The three pillars of commercial email law in Australia and New Zealand are the same in both countries – have consent, identify yourself, and have a functioning and actioned unsubscribe facility.

This week the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has issued Tiger Airways (a Singapore Airlines backed operator) with an $110,000 infringement notice — for failing to unsubscribe customers from marketing emails.  Tiger must now launch a program of audits, reviews, training and process to improve their email practices.

This follows similar action and outcome last year when Virgin Blue was fined for having an unsubscribe link that malfunctioned over a relatively short period of time.

‘This is one of a number of investigations in which the ACMA has found businesses have allowed faulty unsubscribe facilities to continue, in spite of repeated customer complaints,’ said ACMA Deputy Chairman Richard Bean.

‘This action is another reminder to businesses that they should pay attention to what their customers are saying, test their email unsubscribe facilities regularly, and not simply set and forget them. Tiger has now committed to ensuring its unsubscribe facilities are functional and effective.

‘Marketing to customers who have unsubscribed is not only against the law, it causes consumer frustration and that ultimately damages a business’s reputation,’ he added.

The ACMA highlights that marketing to recipients who do not want to receive your emails is not a successful business strategy.  If any of your email recipients are in Australia then it’s probably a great idea to sign up for the ACMA’s emarketing blog.

Action for commercial email breaches in New Zealand is detailed on the website of the Department of Internal Affairs, who manage enforcement of NZ’s UEM Act.

If you have any questions regarding the best practice management of your emarketing databases and mobile and email marketing programs, feel free to post them here and we will answer them here too – or if you prefer, email roanne@jericho.co.nz

“Our rugs will floor you”

This has got to be one of the best subject lines I have seen so far in 2012. Their play on words was so clever I opened and read the whole email even though I have no interest in rugs. If their email subject line had said ‘Rug Sale’ I would have deleted it immediately. Instead, they caught my attention instantly.

The next thing that impressed me about this email was their good use of the pre header text. As you can see in the screenshot, their pre header text matched their subject line, so even though they did repeat the information I knew exactly what the email was about. It’s descriptive yet simple. They also give the option to view text, or text with images which is handy. And they provide a link so people can add them to ‘safe senders’ list. This is a link that we strongly recommend people use if they don’t already.

The body of the email had fantastic graphics that were bright and visually appealing, (Part of which you can see in these screenshots) and like I said I’m not excited by rugs but this email made me want to buy one.

So they have captured my attention, got me excited by their rugs, now they have provided me with a large, colorful, simple, unmissable, call to action. Which I promptly clicked on. (You may recall the importance of a good call to action from our post last week – read it here) See this great call to action in the screenshot below.

Overall this email has all the elements of a well-designed, well thought out, and well tested email. It has a great subject line, makes good use of the pre header text, has attention grabbing content, has a great call to action, and also includes handy links to unsubscribe and connect with them on social media sites at the bottom.

Well done.

We’ve been talking a lot about content lately (and making tools to help) so we were pleased to find this edgy and actionable resource that deals with a fundamental issue affecting businesses.  How to consistently create high quality content that engages, educates, informs and ideally, entertains?

When we ask clients ‘What’s hard?’ about digital marketing, one consistent pain point comes up:  Creating and curating relevant, sharable, high quality content.  Writing is hard.  When we talk to our peers at other agencies, we hear the same thing.

A way to address this critical issue is a fundamental rethinking, restructuring, and re balancing of company culture, resources, budgets and strategy.

This excellent recent report from Altimeter Group introduces a five-step content maturity model, complete with real-world case examples, to move organisations from zero (“standing”) to hero (“running”) with their content strategy.  It includes a useful Content Marketing Maturity self-audit.  It ends with four actionable recommendations, finishing with ‘Design Recombinant Content’…

The report urges us: “Strive to create content that can be redistributed in multiple formats across numerous platforms and channel to maximise value and minimise the resources dedicated to continually creating content from scratch.  Understand how to redistribute and reuse discrete components of longer form content”.

A new seasons product launch for example might turn into a themed landing page, a video, one or more blog entries, tweets and Facebook posts, and an email opt-in incentive in the form a Welcome email reward ‘Join our Inner Circle now and we’ll send you our exclusive How-to-Wear Guide for the 5 must-have pieces for this seasons new looks’.

I strongly recommend that you read this report and consider a content plan for your own business.  Here at Jericho we already have, and it’s a key strategy for working with our clients and in our own business.

Read the report on SlideShare and please share this post with your networks using the icons below. We’d love to see comments below on how you manage, or struggle with, the growing demands for content.

Today we have received a lovely email from Anytime Fitness with a great deal. However we couldn’t really identify said deal from their email…

 Some of our staff go to this gym and they are great, and their staff are lovely. However from the email we received from them today, we identified a few things they could do to improve on their email campaigns.

1) Font color. Their header font is white and their footer font is black. And the blue link in the footer is almost impossible to read. It is always important to ensure that you stay with your brand look and feel, and stick to consistent design, font colors, etc.

2) Font size. This font is OK but any larger and can have the tendency to look like spam. Be aware that the optimal font size is 10 or 12 (This is what we stick to when designing emails) and if it is any bigger it usually gets picked up by spam filters.

3) Watch your use of jargon. Note the sentence “You are able to use your access fob…” Now I have spoken to someone who attends the gym and even they don’t know what the fob is. Always watch your use of jargon.

4) Template. You may have seen some of the stunning templates we get to put together for clients at Jericho. They are structured, have a set width, includes images that catch the eye, they are structured into tables that help certain elements stand out and makes everything easy to read. More importantly, spammers don’t tend to use templates, instead choosing to use line after line of plain text. So this only serves to highlight how this email could have been improved by a template.

5) Centre Aligning. I think this came and went with comic sans.  It is very difficult for people to read so be sure to keep things left aligned.

6) Lack of prominent offer or call to action. We here at the office are struggling to identify what the offer actually is and where to find it in the email. And what do we do now? Where is our clear and simple call to action? One of the most important things to include in your email is information that answers these questions – who is this from, what is it for, what’s in it for me, and what do I do now?

7) Line height. It doesn’t help that the font is large and centre aligned, however we suggest increasing the line height to improve readability.

Contrast. The contrast of black on white generally is quite hard on the eyes – we suggest using a softer colored font, or a subtly colored background.

9) The main thing we noticed was what initially appeared to be Name and contact number fields that hadn’t been filled out correctly. The words in capitals do say ‘your free membership links’ so I was expecting to see links to something that gave me free memberships.  So I thought this was a matter of them not having checked the email correctly before sending. However after looking at the email 10 more times I see that it is actually where I need to input the names of 6 of my friends and then reply to the them with that information… Not many people look through emails more than once, so if they were like me they will miss this entirely. I will now reiterate the importance of having a clear call to action as mentioned in point 6.

10) I will give them this - they had a catchy subject line that was clever and worked well, and the email did pass all the tests on litmus that we ran it through. Litmus is the service that tests your email campaign against all major spam filters and will tell you if it will pass or fail the filters requirements, and gives you grades accordingly. Any number of things can influence this such as having all images or all text, or words such as ‘deal’ free’ sale’ and ‘$’.

So you can see how the little things can make such a big difference. We hope you use this as an opportunity to review your own campaigns and look out for the little things you could do to enhance your emails.

I’m working on a presentation for a Financial Institution  – we’re looking at examples of  campaigns that are doing well, examining what they are finding hard, and presenting ideas that they might take from non-FI email marketing successes.  All BAU, and collecting great examples to discuss is a part of this, so it was coincidental that I was interrupted by the arrival of an email from American Express a few minutes ago.

Last year when AMEX ran a digital promotion, we checked it out and found some things were amiss.  You can read that post here.

This year, there are some improvements (the personalisation is correct) but the key issue is still the same:  it uses the same techniques that phishing scams do. AMEX ask you to enter your credit card number into their form despite the fact that they already use several digits of it in the email as a personalisation field:

My inbox receives phishing spam a lot, and many are hard to tell.  I get messages looking like they are from my own bank, and sometimes they seem to arrive right after I’ve been online banking… spooky but unrelated.  Less experienced customers get caught every day.   To help, there are Govt organisations and sites dedicated to protecting people from scams, like antiphishing.org – who’s article Consumer Advice: How to Avoid Phishing Scams leads with the advice to never enter your account or credit card number…

I just don’t understand why AMEX are playing this again…  Do you?  Here’s the landing page:

Love to hear your comments.

UrbanDaddy do it again.  Taking the ‘daily deal’ and ‘members only’ offer style to the next level – gently gently – with the use of their consistent brand promise, and clever copy.  An exclusive color-way for this sneaker, and only those in the know can get it.

UrbanDaddy Members: $35.  Everyone else: Impossible.

Nice.  No wonder their list grows bigger every day.

Q. What are you doing to make your customers feel like it’s just you and them, and you’re always on the same team.

At Jericho we really believe that’s the case, and try to make our clients feel that way everyday.  If you are one of them, and you think we miss something, tell us here.

GOOP, I love you.

I like your tone, and I like seeing your garden. I like your range of content, the gentleness with which you manage it.

I like that you get drunk and forget all about the pizza in the oven.

If you are into spying like I am, then sign up for GOOP’s weekly newsletter.  There is a lot to learn from this great example of email marketing. It breaks lots of rules.  E.g. It’s too long.  It’s a bit random. It’s personal. And it does it with aplomb.

How could it improve? Add Share to Social links in each email so I can spread your goodness.  Put your logo on the top of the newsletter so I can get back to your site easily.  Cross reference from one issue to another to remind me that there is a lot of great content that came before.  And add search to your site so that I can find more recipes, or more great shops.

To see the result of G’s pizza incident – and her recipes for pizza in the garden see this one.

Do you have any favourite emails?  Tell me…

Sometimes when you are looking at a blank page and trying to create your next fantastic customer communication, it can feel like you are sitting alone in a vacuum.  But it’s worth remembering that there are a number of people on the planet doing really great email marketing.  And you can learn from them… I call it ‘spying‘. (P.S. You never need to stare at a blank page if you have a good plan)

I just sent these two examples to a friend whose large organisation is doing a clean, sterile, well designed, ticks the boxes, boring, wouldn’t-care-if-you-never-saw-it-again, no one really applies what they read, type of a thing.  Their products are HOT.  They have HOT customers, doing incredible things with those products, and sharing what they do everywhere… but inexplicably, it’s nowhere to be seen in their eDM.

Here are the two:

NZ Gardener

Get Growing aims to ‘grow new gardeners’ and in doing so, sell more magazines.  It is a much-loved phenomenon and it’s sent to 25,000 people each week.

What they do really well: It’s so personal.  The heart of this success is it’s heart.  Warm, non-threatening, collegial (gardening isn’t scary, let’s try this together)…  Sharing readers questions and answers makes for great genuine content (bonus – you don’t have to write it!).   Listing current events and prizes keeps the ‘open rates’ consistent.  Timing - sending on Friday afternoon makes it a treat for the weekend. They always encourage opt-ins and pass-along.  Yes, I know you are thinking – it’s so LONG! It is, and the readers LOVE it! (Disclosure - GetGrowing uses SmartMailPro).

Love gardening? You can subscribe to NZ Gardener here.

Urban Daddy

I came across Urban Daddy when I was going to Miami a couple of years ago and I wanted to know what was hot there.  The content, tone, and attitude, as well as the execution and consistently has just outperformed anything I’ve seen like it.  It’s one you need to subscribe to and keep an eye on week in and week out until you ‘get’ the gist.

What they do really well: Like NZ Gardener they bring it to you, they don’t make you work for it.  Heart and passion for the subject matter shines through.  Great content that is curated in the right way each time so that you build trust in their opinion and follow their advice (tag line – ‘Only what you need to know’).  Trust is established with footer text in every issue (‘Urban Daddy is purely editorial – you can’t buy love from the Daddy’).  Great voice, tone, manner, meeting expectations, personalising with strong  but virtually invisible use of dynamic content and preferences.  Need more?:

Email issues.  This page is insanely good and I’ve never seen one like it – it links from the bottom of their home page – Email Issues

You can subscribe to Urban Daddy here.  its worth it even if you don’t live in the States just to learn from and enjoy.

Their Welcome Email is great – below: Restates your options and sets expectations; use of red carpet and language evokes exclusivity; specifically invites pass-along; simple.  It’s ‘oh so’ personal.  Also note it doesn’t ask for the double opt-in – if you have registered they assume you want it.  I think this is fine in cases where you are clearly registering for an email newsletter – not entering a competition, asking for a down-load or other ancillary activity.

What do you think?  Love it?  Hate it? Comment below.  Forward me your favourites - Attn Roanne to GetSmart at Jericho.co.nz

There are more good examples of Welcome Emails to be seen at another GetSmart blog post here.

Had an email sent through yesterday from my friend bwagy who’d been frustrated by a newsletter he couldn’t unsubscribe from.

The email, from a legitimate well-known marketing company, didn’t have an unsubscribe link on the bottom,  it said this at the top:

So, he clicked through to opt-out – but came to this screen, otherwise known as the old login brick wall:

But he didn’t know his password, so he hit ‘junk’ and hoped he wouldn’t see the email again.   Next month, the email arrived in the inbox again.  This is likely to be because the email was sent off a range of IP addresses, and it was from a different one this time, that’s pretty common for smaller databases/senders.

But he still didn’t know his password.  So he clicked Reset it.

The password email never came, or so he thought.  Next day, he told me aha! found it in his junk folder.  Now he could login, change his details, and get off the list. But he’s left frustrated and a bit cross at the messy ‘break up’, palpably colouring the way he feels about the brand.

Moral of the story: unless you have defensible, private information stored in your clients profiles, don’t make them login to update their communication preferences.  Either use a token to log them right on in there, or chuck that login on the fire, and instigate a quick, one click failsafe unsubscribe – click, you are off.  Made a mistake? okay, click to resubscribe.

In marketing it’s so smart not to burn bridges, and when it’s over, you need to let them go.

There  are more comprehensive posts on how to manage unsubscribes here:

4 Tips to improve and minimise email unsubscribes

Unsubscribe don’t send hate mail

Happy to unsubscribe in 30 steps…

Questions? Examples?  Opinions?  Post a comment or fire them over to our team at Jericho.

It’s great to dissect retail email marketing campaigns to look for ideas.  In past Jericho blog posts I’ve called it spying .  Because I’m an online shopper, I received this targeted campaign from Countdown last week.   Countdown is our local supermarket chain.

‘Shop online and Win an iPad’.

But wait a second…

‘Shop online anytime in the next month and win a 1st Gen iPad’?

Now my consumer and marketer hats do a quick switch, I’m reading and I’m scratching my head.

Why can’t I win a new one?

Why spend multiple thousands of dollars on this campaign to win the superseded model?

As you are reading this, it’s likely we are a lot like you – we have at our core a focus on the ‘art’ of email marketing as well as the science.  So we remind clients and prospective clients many times a day that it costs the same to send an ugly email campaign as it does to send a great email campaign… But the real cost is that of missing the sweet spot – misses hit you in the brand and directly in the pocket.

Or in this case, for the sake of a couple of hundred bucks, every time more money is spent to bring eyeballs to this campaign over the next month Countdown are going to look off the boil, off the ball, so… like.. last month, and yes a little bit cheap.

Everything looks spot on in this eDM campaign, and other than the iPad it’s a great example of a retail email campaign.

Here at Jericho, we love our 1st Gen iPad’s.  But we ‘covet’ the new one.  What do you think?  How much cooler would this campaign be if we were in to win a 2nd Gen iPad?  Worth the extra 1% of budget?