Email Marketing Fail from Monsoon this morning

I don't shop for fashion very often on the High Street these days. This is partly due to fashion overload from my 10 years spent in fashion retail and my love of a second-hand bargain from eBay, a charity shop or my Mum.

There's also this small thing of not knowing what the right price is to pay for something and the potential of triggering 'buyer's remorse'. It's a horrid feeling to buy something and then find out you could have got it a lot cheaper the next day or in the next door shop. With the proliferation of promotional offers, never-ending sales and discount days, it's difficult to know what is the 'right' or 'fair' price to pay for something. My Mum also passed on her bargain hunting gene to me so I can't help but look for the yellow stickers in Marks & Spencer's food department!

My love of a bargain sometimes leads me to the Monsoon Accessorize Sample Sale. Non-UK readers may not know the brands. They're ladies and children's fashion brands at mid-range price, generally good quality, fashionable but not overly fashion-forward. Historically, they were known for great-priced evening wear but they've moved on from that (although that's still a big part of what they sell in Holiday Season).

I've been to their Sample Sale a couple of times and got a few things there and I'm on the mailing list. And the email dropped this morning to let me know that their next sale is on 21st and 22nd September. This is the image I received.

Umm, Monsoon - where is the event? It would be nice to know! The image didn't even click through to a website. (FWIW, I'm guessing it's at The American Church in London again, but I could be wrong.)

Lessons learned today:

• Even the big, experienced companies get it wrong from time to time
• Make sure all the key data is included in your email flyer, including the location!

Celebrate!

This is a lovely example of well-designed HTML for email marketing. I receive too many emails that are completely blank and just show placeholders for images, especially on my mobile phone or tablet. This is what you can do with a bit more thought.

What I don’t know of course, is how it does or doesn’t work on mobile…

Hat tip to @ChrisMear for sharing.

SMS is dead. Long live messaging.

You may be forgiven for thinking mobile marketing is all about adverts on web pages seen on a mobile device or in-app advertising or sponsorship. For those of us who’ve been in the game for longer than we care to remember, SMS started the whole mobile marketing sector off back in 1999 yet it is often overlooked for newer ways to use mobile (i.e. mobile adverts) or for older formats (email, print, TV).

But it isn’t quite dead yet. I still use it – although not nearly as much as I used to. My sister is an avid texter and my nieces are still at it. However, for the first time, there has been a downturn in text messaging in the UK.

The main culprits for the downturn is the rise of messaging services like WhatsApp. It makes sense. As we find other, cheaper, more convenient ways to chat to each other, SMS services will get replaced. Why pay for SMS when you can have WhatsApp for free and you’re paying for mobile data anyway? I suspect Facebook messenger and email also have a part to play in this picture.

Let’s look at this growth with a bit of historical context… According to the Mobile Data Association (and they got their figures direct from the network operators), annual consumer usage 1999-2009 was as follows:

1999 - 1 billion; 2000 - 6.2 billion; 2001 - 12.2 billion; 2002 - 16.8 billion; 2003 - 20.5 billion; 2004 - 26 billion; 2005 - 32 billion; 2006 - 41 billion; 2007 - 56.9 billion; 2008 - 78.9 billion; 2009 96.8 billion

As you can see from the graph, SMS was still growing, year-on-year, at a healthy pace in 2010 and 2011. And even though there has been a drop-off, we’re still looking at about 120 billion SMS every year in the UK or thereabouts. That’s 4.5 times more than what we were using 10 years ago. That’s a lot of SMS.

So let’s not dismiss SMS quite yet. When you look at the annual figures, they’re still very healthy so I encourage you to think about SMS as part of your marcomms effort. After all, plenty of your customers are still using it and there may still be value in connecting with them via SMS – especially for customer service – another area often overlooked.

What is particularly exciting for us mobile marketers though, is how much activity is happening on mobile devices. Check out that email figure – 65% of us are accessing email on our smartphones. It really is huge. So if you haven’t ‘gone mobile’ yet, I really think it might be time for you to do so.

I was asked a few years ago what my advice would be to the first time mobile-marketer in terms of ‘going mobile’ and I said to make sure their email marketing was mobile friendly. I think the advice still stands. If you do nothing else in mobile, please make sure your email works on handsets – and test for lower end devices. Not everyone has the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy!

Today’s spammers are…

I don’t have time to name and shame all the email spam I get but I will continue to highlight a few in the hope that it might actually make a difference and make the industry sit up and take notice and change their ways of doing business and running campaigns. It feels like there is a complete disregard of consumers as *real* people. These companies are suffering from TDC, aka Thinly Disguised Contempt – often seen in retail environments but is now spilling over into digital. They seem to have forgotten that *data* isn’t just *data*. It is actually attached to someone real, with a heartbeat and thoughts and feelings and who is ‘not just a number’ or a record on the database. It’s not just about conversion rates and click throughs and a numbers game. This is about real live people. And these email spam companies are wasting real live people’s time, bandwidth and testing their patience.

So an update on Daily Picture / Mikkelsen Media. Their UK MD did call me an did apologise and did assure me I’d been taken off the database. He even rang me to check that I hadn’t got anything from them. So I thought, ok, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt…. And then today, they send me more junk email. If their systems are so broken that an email address cannot be removed from the database, they have no business in sending out any emails at all I would suggest.

And another new spammer on the list is Cabestan who allegedly do email campaigns for the likes of Symantec. Well they send me an email to a *completely made up address* today selling me life cover so this is very much a consumer-based service not a work-related one so consumer laws do apply as I understand it.

Here’s the small print from the email:

Click is a brand licensed to Castle Publicity International Ltd registered in Gibraltar, company registration number (84755) at 932 Europort. Click Financial Ltd is the service provider for Castle Publicity International Ltd. Click Financial Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority, registered number 311877. Registered in England and Wales at: Click House, Bear Lane, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7LG. Registered Number: 04183791.
*Policies from £2.50 a month, premium subject to individual circumstances.

If you don't recognize who used the Cabestan UK service to send you a given message, you can report it to us as spam by sending it to abuse@cabestan.co.uk. We receive, investigate, catalog, and take action based on these complaints. If you're worried that we would simply "list wash" your address without further investigation, feel free to report the message to whatever spam reporting entity you feel most comfortable working with. Spamcop at www.spamcop.net provides an easy way to report unwanted mail as spam.

Interesting that they suggest I tell spamcop. I’ve emailed them and suggested reporting them to the Information Commissioner.

Spam, spam and more spam. Companies like these are spoiling it for legitimate email marketers and will ultimately make email marketing, and arguably email itself, a very unattractive proposition indeed.

Technorati Tags: spam,email spam,junk email,spammers,email marketing

And today’s spammers are

Trifle Solutions I’ve tried to get off Shahida Afzal’s list for at least a year to no avail. And of course there’s no-one to speak to to sort it out. Let’s see if the message I left gets actioned.

Vitesse Media – these guys have bought a dud email address as it’s one I don’t actively use. Shame on the email sales house who sold it to them.

Fleet Vehicle Tracking – ditto

The National Business Awards which is run by  CMP Information also used not one but *three* dud email addresses using one of my domains. They’re an information house. They sell this data on. It’s ridiculous. They’re selling out of date, made-up data and there’s no way to tell the difference between good data and bad.

Message Takers – particularly insidious as it’s disguised as a personal email from someone who sounds like he’s quite high up in business. This could fool some of the more naive SMEs out there.

There’s more email spam and email spammers. Unfortunately.

Email marketing is so very very broken.

Technorati Tags: spam,email spam,email marketing,spammers,junk email

Don’t spam me please otherwise I’ll get nasty

and write about you here. You have been warned.

I’ve had enough of DailyPicture. I get rubbish from them every day in my inbox. I’ve no idea how or when or if I ever signed up to their email list. I routinely unsubscribe every day and it’s never worked as they keep sending me spam email. This has been going on for weeks, if not months. And I’ve had enough already. I don’t like email spam or email spammers. Wasting my time and wasting my bandwidth.

There are no contact details on their website. The only clue as to who they’re owned by is in their Terms and Conditions which says they’re owned by Mikkelsen Media.

So I call Mikkelsen Media to find out how to unsubscribe. Someone answers the phone. I say ‘Please can you tell me how to unsubscribe from Daily Picture as I press the unsubscribe button every day but you still keep sending me sh1t’ [Excuse the French, but I’m really cross about this]. Her answer, in a fairly disinterested, I get this all the time, kind of manner, ‘oh, I think it’s broken, I’ll look into it’. And as far as she was concerned that was the end of the conversation. I just managed to get a word in before she hung up to ask her why she hadn’t taken down my details and that if something didn’t happen, I’d be reporting them to the Information Commissioner for breaking the rules. So reluctantly, she took down my email address. What she will do with it, who knows.

Let’s see if I still get spam email tomorrow then…

Technorati Tags: spam,email,junk email,spam email,spammers,data privacy

Is the Love Letter doomed in our digital age?

The National Trust seems to think that it might be as we’re swapping the old fashioned pen and paper for very short ‘I luv u’ messages instead. Now that would be a shame. Admittedly, it’s over 20 years since I had a proper love letter. In fact, I got three in three days from the same handsome boy I was dating at the time (Mark Hickson, where are you? All is forgiven!) but then we didn’t have mobile phones or computers and I was also sharing a landline with about 30 other people in a Hall of Residence in deepest New Cross. And clearly he was thinking about me. A lot. I still have those letters and they’re a lovely thing to keep.

And it got me wondering if text messages or an email means as much as those letters mean to me or if they’re seen as throwaway and disposable as much of the rest of our modern lives seem to be? And can we ‘keep’ and ‘treasure’ emails and texts in the same way that I have kept a bunch of old letters from friends, family and loved ones? I wonder if services like Treasuremytext are the answer?

The National Trust has surveyed 2,500 of our Great British public and come up with some interesting factoids.

Andrew McLaughlin, head of communications at The National Trust, says, "In today's age of easy and instant communication, written letters and carefully crafted poems aren't as important as they once were, but if anything that makes genuine love letters more valuable rather than less.

In comparison, text messages and emails just don't cut it, I'm afraid. Our survey shows that people would still love to receive carefully written letters or poems, but just don't make time to write them.

Fortunately, while we may have lost practice, we haven't forgotten the letters and poems which once made Britain one of the most romantic countries in the world. Among the thousands of writings we have on display at properties up and down the country, the love letters are always among the most popular and say far more about somebody's life than almost anything else."

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: love,love letter,letter,sms,email,national trust

Tips and hints on marketing via email to blackberry users

Yes, it's true. Blackberry is addictive. Some say that it's as addictive as hard drugs. In fact, once you have email on your phone (I use gmail for mobile) then it really is addictive, but it's a very different experience from the pc or laptop based version. Personally, I use gmail on my phone to take a cursory glance at my inbox to see if there's anything really important in there. If there is, the chances are I will call the sender back as it's easier to talk something through than tap it out on the keypad. Or if I do reply on my phone, I use text speak (and all the associated abbreviations and emoticons) which might look a bit odd to the recipient.

Marketing Sherpa has recently completed a report on how key decision making folks are reading their emails and it seems that 64% of them are reading them on blackberries or other mobile devices. This is important news to email marketers.

Marketing Sherpa gives some interesting pointers as to how to make your marketing email mobile and blackberry friendly including using the full URL i.e. http://www.technokitten.com in the message rather than a hyperlink. The chances are the full URL will be 'read' by the email reader as a website and create the hyperlink for the reader. Whereas the link will just give you the link words and will not be a hyperlink.

They also have some information (with a US bias?) about who's using email on their mobile and why, including:

• 38% are ages 18-44 vs 12% for ages 45-64 (so does that mean 60% of survey participants don't use mobile email?)
• 80% access their mobile email at home (yup, guilty as charged)
• 39% admit to checking email while driving their cars (I don't drive, so this doesn't apply to me, I do check it on the bus though).
• 87% access the same email accounts from both their mobile device and through a computer at home or work (yup, that's me - in fact, that's one of the reasons I route all my work email via gmail so I can do precisely this)
• Mobile email users scan their email for important one-to-one messages, leaving the rest for perusal on their PC later (absolutely)
• Sales reps and road warriors are the main mobile email users, but this is going to change in the next six months as the software and pricing becomes more accessible to consumer users.

If you also have a look at GigaOM's roundup of AOL's latest mobile email research (of US customers) there are even more tidbits of info of email usage:

Mobile email:

• 59% of people check email in bed (yup, guilty of this one too!)
• 53% in the bathroom (only while I'm waiting for the bath to fill up)
• 37% are checking email while they drive (don't drive, see above)
• and 12% admit to checking email in church (absolutely not! The phone goes to silent and is put away as soon as I enter a House of God of any denomination).

Who's addicted to email generally:

• Women (16%) are more likely to describe themselves as addicted to email than men (13%), and are actually spending 15 minutes more per day on email than men.

• Forty-three percent of email users check their email first thing in the morning, and 40% have checked their email in the middle of the night. Twenty-six percent admit to checking email on a laptop in bed while in their pajamas.

• Sixty percent of people who email admit to checking their personal email at work an average of three times a day. While only 15% of those who do so have been “busted” by their bosses, 28% say they feel guilty about it.

Read more of the special report for technical guidelines and further hints and tips for marketing via email to mobile devices and you can request a free whitepaper on the topic from the folks at Exact Target.

And it seems that emozes is giving RIM (the folks behind Blackberry) a run for their money.