First, last and other impressions

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 25, 2008

Email is not just a sales flyer in electronic form. Emails impact the way recipients think about you, your business or your brand. Each and every message influences the image and impression people have.

Once you accept this, you must also accept that every email (and every element of each email) contributes to this experiential effect.

In this sense, every email becomes a marketing one.

That has many consequences. For example, it suggests there should be marketing input to all outgoing email from your business, whoever sends it.

Consider one of last year's hot trends: adding marketing elements to transactional email.

This happened partly because people spotted the selling opportunity (think of Amazon's "recommendations" built into order confirmations.)

But it also happened because of a recognition that transactional emails have a marketing impact. So they need care and attention in terms of tone, style, branding as well.

Equally, if you accept the "brand experience" role of email, then every element in your email and every interaction with your email system has a potential impact on this experience.

Which is why oft-forgotten aspects of email life, like administrative headers and footers deserve more marketer love than they get.

Two weeks ago, for example, Stefan Pollard wrote about the snippet text. And just yesterday Lisa Harmon pulled out a few examples to illustrate some possible approaches for the little lines of text that top your email (check the comments on her post, too.)

Perhaps the most ignored aspect of email is the unsubscribe mechanism. Chad White just released the "Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study," which demonstrates how leading retailers are handling (or not) this email marketing orphan.

Chad shows there is much room for improvement.

When people leave your list, they are not necessarily ending their relationship with your business as a whole. They are just choosing to no longer hear from you through the medium of your email newsletter or sales list.

That's an important point. When they leave your list, you must leave them with a positive impression. Because they are still customers or prospects. Still, perhaps, interacting with you in other ways or through other channels.

Consider also that people trying to unsubscribe aren't necessarily saying they want to leave your list. What they are really saying is "I'm not interested in your content" or "you send me too many emails."

So the unsubscribe process is also an opportunity. To make a positive impact. To learn where you are going wrong with your emails. To present would-be unsubscribes with alternatives that address their needs and keep them on board.

That means:

intuitive, user-friendly unsubscribe mechanisms
...with instructions or content written with as much copywriting care as you'd give to the rest of your email
...with opportunities to solicit feedback
...and presenting alternatives: let users change content or frequency preferences, or point them to other ways of getting info from you, such as RSS feeds.

Unfortunately, most of us are stuck with preset unsubscribe mechanisms and templates with little opportunity for customization. So listen up ESPs! Help us make the right impression...

Tags: email marketing, list management, email unsubscribes

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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