Stop sending email…….
February 4, 2009
Effective immediately…….please stop sending email if any of the following conditions exist:
- You send email just to sell stuff and are not worried about establishing a lifetime relationship with your subscriber
- You send out more than 3 promotional emails a week with no analytics defining your list attrition.
- You don’t welcome people into your program with a healthy, clear, concise and truly welcoming email.
- You don’t segment.
- You can’t clearly represent your value proposition.
- You don’t have frequency caps/cadence worked out.
- Everyone in your org is calling it an email blast and deep down inside you kinda agree with them.
- You are more worried about pushing the email out than the strategy behind the push.
- You have used an eAppend to acquire 90% of your list.
- You are more worried about incorporating a share to a subscribers social network feature than serving up dynamic relevant content to the subscriber based on propensity models or user behavior.
- Short term revenue achievement is more important than long term subscriber engagement.
- Last but not least….you spend more time reading blogs and tweets from self proclaimed industry experts (like me) about best practices and the latest trends rather than implement ANY of the suggestions from us folks.
Until next time…..
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5 Comments
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Amen & Hallelujah.
I agree with all of these but especially love this one:
You have used an eAppend to acquire 90% of your list.
Because while they use it to acquire the majority of the list, it makes up about .3% of their engaged subscribers, and provides more than 90% of their complaints.
-Kelly Lorenz
Great list. I’d like to add to it, if I could:
#13. Your email credits are about to expire. Unless you have something relevant to say, this is not an excuse to send an email.
I came across your blog because it showed up as an inbound link to my site in google webmaster tools.
Anyhow I got a kick out of item 7 for some reason :->.
Very nice blogging. I think I may have to subscribe in hopes that something will rub off on me(item 12).
BTW tell Ms. Green to get to work!
Great list! All your points are certainly valid, and I couldn’t agree more with #3. The right welcome email is essential to sustained customer engagement, and brands that use complex or aggressive messaging via this initial communication should probably stop what they’re doing and make some significant tweaks to their email program.