Linkedin Welcome Emails

Posted: May 24, 2012 by captaininbox in Email Marketing, Message Content and Design, Social-and-viral
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Recently I received an email the day after someone accepted my invite to Linkedin. This is great and possibly the only example I’ve ever seen when this worked, this was most likely down to the expertise of the bloke who implemented it…

It was a nice soft welcome email, suggesting I sign-up for a newsletter. I clicked through to the signup form, there was a lot of text on it. While I was reading the text the page went grey and a light box popped up asking me to sign-up for the newsletter.

When I got the email I was reminded of a giant bollocking someone got from John Caldwell and many others, including me, who added Linkedin Contacts to a list and sent them an email inviting them to a newsletter with one click.
This guy got properly ruined, it was awesome: RedPill Email was where the main forum ended up from Linkedin but there are also blogs from Word to the Wise and Al Iverson.

I believe the email they got was pretty poor and very salesy. The email I got was well written with a very welcoming and thankfull attitude with the newsletter sign-up as an obvious call to action but the copy had already won enough attention. Also seeing as the person in question was already a trusted source in email & content it was easier to click through than be offended.

However, I can’t help but compare the two.

I believe the reason why I accepted this email was due to the short time between connecting with the person and receiving the email. The momentum of engagement was still very warm, so there was more leeway and was more likely to want to further engage and stay in the zone, had this email got to me in two months, the engagement would have been less and so would be the rapport.

Once I clicked through I found the sign-up page was a bit too wordy for my attention-span and as I was working my way down the page I got hit with a lightbox asking me to sign-up for the newsletter. So while I was on the the newsletter form’s page reading about the benefits of signing-up I was interrupted with a call to sign-up for the newsletter.

I did not enjoy this and have not signed up.

I do believe that this was most likely an oversight, although I will be more than happy to be proven wrong if the lightbox on that page made a positive the difference in conversions.

Here is the email I got, as you will see, it is from a very very well respected member of the email community. I have since contacted him about removing the light box from sign-up form.
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Welcome to linkedin email

Here is the newsletter page with the newsletter lightbox:

I don’t know Christopher Penn personally, but we have interacted via Twitter once or twice. I am not being critical here at all, merely reflective of my experience. If it wasn’t for the lightbox on the newsletter page, I would have signed-up.

To be honest if someone had told me about this beforehand I’d have not taken the action but after having the concept forced upon me, I’m not unhappy about it.

My personal opinion is that the process was clever, the email content was perfect and the timing of the email was the key winning point here. I am not surprised  to get this kind of excellence from Mr Penn and he has certainly lived up to his reputation. While the concept was a risky proposition, the implementation was near perfect.

I also love the idea that if someone pays $2,499.00 through Google cart, they’ll get a response for a speaking job within a day. I wish I had that kind of klout :-)

Basic Creative Optimisation Tips

Posted: May 21, 2012 by captaininbox in Best Practice Strategy, Deliverability, Email Marketing, Message Content and Design
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I wrote this at the end of the report did for a customer, thought it was blog worthy…

Deliverability and Brand Rapport

Try to invite replies to the email, this not only gets you in their address book, it will also tell each inbox that you are a trusted sender so deliverability will be easier. Also allowing your recipients to converse to you will bring them closer to the brand.

Preheader

To ensure an optimal experience before the images are loaded on desktops, having a 2 line preheader to tease for the snippet preview and get the images loaded permanently can not only improve the engagement and subsequent conversions of this email but all future emails once the images are permanently loaded.

  • Left aligned
  • 10px
  • Top line as teaser
  • 2nd line imager loader / view in a browser
Preview Pane

The preview pane content and the rest of the email could be thought of as two different emails, where the preview pane view is built for optimal engagement and conversion and the rest of the email is freer because anyone who gets that far would/should have loaded the images of hit the browser view button.

  • Avoid large images spanning the whole width
    • Can break one up into more than one image
    • Some will be hidden with Responsive Design.
  • Where you have text, use actual text
    • rather than text in an image, where possible
  • Needs some text that grabs attention in the top left
    • Also a great spot for personalisation, like first name
    • Try using HTML buttons for calls to action
      • Rather than image buttons
      • The latest CSS3 features can add rounded corners, shadows and glows depending on the email client used.
Mobile Responsive Design

As per the piece earlier in this review responsive design is the best way to build an email because each recipient should then get the best experience depending on their device.

  • Ensure you have the ability to shrink the width from 600px to 300px.
    • Two main columns
    • Be happy to lose the far right if needed
    • Full width banner images can be shrunk or sections hidden (split the images)
    • Learn how to force right hand content to underneath the left column.
  • Make sure the normal text is still readable once zoomed to the width
    • 14px Arial
    • 12px Verdana
    • HTML Call to Action Buttons
      • Use CSS3 HTML buttons that can be made easily ‘tappable’ on a mobile
      • On the iPhone, this can even be given a pulsing glow!
  • Hide the preheader
    • Mobile devices don’t really need the preheader text as long as the images are loaded.
    • You may still need a browser view link for iPhones will no images – but they are so few it might not be worth the effort.
    • The teaser text will still work in the inbox preview.
    • Consider leaving and optimising the call to action depending on the content goals.
  • Test the email length to ensure the length does not harm engagement.

The Forced Optin

Posted: May 14, 2012 by captaininbox in Best Practice Strategy, Data and Targeting, Email Marketing
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A forced opt-in is where a site asks for an email address, forces you to opt-in to emails, in order to get something.

Common B2C implementations are on financial aid sites, where you have to fill out a form in order to get your quote. However the quote is not emailed to you, it simply appears on the next page but you still have to supply an email address and accept the Ts & Cs.

Consumers have since figured this out and when they don’t see a relevance to entering their email address, they expect spam, so they either enter in their junk address or just make one up. Also consumers will often use these forms for a flash check of their credit rating, ie: accept or reject, so they can be opted back in as well.

This means that lists built this way are full of addresses that do not exist or belong to people who have not actually asked for them and many of the rest were not expecting the email and probably do not want it.

Many of these addresses are just people who’ve just hit a load of keys in a row, like: qwerty, asdf etc. others make the point like: nospam@thanks.ta etc. etc.

Of course many of these will bounce when first sent to and as long as your email software suppresses hard bounces you won’t have to worry about hitting them again. If you have a lot of them all in the same ISP, eg: Hotmail; a high number of bounces will not do your reputation and favours.

The ones that are actually delivered tend to find the inboxes armed with rather powerful spam buttons which get used without a second thought.

On the other hand over time instead of wasting their efforts dealing with all of the emails sent to junk addresses, the ISPs hosting them simply black hole it so you’ll never know.

However, the odd one gets turned into a spam trap, whether it’s run by the ISP or a Spam Fighting organisation. As you know, hitting traps harms your reputation or just gets you blocked.

Ideally lists would be built without forcing people to opt-in to emails, instead the list would be full of people who have deliberately signified that they want your emails. However, if you are forced to collect email this way, there are some ways help remove some of the risk:

  • Clean out the obvious junk addresses before you send the email to the list.
  • Send a welcome email that makes the opt-out easy, so people will happily clean themselves off you list for you.
  • Put an unsubscribe link in the top right as well the bottom in at least the first 5 emails you send each address.
    This way if someone opens the email and their mouse drifts towards the spam button, they are likely to pass this unsubscribe link in the top right and there is a chance they’d use that rather than the spam button.

The perceptions of this low level of data collection tends to come from the olden-days of direct mail when it was a numbers game and there were no blacklists. Well that model does not apply to email and ISPs & Spam fighting agencies don’t like it and where they are inclined to, they will target senders who obviously collet data this way and junk it or block it.

If you have the option to make a change to your collection methods:

Alter the collection method to only take an email address when your process actually needs to send them an email.

Change the process or decide to only email people who have deliberately requested emails.

Don’t opt someone in from the initial form but offer them help and benefits to sign-up on the next page.

This will save you a lot of pain, generally poor deliverability and subsequently a low open rate.

The important point here, is that hammering dead and uninterested addresses will harm your ability to get in front of the people who will generate revenue with you.

Ackbar spam trap

Posted: March 23, 2012 by captaininbox in Deliverability, Email Marketing
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A colleague emailed me the original, I added a spam stamp, thought it was funny?

Thanks to ohinternet.com for hosting the original and thanks to Google image search for helping me find it.

Waking up the old addresses

Posted: March 1, 2012 by captaininbox in Email Marketing
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As more people are getting into or starting to properly do email, many brands are trying to monetise lists where some of them have not been touched for over 2 years, sometimes even 5-10 years.

While this is not illegal or anything, there is the risk that many of the older ones have since died and due to not being emailed for so long, the sender has missed the hard bounce on some addresses which have since been turned into a trap by an ISP. Then hitting them could severely harm inbox placement and/or invoke harsh throttling on high volume sends.

Personally, I’d say write off anything old than two years but as a deliverability bloke I’m cautious, as a marketer you might not be that paranoid so will keep the list as it is.

I’ve had a few thoughts about how best wheedle these out of the list and I reckon they key to it is to stagger it out by engagement and consider sending less content more frequently.

Two segments:

  1. Everyone who’s a year old or less would start ‘engaged’.
  2. The rest – Everyone else would be ‘disengaged’.

 

The ‘disengaged‘ could to go on a 3 month email dial down, where your mission is to get them to open/click an email so you know they are alive, any activity would then put them into the engaged list.

  1. This could be weekly/bi-weekly to start with (1st month) and those who don’t engage then make a change for month.
    The content needs to start very soft and remind them who you are and how you know them.
  2.  In month two try more audacious subject lines and louder offers, less content more emails etc.
  3.  For month 3 try some plain text, try a different email address, even put a count down in the subject line and/or content. Tell them that their on the way out in the subject just in case it tips them over and they are fine with getting the emails but not opening – like I am with Amazon!

    Anyone left not doing anything, get rid of them – just for the first bulk list of the old ones though!

  • Make sure you send in tiny batches and as slowly as possible, eg: no more than 10k per half day at 2k per hour. This will help avoid massive consequences from the hard bounces.
  • Make sure you have an unsubscribe link in the top right as well as the bottom .
  • Make sure you have an easy change of address process from the email, if you are emailing an old address or their now junk address, once you win them back you’d rather them give you their main address.

Ensure that while you are doing this, you are also emailing your engaged regularly too to help balance out the engagement.

 

For the ‘engaged‘, while some may still be surprised at getting the email, especially if you are exploiting the soft-optin, there is better chance of them remembering you.

After 6 months of normal sending, anyone who has not engaged an email or the site (purchased, filled a basked, logged in etc.) should then to go into a 6 month re-engagement process where you change the strategy,

eg: first 3 months send different dates/times, less content more emails – even give them a choice to change weekly emails to a monthly digest?

If there is still no engagement then consider putting them on to the old disengaged 3 month dial down and see if you can kick them back in to life.

You then have to decide what to do with the people who were engaged but are now are ignoring you even after all of your attempts to wake them up.

Some people say, keep emailing:
If the address is live – which is should be because you’ve had it less than than year after they gave it you, the recipient might just be busy or you are still emailing their junk address.

In this case, I can’t argue with the keep emailing tule, you’re not really doing much harm and if your engagement strategy is working, these people should be a minority so should not harm your reputation.

The important thing is to clean out the inactives from the list of people who are very old, do this efficiently because you want the dead ones gone.

If you have the opportunity to see IP stats like Hotmail SNDS, you can get an idea of how many spam traps you have from Hotmail (+live, msn etc.) and Return Path’s tools can give you that and more.

I’m not saying this is tried a tested method and I’d be more than happy to have other perspectives. This is merely a logical measured concept from my own experiences of the consequences implemented by ISPs when too much old stuff is hit too quickly and not cleaned out.

Happy to discuss it further ;-)

Over Branding

Posted: February 22, 2012 by captaininbox in Email Marketing, Message Content and Design
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There really is no need to have such large logo and so many images before the content. A recipient has seen the “From Name” and trusted it enough to open the email once the subject line has convinced them there is something relevant inside.

Once the email is open they are in a bit of a rush to get the content they were promised in the subject line.

At the moment they would have to load the images and scroll quite a way.

A good idea is to drastically reduce the amount of anything between the top of the email and the actual content.

You still need some branding, the look feel and a logo is required to help get people into the mind set and trusting way your existing rapport has already built, but there is not need to sell yourself in an email that someone has already asked for.

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