Contrary views worth listening to
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 06, 2007
The email marketing media can get a little cosy at times (Ken Magill's columns excepted.) Perhaps the words "best practices" are at fault, since they imply there can only be one best practice.Sometimes that's indeed the case. Nobody will argue that a continuous paragraph of 345 lines of text makes for an engaging email read.
But it's good to shake the bars of the email cage now and then, and recognize that there are sometimes different ways to achieve the same email marketing ends.
Consider these recent blog posts and articles, for example, all of which challenge common assumptions...
Case 1: Josh takes a look at the emails sent out by Borders.
Many folk would argue that the regular delivery time and day ensures the emails are recognized and expected by recipients. Josh suggests that this could actually be the problem with the Borders program, and their marketers might vary things a little...
rather than expecting it."
Case 2: There's a strong argument that says you should centralize email in your business, so you ensure all outgoing marketing (and perhaps other) email is coordinated in terms of message, branding and contact frequencies.
Kevin Hillstrom sees the point, but says it's not always that simple. You also need to leave room for flexibility...
a myriad of "rule breaking" opportunities for
others, must allow innovation."
Case 3: Most marketers favor HTML emails enriched with images to get the message across. Anna Billstrom highlights a Barack Obama campaign email which takes a simple text-based approach instead...
can be very strategic."
every email, but focus on the relationship
and growing the reasons I want to be on this list."
As the old saying goes, "there's more than one way to peel a potato."
Tags: email marketing
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1 Comments:
Our experience shows that 40% of the open recipients and click-thrus occur within 2 hours of the email hitting their inbox, regardless of time of day during working hours. Essentially, the understanding gleaned here is that most everyone is looking at their emails many times throughout the day. There is not an ideal delivery time. Also, our experience shows there is not an ideal delivery day either. Some industry reports show that Monday is the heaviest email day, therefore you shouldn't send on Monday. However, once email marketings take this advice they will lose all possibility of leads on Monday. What if your best and most profitable prospect could have become active on a Monday if an email had been sent? You lose that possibility. Emails should be sent every day, but to a rotating group of people.
As far as HTML emails, this is mainly only effective when communicating with customers. It is much less effective for new business prospecting and will trigger filtering more often. Also, the 2006 Marketing Sherpa report clearly taught us that most recipients prefer text-based emails and not HTML emails. The same report shows that the highest ROI's achieved by email marketers was with text-based emails. Save HTML for customer campaigns.
Griff
http://eprospector.typepad.com/small_business_sales_and_/
By 
Griff, on
07 November, 2007
