Last week I updated my email signature block. I made a couple of changes; actually more than a couple if I include the formatting changes. The signature now has my full name, my title, name of company hyperlinked to my company’s website, my desk phone number, link to my blog. Something new I added last week was a link to my LinkedIn profile.
I have seen some really nice looking email signatures. Professional, short and give you the information you need. I have some people include graphics in their signatures. I don’t like that personally.
In my signature the link to my blog and my LinkedIn profile is blatant self-promotion. However, in some sense you are your own brand and the face of the company. It is important that people get to know you and are able to build a close business relationship with you. In today’s social networking world you have to let others know you beyond your pure business side.
The other thing I did was I dropped all the details from Reply & Fwd emails. If I am replying to an email or forwarding someone an email, it is quite likely they know who I am; there is need to add a block of text especially if there ends up being a string of replies.
I was reading Marketing Sherpa this morning and came across this interesting case study about how a simple change to your newsletter can make all the difference.This is a great reason to start doing that email testing that you have been putting off because the results can be amazing. Every email that goes out without a split is a missed opportunity to gain insight into your recipients behavior.
SUMMARY: Sometimes even the smallest change can make a world of difference in your email design. See how one publisher transformed a related stories link into a gray utility button and immediately saw a 190% increase in clicks and traffic is up 6% on a different landing page.
It’s an easy tweak that if you haven’t considered, you may want to test on your own newsletters.
Why not let your customers pick an email template and color theme from a set of available themes when they register/optin to your marketing campaign? It could be something similar to how blogger lets you choose a template and color theme for your blog. Your mailer program could then leverage this to send out visually personalized email.
I am a fan of the Customer Driven Marketing blog and it never fails that I run across some interesting ideas every time I visit. This little musing got me thinking about how we always fret over the look and feel over our email templates…and what if we just turned it over to the subscriber? And make it a part of their preference center so they can change whenever they want? Its food for thought.
I am proud to announce that I have an article published in a new book titled “Email marketing by the numbers”. The book is authored by email marketing expert and well known blogger Chris Baggott. It’s really a collection of expert articles and anecdotes by various authors. Chris, an avid blogger, public speaker and email marketing expert hit upon the idea to publish a book that allowed the best email marketing minds to come together and provide insight about email marketing. The book covers various topics ranging from general email marketing concepts, deliverability to database marketing.
I lend my voice around database integration and APIs. With integration you can continue to use your current applications, but use “APIs – Application Programming Interfaces” to extend the application. Given my history around integration and custom software development space, I talk about what is integration and how it can be used within email marketing.
I just want to take a moment and tell you about a book that has come out recently that I highly recommend - “Email Marketing by the Numbers“. It is a great book by Chris Baggott and Ali Sales - both of whom I collaborated very closely with during my days in marketing department at ExactTarget. They are both extremely talented marketers to which I can personally attest.
I bought the book as soon as it came available and was delighted to find it not just a book by Chris, but a compilation of work from many talented internet marketers from around the world. Many of those talented professionals are people I worked with while at ExactTarget like Morgan Stewart, Chip House, Joel Book, and Ali Sales. Other contributors, specifically Amol Dalvi, I continue to work with in my current position at tech start up Right On Interactive.
I also want to mention Kelly Rusk with Card Communications who is an email marketing expert who contributed to the book as well - she both posts and links here and is an extremely talented internet marketer. I met her by chance when I started blogging and have been faithfully reading her posts ever since!
Besides the fact that many reputable professionals contributed to the book (my friends!) - it is also an easy read. A book on email marketing could easily put anyone to sleep (even die-hards like me) but instead it flows nicely and the examples and insight are truly inspiring.
So if you are truly interested in adding email to your marketing arsenal or just want to hone in your existing skills - you cant go wrong buying this book. Good job guys!
What we have here is a major shift in how marketers will have to approach email marketing, since Microsoft has decided to move away completely from usability and technology in favor of security. (It should be noted that I don’t accept the premise of the argument that it is ultimately a choice of one or the other…)
If you are a web designer - you may want to relearn how to design using tables because the new Outlook does not support CSS floating or positioning. The irony for us old web designers is that we actually remember what it was like to hack together a design using tables - most new designers are unfamiliar with the old way of designing on the web…welcome to 1999!
If you put forms in your email - don’t expect those to render either. You know those sophisticated emails that contain surveys or registrations…kiss them goodbye because they are now the odd man out. Sit back and think about what this means as marketers…yep, it sucks that bad.
And if you were ever holding out for rich media - videos, flash, applets ect…fuhgettaboutit! Microsoft doesn’t seem to think that those spam filter issues are going away any time soon - so now it will be even longer before they become available in email. Thanks alot.
The biggest point I am making besides the fact that all of these changes really impact email marketing negatively - is that its a fundamental shift in Microsoft’s way of thinking. Instead of pioneering the way to help make email more user friendly and extending its functionality, they have decided to force us into much more primitive email. It almost feels like Microsoft is trying to revert back to 1999.
But then those were much better times for Microsoft.
