excess voice: nick usborne's blog

Do you segment your email subscriber lists?

Segmenting your list means you can customize your messages in many ways.

How about those subscribers who always click on the links, but never buy anything? Write them a specific sequence of emails to tip them over into purchasing. Maybe send them a survey and learn a little more about them.

How about the group who clicked on and purchased Product A last year? Maybe they would be a perfect match for Product E which you are about to launch.

List segmentation gives the opportunity to speak with different groups of subscribers with carefully customized messages. It not only makes every email directly relevant to each reader, but also results in much higher conversion rates.

If your email delivery service doesn't enable you to drill down and segment in this way...you might want to consider upgrading to a new service.

Is it just me, or are the “best emails” simply awful?

I am trying to write an article about email and need to find three “kick ass” emails, as the editor describes them.

This is a tough task.

One email I looked at is an award-winning welcome email from Dell.

Here is the first paragraph:

“We're thrilled that you're interested in receiving the Dell Small Business E-mail Updates! With exceptional value, online shopping convenience and a huge product selection, Dell is the smart choice for all your business technology. We don't make technology for just anyone. We make it for only one. You.”

Well. Maybe it’s just me, but as far as I’m concerned this is just self-serving garbage.

They are writing a welcome message, and the best they can do is start by telling me how great they are?

As for those last couple of lines...

“We don't make technology for just anyone. We make it for only one. You.”

This is the truly horrible.

First, the message is not true. They DO make technology for just anyone. They don’t make it just for me. It’s a lie, and a ridiculous one at that.

It’s copywriting at its most self indulgent. Trying to be clever. And, I guess, hoping I will believe the message.

Good luck. The day I believe that Dell makes stuff only for me is the day I’ll believe that Ford really cares.

(Yes, I know that Dell will customize my order. But that's not what they are saying here. They say thay make technology just for me. If you have a strong value proposition, use it...but be specific and accurate.)

The thing is, when someone trusts you enough and is interested enough to sign up for your emails or e-newsletters...show them a little respect.

Welcome letters can be powerful things. But not if you use them to stand on a soap box and use overblown ad-speak to tell people how wonderful you are.

Job one for this email should have been to confirm that the reader was right to trust Dell with his or her email address.

Job two should have been to deliver useful and helpful information to the reader.

Job seven thousand, three hundred and fifty seven should have been to say what a great company Dell is.

Do experts always get the basics right?

My first instinct is to say no. And I think I’m right.

This morning I had a brief email chat with the always excellent Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports.

He had purchased a copy of my short report, 6 Questions to ask yourself when writing Subject Lines for your emails.

In his blog he described it as being good advice for those with little experience.

And he’s right. The report talks about six fundamental points one should address when writing a subject line.

But I have to admit I was disappointed when he said that. Not that his point wasn’t accurate, but because I felt it sounded like the report was light-weight and not worth reading if you had some real experience with email.

The thing is, I didn’t write it just with beginners in mind. I wrote it after years of experience had taught me that sophisticated marketers often rush their subject lines, and rarely consider all six points I covered.

But Mark’s observation was helpful in an important way. It made me think of the problem I face when trying to create short, simple content for an experienced audience.

How does one remind experts of the fundamentals, without appearing that you are talking to beginners?

I’m not sure. But I’m going to give it a lot of thought.

If I have learned one thing after the last ten years of writing and consulting for businesses large and small online, it’s that experienced marketers often get too tied up in what they have learned recently, and fail to address the simple fundamentals they learned when they got started.

Don’t give me a gift and then ask me to buy something...all in the same email.

At this time of year I receive plenty of emails asking me to buy products and services.

I have also received some “thank you” emails from companies which are offering discounts, downloads and free trials out of appreciation for my attention over the last year.

I don’t mind getting the sales emails. I either trash them or open them. No problem there.

And it’s good to get a genuine thank-you email with some freebie or discount attached. I haven’t claimed all of the various offers, but I have felt kindly about the companies who thought to say thank you.

But then...there is another group of companies which say thank you with one breath, and try to sell me something with the next.

I think that’s a bad idea.

Don’t use the first five lines of your email to offer me a thank-you gift, and then spend the next thirty lines trying to sell me something.

The impression I get is not that you want to say thank you at all, but simply want to use the “free gift” to hook me into buying one of your products or services.

That warm feeling about your company is lost. Instead, I just feel you are being sneaky.

This is an email error, a relationship error and an etiquette error that is very easy to avoid.

Simply separate out the two parts of the email.

Send me one sales email. And send me a separate thank-you email.

Problem solved.

Where is Email 2.0?

I have just added a new article to the Excess Voice site on the topic of email.

It seems to me that not only the technology of email, but also the use of imagination when creating commercial emails and e-newsletters is lagging far behind.

Web 2.0 is in full flow. Email is just becoming more and more boring.

And it shouldn’t be.

You can read the complete article here:

Where is Email 2.0? And why is commercial email so boring?

An email trick you shouldn’t use, unless you are truly desperate.

This has probably happened to you a few times.

You receive an email from some marketer.  And then within a few hours you receive a second email, which apologizes for the fact that the first email contained a broken link. And they provide the link one more time.

There are two ways to view this occurrence.

First, if you know and truly respect the sender, you can give him or her the benefit of the doubt.

Second, you can conclude that the sender is being just plain sneaky...particularly if the link in the first email wasn’t broken at all.

This double-dipping ploy simply gives the sender double exposure for the most profitable link in the first email or newsletter.

It’s sneaky, dishonest and will alienate all those subscribers who recognize what is happening.

So why do people do this? Because it works so well. That second email, with just a short, apologetic message and a single link gets great clickthrough.

If you’re having trouble making your mortgage payment for the month, give it a try. You might make some extra bucks.

But unless you are in a desperate financial situation, this is a very bad thing to do.

It simply erodes the greatest asset you have with any email or newsletter list...

Trust.

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