.

Even though this is clearly a LAZY attempt at an email marketing campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised if an intern or some other lowly employee put this together. I’m sure Borders fired all of their marketing and creative assets a long time ago. It doesn’t surprise me that it looks this way… there’s really no accountability or a sense of trying with this email.

In short, the email is essentially a guy on a street corner waving a going-out-of-business sign to oncoming traffic:

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 18, 2011

A Golden Rule For Email Marketers: Never Assume Permission

The following post was written by our guest author, Crystal Gouldey. Crystal is an Education Marketing Associate at AWeber, an Email Service Provider and Software Platform.

When you assume permission, you end up sending information people don’t want. This usually happens in one of two ways. The first occurs when you add the email address of a contact who never actually requested to be on your list. The second happens when you send all your emails out to every one on your list, regardless of how you got their email address or what interests they’ve expressed.

If you do these things, you can run into a few problems:

1. You get a bad reputation. People complain about companies that have annoyed them (they may even blog about the experience).
2. Your deliverability decreases, making it harder for you to get your emails to subscribers who do want your emails.
3. You go from having potentially interested subscribers to angry ones pretty quickly.

Here are some groups that email marketers typically assume permission from:

Social Media Followers
You have fairly easy access to the email addresses of Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, etc. These contacts agreed they want to connect with you on these sites, but that doesn’t mean they want to be on your mailing list.

Customers Who Purchased
Online orders typically require purchasers to provide an email address. This is usually done to send the receipts and any other important information,  but it doesn’t mean the customers want to receive your promotional emails.

Support Inquiries
When someone emails you a question, obviously they’ll be expecting an email back. What they won’t be expecting is their email address added to your list.

I have a good example of this mistake. Earlier this year, I was looking for wedding photographers. After talking to one company, I got quite a surprise in my inbox the next day:

Adding me to their list was bad enough, but they knew I was interested in wedding photography and still sent their general promotional emails.

Subscribers Who Submitted Preferences
The subscribers that signed up using your preference center did so because they’re interested in specific information. Sending out emails outside of their stated preferences can show you assume you have their permission to send them whatever YOU want.

Here’s an example: I signed up on Princess Cruises site specifying in their preference center I was interested in cruises to Europe and Australia. A few days later I got this:

Alaska was NOT what I requested.

So what should you do? Provide links to pages where people can sign up to your mailing list. Ask your followers and regular contacts if they wish to be added. Listen to what people want from you. But whatever you do, never assume.

Find more of Crystal’s insight on the AWeber blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 17, 2011

Hotmail Kind-of Sort-of Announces HTML5 Video Support

So Hotmail now supports HTML5 video in email. This is a major development in the video-in-email saga, but it’s not a bullet-proof solution… yet.

Once the email is opened and images are displayed, the user must right-click on the video and select Play. This is due to Hotmail stripping out the <video> tag by default. Unsurprisingly, IE 7/8 doesn’t support HTML5 video yet, so you must have fallback content (such as an image) in place for users browsing the web with IE. Safari does not allow for right-click enabled playback, so fallback content is completely necessary here, as well.

Ros at CampaignMonitor brings up a good point in regards to autoplay in that having a video automatically play in users’ inboxes is likely to be a huge annoyance and will ultimately be a great way of encouraging users to unsubscribe. Food for thought.

All in all, this is not a solution that has been fully-realized, but it is only a relatively short matter of time before its fleshed out to the point where videos in email is viable and worth pursing in future efforts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 20, 2011

Mobile Email Design DOs and DON’Ts

Style Campaign has always been one of my favorite email marketing blogs, primarily because they seem to focus on niche topics such as video, animated gifs and now, mobile.

Mobile is on top of every marketer’s minds who have any involvement in email. It’s an exciting time for us in the industry. In a relatively short time, the entire email landscape is going to be effect by mobile’s influence. It’s not a question of “if”, but more a question of “when” it will take over the majority of email client market share.

So with that it mind, it is becoming increasingly clear that email designs must be able to conform to mobile devices. This article at Style Campaign goes into much detail about the do’s and don’ts regarding email design. It’s a fantastic read for anyone interested in mobile-centric revamping your newsletter.

Key takeaways:

The peak of mobile email use is around 7AM, when everyone is waking up. This means people’s vision is bleary and their overall effectiveness of handling their phones properly is decreased. Because of this, we must design our emails to make it easy for the beleaguered, pre-caffeinated masses.

44x44 is the perfect dimension for a fingertip to touch a link, according to Apple. With this in mind, there shouldn’t be any competing links within that block. Convenience for one-handed users is key.

Big buttons make for a better mobile user experience than tiny ones.

Most people handle their phones with their right hands. Keep general ergonomics in mind when and where you place specific icons and links.

Text under 12px will scale up, which in turn can break your design. Auto-scaling can be prevented by adding the style ”-webkit-text-size-adjust:none”

While it is a best practice for your email’s navigation to resemble the site’s navigation, that’s not necessarily the case for mobile email.

So with the increase of mobile use, will we see all best practices slowly change and evolve? Will we see mobile’s influence effect all email designs from this point on? Time will tell.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 06, 2011

Mobile Email Usage On The Rise

According to a recent study conducted by Campaign Monitor, mobile email is on the rise. Now this shouldn’t be much of a surprise as mobile devices are becoming more and more prominent pretty much everywhere in the world, but what is surprising is the rate at which mobile use is rising.

With the release of the iPhone, iPad and Android phones, the mobile market share has gone from 4% to 20% in 24 months. This, to me, is insanely quick growth. Of that 20%, iPhone unsurprisingly accounts for the vast majority with iPad and Android falling behind in pecking order. Even more alarming is the rate at which Desktop clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail and the like have dropped: almost 11%.

Go here and check out this fantastic article. It’s well worth your time.

If this isn’t evidence for more mobile-centric email designs, I don’t know what is. If your ESP allows for a mobile alternative, be sure to utilize it.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 16, 2011