You know how you get to the end of a checkout form, and there is the opportunity to sign up for someone’s email marketing list? Unless you don’t notice it, or you really want to be on the list, you generally don’t check it; after all, who needs more email? So stick with me and see what I saw today.

Here I am, working on DataBazaar’s website (they sell printer ink). And as part of that process, I am pretending to buy a product.

So I get to the end of the checkout process, and instead of saying, “Please add me to your mailing list,” it says, “Please send me money saving coupons.” Talk about great writing for the web. Lots of people have email marketing lists that include coupons, but they tend to be worded in your average boring way: “Please notify me of upcoming coupons via your weekly email newsletter.” (I actually got that one off a competitor’s website.)

Do other people have great ways of asking customers to sign up for their email marketing (that work?) I’d love to hear.

Robbin

I really notice lousy email subject lines and offers when I finally see good ones.

I opted in (by accident) to the email list of my favorite national clothing store. They have no e-commerce capabilities, so all email has the goal of driving the reader to the bricks and mortar location. They bore the reader with subject lines and no-offers like, “Shine this season at [our store]” and “Suede, Denim and more now at [our store].”

The company makes it worse by sending the whole ad in one picture. Many email programs, like Thunderbird or Outlook, may not open up the picture unless you click on the “show me the pictures” button (requiring yet another click. And clicks are precious.)

This week, though, their mail carried the subject line, “Hurry! Take an additional 20% off already reduced merchandise!” Not only did I open it, not only did I click to see the picture, but I printed it out and put it in my bag so that I could redeem the coupon.

You don’t always have to do a sale to get noticed. I only got onto this mailing list by asking them to please tell me when their brushed cotton winter pants came into stock. So even a nice little personalized text message about product availability would have been more interesting to me than another email about what fabrics they had in stock. “Sale – New Reductions Just Taken” would have been so much more compelling if it had been written, “Limited Time Sale! 50% off selected merchandise.” It really was a 50% sale, so the offer was compelling but the subject line fell flat.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Personal, one-to-one email should be one of the best ways to convert an individual. You have the opportunity to customize everything about the message. Yet I am still awed at how badly people do this. Websites are hard. Mass email is hard. But individual email is easy, it just requires a little bit of attention.

In my first post on this topic, months ago, I moaned about how people don’t write personal subject lines. But even after the email is opened, if you are looking for action, you still have to write something that the recipient cares about.

For example, I recently got an email from a PR firm, asking me to take some action on some web analytic software review. It was your standard press release (item, quote, item, quote, for more info contact..), but the beginning was just personalized enough to make me really read it. It started out like this,

Hi Robbin -

I found your blog while conducting research on industry influencers in web analytics….

Just to see how personal this really was, I wrote the PR guy back and said, “Here is a copy of my recent posting on how people should write press releases now that everyone online reads them — what do you think?” And I was so impressed that the PR guy answered back personally with specific comments. (In fact, here is the link to the white paper he wanted me to review. It is about HBX vs SiteCatalyst. Since I really know SC but don’t know HBX even slightly, I will let you all review it yourselves.)

Compare that to another web analytics blogger who wants to be on my blogroll. His first email to me was something like this:

Dear LunaMetrics blog:

I was wondering if you could check out my blog and if the information sounds useful, potentially put a link up on your blog.

He could so easily have changed the dynamics of his email by writing, “It would be an honor to be included on your blogroll.” He wouldn’t even have to lie and say that he reads me….

I am just always amazed at how we work to convert an individual by email, we take the time to send them a personal note, and then we don’t create the content to make all that effort worthwhile.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

At Pittsburgh’s Web Analytics Wednesday, I told the story of this post whereby I mistook someone’s email address for an alternative website address. Dan Halpern of Duquesne University said, “Why do people circumvent the bots with ‘myname at gmail.com’ text, when they can just encrypt their email address?” He then sent me a link to this email encoder site. (It looks like there are a lot of encoders out there, just type in spambot encoder.)

I tried it and it works (but I don’t know if bots caught onto this one long ago.) Here’s what this particular encoder says about themselves:

This form will allow you to encode your e-mail address through the use of Character Entities, transforming your ascii email address into its equivalent decimal entity. Simply enter your regular e-mail address in the first text box, click the encode button, and then highlight and copy the resulting code produced in the second text box. This encoded e-mail address can be read and translated back into its original ascii text by almost any web browser without any further action on your part. Just replace all instances of your e-mail address on your pages with the code, and you won’t have to worry about spam lists.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

A while back, I did a post on “How to make sure no one replies to your email.” That addressed the issue of personal email that you open up and it looks like a form letter. Today, I’m talking about the opposite problem: someone who writes a personal email (or what looks like a personal email) and then doesn’t take the time to write a subject line that reflects the mail’s one-to-one nature. A lot has been written about testing of subject lines, but that’s generally for mass emailing, where you can split the audience and see what pulls the best. I don’t see that much on how to write personal email, but personal email is often where the sales call begins, especially for high-ticket items and/or in business-to-business companies.

Bad example #1: Last fall, I was hoping to work with the marketing committee of the Web Analytics Association (I still am.) Another web analyst arranged for the co-chair of the committee (at that time) to get in touch with me, and I was probably told the co-chair’s first name, although I promptly forgot it. When the co-chair’s email came through, it looked like this:

From: Firstname Lastname (which I didn’t remember/recognize)
Subject: Time for a chat?

This was a very one-to-one email, but the subject line looked so pink (like spam) that I promptly deleted it. I am posting this example becaue the email came from a high-level executive at a large web analytics company, and I just didn’t understand how someone “in the business” wouldn’t know better.

Bad example #2: This morning, I got email that looked like this:

From: John0700@yahoo.com
Subject: Recommendation from John0700@yahoo.com

This also looked very pink, but my Thunderbird email client does an incredible job of deleting junk mail, so I took a chance and opened it. It might have been personal and it might have been mass generated, but here was the opening:

Hi Robbin Steif,
I was visiting your profile today on blogger.com and thought you could use this for your blog, “Increasing your Website’s Conversion Rate”. Its a good resource for sticking files up on your blog and it doesnt cost anything.

He then went on to give me a link to his site. {I made up this email address, although it is very similar to the one I got.)

Now, maybe this last message was mass generated. If so (and if, as it seems, he was visiting blogs and sending all the blog owners the same message), why wasn’t the subject line, “Your blog,” a subject that would mean something to me.

If I go to a networking event, say, and John Smith tells me about an associate whom I should write, I never send email with “Recommendations from Robbin” or “Let’s talk” in the subject line. The recipient will trash it, 1-2-3, because he doesn’t know me and my subject line is meaningless to him. I work hard to craft a subject line that means something to him, usually, “John Smith gave me your name.” After all, conversion starts with a click.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Last night, I got an email from a new blog service that is going to create an aggregation of Pittsburgh-based blogs. It looked very fishy (and phishy) to me. It was from PittsburghNews@gmail.com and the subject line was “permission to aggregate your blog’s feed. – lunametrics.blogspot.com.” Here are some highlights of the email:

We would like to ask permission to aggregate your blog’s feed. All
you need to do is reply to this email and tell us if it’s okay to use
your feed in our site. To see the initial version of the site go to
PittsburghsNews.

http://pittsburghsnews.com .
(Creative huh?)…

… We only promote aggregated content that we like and we actually have
pretty high standards. Our taste and judgment might be impaired but we
like your blog’s feed items and believe this can only help you get
more readers…

There was no name or phone number attached to the email.

On the one hand, I went on high alert. This was clearly a phishing scheme. On the other hand, I am very interested in blog marketing for myself and my customers, and there were little touches in the writing (like their “Creative, huh?” and “our taste and judgment might be impaired..”) that made me wonder if this might actually be real. So I typed in the URL (no clicking!) and it was for real.

So, why was this legitimate email different from all other legitimate emails?

1) They asked me for something that I thought they didn’t need my permission to do. (In all fairness, I am not a lawyer. So, I forwarded the question this morning to Mike Madison, who pretends to be a professor of law, specializing in intellectual property at the University of Pittsburgh, but who is really a blogger. Read Mike’s legal response.)

2) They told me I had won the lottery without applying. Sort of like all those spam emails (and even snail mail) “You’ve won a million dollars, all you have to do is sign here.”

3) They told me that they loved my blog but didn’t indicate why. I was particularly suspicious because it’s a Pittsburgh blog rollup, and I never write about Pittsburgh except to tell local analysts when the Pittsburgh Web Analytics Wednesday is (May 10, 6-8 pm, Panera’s on the Blvd. in Oakland.)

4) It came from a nameless address, the equivalent of noname@gmail.com

5) It wasn’t signed by a real person’s name

6) There wasn’t a phone number in the email

In order to get me to convert, all I had to do was write back and say “Sure.” Ultimately, I did so, but not before spending a long time thinking about how to write email that people trust and will act upon.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Just because this post is about email marketing, don’t think it’s off topic. I try hard to write only about conversion.

Before I sent out my email newsletter yesterday, I personally (i.e. not a blast) wrote all the people who might be interested in being on my list and said, “Are you interested? Here are the details. Don’t be embarrassed to say no, we are all busy people.” Of course, a few people didn’t reply, but those who answered said “Yes!” and usually thanked me for asking first.

So I sent out the newsletter (it was on the topic of scent)… and one recipient, who had heard me speak at a seminar, called me up to ask me to do a project. Send me a contract today, she said.

I learned three things. 1) It never hurts to be polite (my mother taught me that one a long time ago) 2) It never hurts to ask and 3) Remember to keep touching the customer in subtle ways. Conversion comes through lots of different channels.

Robbin Steif, CEO
LunaMetrics