Common Email Marketing Mistakes
Email campaigns are still the best way to communicate with your customers and keep them informed of news or updates on the products or services you offer. In order to keep engaging with your customers you need to make sure they find the emails they receive relevant and engaging, if you fail this, your doing nothing more than irritating them and possibly ruining your brands reputation. Making sure to follow a few simple steps can keep your reputation in tip top condition.
1. Always make sure to include a sender name
As you can see from the gmail inbox snippet, LunaTickets has chosen to not add a sender name on it's campaigns. When coming through on my phone, instead of seeing who it's from before opening I'll see do-not-reply.
2. Always provide a link to a web page version
I could think of 10-20 different senders who always miss out the "view as webpage" link. Not only does this make it difficult to view in a browser. It also stops people linking directly to a campaign within facebook, twitter etc, stopping it from being shared.
3. No matter how you gained them, provide an easy way to lose them.
Your email will never be able to interest everybody who receives it and there will always be someone who wants to unsubscribe. Makes sure not to side this from them. Keep a clear unsubscribe link in the footer for anyone who needs it.
4. Make sure your campaign isn't 100% image based.
Although their campaigns are visually nice to look at, practicality wise eBuyers campaigns are usually completely image based, meaning that they take a long time to load on a mobile browser, even when using 3G. Breaking the images up and doing something similar to Firebox's campaigns would reduce loading times and also allow the campaign to still be read if images were disabled.
5. Test, Test then Test again.
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6. Keep a clear objective.
Make sure you know exactly what you want the recipient of your email to do. If your offering something to your readers, make sure they know what or where to click to claim the offer. If your providing information, keep it simple and get a few people to read it and make sure they can understand the message your trying to convey. A good example of this is the TopMan newsletter which gives one feature in the main content, giving the user a very limited option of where to click within the email.
Do we really need myspace?
Myspace used to be the number 1 social networking website, but now it's almost scary how quickly it's declining in popularity. Myspace was a platform targetted at the younger generations, and up until the past couple of years it worked. Hitwise stats released last month with a comparison of MySpace and Facebook and they don't paint a pretty picture for Myspace.
Less is more.
That's the approach Facebook took when developing their system, it was a winner not only with the former myspace users, but also with older generations, some who, before now had never heard or used social networking. Professional high profile businesses would never, in a million years have dreamt of publicising a corporate myspace page, facebook had a universal clean design that also provided a platform to easily stay in touch with it's fans. In recent months myspace has realised this and started pushing newer layouts and suggesting profile themes to help avoid seizure inducing animated backgrounds and music interupting the music you was most likely listening to before you loaded the page.
There is one thing
Myspace has one good thing over Facebook and that is it's connection with bands and music. Myspace has well over 15 million signed and unsigned bands and the url for these bands is usually always put on promotional material at gigs or festivals. Why hasn't facebook done the same? Well the straight forward answer is, it's not what facebook was designed for, and I don't think they ever will. Myspace is clearly heading to becoming primarily a music and artist website.
My prediction
Probably a bold statement to make, but in my opinion I predict Myspace will loose users to the point that users will eventually all move over to facebook as a way to keep in contact with friends, but users will still stick with myspace for music until something better comes along.
