Category Archives: Email marketing

The Great Unsubscribe Myth

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Spam from Unsubscribing

A few months back, computer maven David Pogue wrote an article about finally getting over the fear of clicking the “Unsubscribe” button. “[T]he rule, for 15 years, has been: Never respond. Don’t even try to unsubscribe,” he wrote. “…You’ll wind up getting put on even more spam lists as a result.”

Pogue is one of the smartest journalists in the technology field. The fact that he would think that responding to an unsubscribe link might cause you to get more email just goes to show how pervasive this myth is. And make no mistake about it: it is a myth.

Just to make it clear, I’m not talking about the obviously questionable messages that continue to fill our junk folders every day. There is no profit in sending any kind of message back to someone who is trying to sell you Viagra or nude pictures of  Russian models. You shouldn’t respond to one of these anymore than you should engage in conversation with the guy selling “Rolex” watches on the street. I’m talking about the email you receive as the result of some online action, be that purchasing a laptop, or signing up to receive a whitepaper. Painting these emails with the same broad strokes does a disservice to them, and, in the era of the CAN-SPAM Act, is patently wrong.

The story started in the early days of email, when, every time you tried to unsubscribe from an email, twenty more unwanted emails showed up in your inbox. “Don’t ask to be removed from a junk-mail list,” wrote Amy Harmon in the New York Times back in 1998. “…Some of them may actually remove you. But many more appear to simply take the reply as confirmation that they can continue to reach you there.” Ms. Harmon doesn’t really explain what she means by “junk-mail list,” nor does she attempt to distinguish between legitimate business email (those ones that honored the request to be removed from a list, I suspect), and the spammers. Back then, unsubscribes were accomplished by replying with “unsubscribe” in the subject line. While there may be a few legitimate businesses that still handle unsubscribes in this fashion—although, frankly, I’d be suspicious of any that do—most email marketing today uses an unsubscribe link that takes you to a page where you can opt to stop receiving email from that source.

The different email marketing service providers handle unsubscribes in their own ways. Some require a double opt-out. As a rule, we don’t recommend this technique. A double opt-in is put in place to make sure the recipient really wants to receive that email from you and the recipient knows it. A double opt-out, on the other hand, is seen as a nuisance, and actually may qualify as a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Others require the recipient to re-enter their information, even though all of this information could easily be included in the link. Some go to the other extreme, automating the entire unsubscribe process so that clicking the link  is all it takes. We don’t recommend this approach either. It is too easy to accidentally unsubscribe, and people might not bother resubscribing after that. The best approach is to take the recipient to an email page where they can unsubscribe with one click. If they accidentally clicked the link (or, the person to whom they forwarded the email clicked it in error), they have the opportunity to leave the page without changing anything. Some sites includes short surveys to help them understand the cause of the unsubscribe. This is fine as long as it is optional. Force a recipient to wade through a survey and they will simply go back to their inbox and mark that email as spam.

In 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act made it a law that clicking on those unsubscribe links will actually do what they say, and yet, the Unsubscribe Myth persists. Many people will tag email as spam—even though they agreed to receive it—simply to stop getting it. There is a misperception that tagging an email as junk is a better way to stop receiving unwanted email than clicking the unsubscribe link; that somehow this bypasses notifying the sender. If that were true, it would be very easy for anyone to scuttle another company’s email efforts with just a few clicks. If a recipient tags an email as spam, any ESP worth its salt will know about it immediately and will take steps to ensure that that this doesn’t affect a company’s email deliverability. Nonetheless, clicking Unsubscribe is still the preferred way to eliminate email you no longer want. Flagging an email as spam if best done only if the sender doesn’t respect an unsubscribe request. It’s nice to see that David Pogue finally realizes this. Hopefully, others will follow.

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Personalizing Your Email Marketing

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dynamic content in email

Recently on the Direct Marketing News Site, Editor-in-Chief Ginger Conlon talked about the positive effect personalization can have on your email marketing efforts. “The sweetest words to anyone is their own name,” she writes. “If you have my name, and you’re a direct marketer, why don’t you use it?”

Every email solution worth its salt at least has the ability to use the first name field somewhere in the mailing. More advanced software can take this one step further by letting you control the sender and reply lines as well—an important feature if the recipients are used to dealing with specific salespeople. Still more sophisticated software will take this even further, allowing you to tailor an email’s content to use any portion of a recipient’s data. Yet, in spite of this, many marketers go out of their way to make their mailings as generic as possible. As Seth Godin has pointed out on numerous occasions, generic means boring, and boring means no sale.

It’s easy to understand where some of the reluctance of marketers to use personalization comes from. When the ability to add demographic data to email was first introduced, many marketers (bad marketers) muddied the field by sticking a person’s first name in nearly every subject line. After a while, subjects like “Jim, look at this great deal!” became synonymous with spam. But personalization is about so much more than sticking a person’s first name in the subject line or at the top of the message. It’s about providing content in each and every email that is specifically relevant to that person alone. Relevancy means not sending generic messages. Relevancy means when people read it, they feel like you are really talking to them.

While you can certainly improve your customer engagement with the simple addition of a first name field to your emails, the key to real personalization is dynamic content. Dynamic content simply means that when it comes time to send email to a person, the software looks for specific information that you’ve entered based on that person’s statistics (demographics). If the demographics say the person likes orange juice, then you may want to say something about orange juice. If the demographics say a person hates orange juice, then any mention of the subject is removed from the email.

The possibilities are endless, but here are a few good ways to use dynamic content to improve reader response:

Location-based offers

Companies with different locations can take advantage of the fact that some recipients are close to certain locations by telling them about nearby site-specific sales or events. There are a few ways to accomplish this depending on the size of the company. State, city, or Zip code information is the easiest way for companies with just a few sites to do this, but if it is a company with many locations all over the country (or the world, for that matter), a site (or store) number field is the best way to accomplish this. Another advantage of using the store number field is if a client prefers to visit a certain location, regardless of its proximity to their actual address. For example: I live down the street from a CVS store, but I never go there. I go to the one near where I work, which is several miles from my home. A coupon for the store near my house might entice me to visit, but one for the location near my office will have a better chance of drawing me in.

Membership privileges

If a person has membership or a similar preferred status, your email should reflect this. Two of the most favorably received types of email are those that make people feel “special” and those that impart “secret” information. Email directed at members accomplish both of these at once. You can also use this information to create unique user coupons, either as components of the email, or dynamic barcodes. If your company has a membership and you are not using that information to advance sales, you are ignoring a strong potential sales channel.

Gender and age specifics

This is almost a no-brainer. Gender and age are two of the most important variables when it comes to assembling an email message. Men don’t buy the same things as woman, and older people don’t have the same needs as teenagers. You can send everyone on your list the same email, but that’s the quickest route to the trash folder. Sending a single man an email about your back-to-school specials might not make sense, whereas a family with kids will certainly want to hear about it. Sometimes this can be handled with segmentation, but if you are tracking a specific event (such as a company-wide sale), then you may want one email to cover it.

Conclusion

In the end, people want email that pertains to them. If they feel like you are only pretending to do this then they are going to tune you out. The careful use of dynamic content will let you create email that speaks to each recipient individually, which, in turn, increases the potential for engagement. With careful and sensible dynamic content use, you can make sure that each person receives the email that best matches their needs and desires, and, in the end, isn’t that what we all want?

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Dynamic Barcodes

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Create Dynamic Barcodes with Goolara Symphonie

Goolara Symphonie now supports the ability to create and add barcodes to email from within the software. If you need to generate coupons, passes, or other barcoded email, now you can do this without ever leaving Symphonie. But that’s only the tip of iceberg. Symphonie also lets you create dynamic barcodes. Using a recipient’s demographics, you can create tailor-made barcodes that contain a customer’s vital statistics or other unique information, helping you control the use of the coupons you send out.

There are many different types of barcodes. Symphonie features some of the most popular, including:

UPC, DataMatrix, Code 128, and QR Code samples

We may add additional choices to the list from time to time if there are other codes that prove to be popular.

As a coupon production and control technique, dynamic barcodes are hard to beat. Possible uses include the ability to create use once or limited use coupons based on:

  • Coupon recipient
  • State or city
  • Specific store branch
  • Customer status (member, VIP, etc.)
  • Age
  • Date range

There are three ways to segment email campaigns: per customer, by pool, or with a limited data range. Here are some ideas for using these features.

Dynamic Barcodes by Individual Customer

Customers with robust POS systems can take full advantage of dynamic barcodes, assigning a unique code to each customer. This code may contain any of the demographics about a recipient, and is a great way to keep track of coupon usage and to compare current and past shopping patterns. It also makes it easier to control the use of the coupons in situations where online copying might by unwanted.

In the example below, a customer’s ID number is included as part of the barcode:

Example showing dynamic barcodeOnce the customer uses the coupon, that information goes into your system, providing plenty of additional information about the customer and their purchasing habits, allowing you to further refine your marketing strategy.

If your POS system cannot handle that much information, there are a simpler alternative uses for the dynamic barcode feature that are also quite powerful.

Dynamic Barcodes by Pool

If individual customer information is more than your POS system can handle, an effective alternative is to generate a few barcodes based on specific demographics (e.g., state, membership level, age group, etc.). Now you are only working with a few codes. The software determines who gets which coupon based on recipient demographics. You can also use this feature with specific number ranges to add customer specific information without overloading your system (see below)

Limited Number Range Dynamic Barcodes

Individually numbered barcodes are a useful addition to codes that don’t contain specific customer information. After the coupons are used the barcode numbers are paired up with specific customers. This is easily accomplished and we can work with you to facilitate this solution as well. We will use the number range you specify and send a list that identifies which customer received which number. In this way, even basic POS systems can compete with more advanced systems when it comes to identifying customer buying patterns. As long a system can keep track of one variable number, we can provide the rest. Please call for more information.

If you’ve used barcodes already, then you know what a valuable tool they are for marketing and sales purposes. If you are new to barcodes, Wikipedia has a good explanation of what they are and how they work; also please download the latest version of the user manual, or contact us for more information.

For more information on Dynamic Barcodes, click here.

For more information on Goolara Symphonie, click here.

For more information on Dynamic Content, click here.