Personalization can do a lot to help an email campaign. Split tests regularly show that personalization options hugely increase email conversion rates. However, lately I've been wondering about how we can use group targeting instead of personalization as a way to engage readership. Specifically, I've been wondering if, perhaps, we could further engage email audiences by adding them to targeted groups, and then addressing the groups directly, instead of the individuals. The reasoning has to do with how individuals interact in groups, specifically how groups provide identity, support, and guidance for their members. Would grouping people together engage them readily with the subject?

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Over the last week a couple coworkers, clients and I have been discussing the effectiveness of email campaigns that we've received over the last few months. We've had arguments over whether or not headlines like "Why Is Your PC So Slow" and "Get $50 for 30 Minutes of Your Time" are effective at getting people to open emails. We've debated the usefulness of less-than-paragon tactics such as out-out's and disguised opt-ins (if you need an example of the latter go try to download Quicktime from Apple.com and tell me if you have to enter your email address in order to do so). We've settled on three general principals that we think creates a good, and effective, email campaign, including: trust & recognition, matching expectation, and affective quality of subject lines.

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While writing a post on the roles of personalization in email marketing I came across an interesting series of studiesover at Psyblog suggesting that promising rewards can have negative effects on overall performance in both children and adults. This has interesting implications for email marketers who often base their campaigns on "reward" models, where subscribers are likely to get something for signing up.

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beware of bad links

I was putting the finishing touches on our VKI Newsletter today when I noticed that we still had 10 ExactTarget inbox preview credits which were soon to expire. As I had just rewritten our template, I decided to give it a run through ET's tool and see if it would turn up anything that my other tests had not. 

For the most part the test went well, but under reputation I noticed the following:

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Maybe it's because I do an email newsletter, maybe it's because I write blog posts, maybe its because I love to complain about peoples lack of CAN-SPAM compliance, but I just love to sign up for newsletters. I'll sign up for any one I see, then go about trying to unsubscribe if I don't like it.

Normally I'll rant about how one email campaign or another doesn't comply with some best practice, but today I decided I am going to take a different tact. Instead, I am going to show off some email campaigns, mainly from small companies, that do things that I just love. Campaigns of little guys, without huge marketing budgets, which manage to pull certain effects off better than most of the high-class email marketing I see. While none of the following are examples of perfect email campaigns, each does one thing well, be it providing useful content, tempting the reader to buy, or creating a lasting relationship with the reader. 

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No problems with permission this week, I'm afraid I just haven't been getting that much spam. However, this is a good time to explain something that we tend to gloss over when talking about email marketing and problems with permission:

You may be an "Accidental Spammer"

What's an accidental spammer? You ask.

You don't have to be one of those devious "80% OFF of Pfizer" senders to be a spammer. In fact, devious problems are less of a problem than you might think. Over the years spam filtering engines have gotten really good at both filtering those before they go out, and catching them before they reach the inbox (in fact 95% of email gets caught as spam). The problem lies in legitimate email senders, small businesses and the like, who in good faith decide to send an "email blast" or overload their viewers with marketing messages. These seem like legitimate marketing, but are seen negatively by users all too willing to hit the mark-as-spam button.

We've covered a few times why being considered spam is bad. In a nutshell, spam complaints adversely affect your ability to send mail, as well as your ESP (Email Service Provider). Because of this you don't want it, but your ESP really doesn't want it (just a few bad email campaigns can ruin an IP). Lots of stuff counts as spam complaints, from weighty complaints and domain blocks by IT admins to too many viewers hitting the report-as-spam button.

All that needs to happen for you to be considered spam is that you send an email to some one who doesn't want it or for a filter to mark you as spam.

That's it. So how you can prevent that?

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A special thanks to reader "Erin" this week, who sent in a link to Crain's New York, and a horrible unsubscribe story of her own. Much like last weeks complaint about Codemasters, Crain's unsubscribe policy made her jump through hoops in order to opt out of receiving email. Always eager for an excuse to go hoop jumping, I decided to sign up and... well... jump in.

For those of you unfamiliar with Crain Communication, it is a publishing house based in Detroit that publishes a series of trade weeklies. They're also the people behind one of my favourite sites: Advertising Age.  Wikipedia also tells me that they publish American Coin-Op, American Drycleaner, and American Laundry News, for people working in the fast paced world of laundromats.

Now this week is actually going to be a little different. Crain's of New York is a great example not because they are an example of an especially bad campaign (on the contrary it is really very good) but rather how even people with very competent email marketing departments have a tenancy to break CAN-SPAM, and do other very annoying things.

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the future workplaces of gmail spammers

There was a time when life online was simple. You could have several email accounts with different names disconnected from one another and use one for your finances, one for work, one for personal email, one for letting all those "internet people" contact you, one for signing up to websites, and one just there so that you write obnoxious emails to people without them knowing who you are.

My god, I have too many email addresses.

Then, back in June of 2009, we reported that our favourite mail provider--gmail--asked us to input a mobile phone for sign up. A month later the web was a flood with messages and complaints. Many people who do not have cellphones were finding that their text-based medium of choice was now requiring them to have access to another text-based medium.

This week I want to take another look at what happened, why it happened, and what you can do about it.

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I've always had mixed feelings about coupon codes. On the one hand, they're a fairly simple and convenient way to implement email promotions for subsets of your customers. On the other hand, they have some major downsides.

First, forcing customers to remember codes is clumsy and violates a basic usability principle: don't force visitors to rely on their memories. (Sure, they might be able to copy and paste rather than remember, but that's still forcing them to do too much work.)

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And I thought Shaw was bad! Well, this week I've found another excellent contender for the worst opt-out system, and even better the company is sending from the US. Yes folks, a genuine CAN-SPAM breach!

While browsing an old mail account the other day I noticed that I've been receiving regular emails from Codemasters. Who on earth are Codemasters? All I remember is that they have something to do with video games. Their email is an ad for a game called Operation Flashpoint. I never played this game, nor do I have any desire to play it, so why are they emailing me? Maybe at one point I signed up for an account there and they used an opt-out instead of an opt-in for their newsletter (a bad sign).

"Whatever," I think, "I'll unsubscribe." Well, we know how well that has worked in the past.

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