The Roses Only gang, full of pent up emotion, longing and love, finally cracked yesterday and let me know just how they feel about me

They sent me a lovely email telling me how much they missed me.  Bless!

It just about brought a tear to my eye. I had to fight off the overwhelming urge to track them down and hug every last damn one of them and reassure them that yes, I still care.

It's not often you see a re-activation campaign. Behavioral segmentation seems to be either a completely foreign concept or some other language to most marketers.  So it's good to see some publishers take this seriously, and do a nice job of it.

The copy was light hearted, emotional and engaging:

We miss you!
You haven’t sent a gift with us for a while, and we’re sure your loved ones miss the gifts you used to send them.

We’d like to remind you of the good times we’ve had – the smiles, the tears of joy when the Roses Only gift would arrive at the door.

This was nicely followed up with their usual engaging offers in a very clean and simple to navigate layout.  

Although still a little long, the CTA's are nice a big and the offers are very nicely chosen so you forgive the fact you have to scroll a way to see it all.

You also forgive the fact that the online version contains a bunch of special characters where the apostrophe's should be...

Overall, a nice example of how to keep your database engaged and feeling all warm and fuzzy.

Feeling the love?  Want to start sharing it?  How about dropping us a line and seeing how we can help you get all lovey with your database.

Roses Only is, strangely enough, an online flower shop. Their great but very restrictive brand name apparently led to them creating a number of other 'Only' flavoured stores - Hampers, Fruit and Sparkling.

One of the things they've always done well is present nice, clean, crisp imagery in a well laid out message. Their current offer is a great example.

Subject: Ed, Red Hot Special - 15% off everything!!

While definitely attention grabbing, the subject line would skirt the boundaries of 'spammy' had it not been paired with a well known 'From' address.

A very clean layout, starting with the banner text and black on white, high contrast copy makes it very easy to read and gets straight to the point.

Areas of improvement though would be perhaps making the CTA's a little more prominent. In the same vein, the promotional code is almost lost in the rest of the copy.

One of the things done really well, and that's not seen as often as it should be, is the small link in the header to a mobile version of the email.

Which links to a simple, lean, text only version of the same email:

Which, ironically, due to the nature of text only formatting, has more prominent CTA's than it's big brother.

Nice! Now I'm off to order some gifts :)

Drop us a line if you like some tips on improving your holiday campaigns.

Recently we had a customer ask us to provide best practice advice for a registration process.

So we recommended a number of improvements to their form. Among them was the suggestion of employing a double opt-in system. This got us thinking about making sure you all know how this works and why it's a good reason to start using it today.

A quick recap on how this process works is as follows:

1. A registration form is completed
2. A confirmation email is sent to stated email address
3. The recipient clicks on the link in the email to confirm their subscription

That's all there is to it. Nice and simple!

The benefits of this process are:

1. The recipient can verify that the email address supplied is correct and that they own it
2. The recipient has a chance to add this address to their contact or safe senders lists
3. The sender now has a valid email in their database

Our studies show that an average of about 78% of double opt-in emails are validatated (clicked through). The reasons for this are obvious - you have the registrants' attention. They're telling you that they want to join your list and will do what you ask.

The remaining ~20% are usually invalid addresses - which you didn't want anyway.

So the net result, either way is that you'll end up with a perfectly validated, qualified subscriber.

What more can you ask for?! :)

Now it doesn't necessarily have to follow this exact process. There are a number of ways that the end goal of the double opt-in process can be achieved to make it less troublesome or complicated.

For example

A creative way to employ this validation process is to integrate it with your registration process. This means breaking up the registration into two parts.

Step 1 - Basic rego info

• Email (validated using javascript and/or double entry)
• First name
• Last name
• Salutation*
• Post/Zip Code*

You can ask for more but we'd suggest keeping it to these 5. (*you can extrapolate gender and geographic location from these). At the very least, ask for email and first name.

Then you send a confirmation email which asks for validation and sends them onto part 2 of the process on the validation links' 'Thank You' page.

Stage 2 - more info

Here's where you can ask for the extra info that you may have left out of step 1 and then ask for other relevant information such as preferences or other demographic data.

Of course some type of incentive works best. But sometimes just a reminder that you can give the subscriber a better quality service if they give up this information is enough.

In all cases remember one important rule. Only ask for the information you need, when you need it.

For more tips and hints, feel free to drop us a line.

Nicks Wine Merchants - Vintage Direct is a large Aussie online liquor vendor. They do a great job of making me part with my hard earned $$ in my ongoing quest to build a decent Single Malt Scotch collection.

I enjoy my Scotch neat. But neat is not a word I'd necessarily use to describe these emails. Whilst there are a lot of quite nice things that they're doing such as having a clear banner image and branding, a prominent offer (Free delivery on orders over $200) and a table of contents (that doesn't link anywhere), there's a few things that I think could be done a little better.

Subject: Issue No. 435 - Nicks Newsletter

The first area to look at is the header and intro. You normally have around 250 pixels of 'above the fold' space to work with. (A separate debate on whether 'the fold' is relevant will be had in a future post.)

But it seems that there's a little bit of a waste going on here - with about 5 lines of instructions before the banner starts. A little too much I think!

Secondly, the introductory article or feature is massive. We normally suggest that less is more when it comes to copy in an email. This is is definitely on the 'more' side. While not a huge issue when it comes to communicating the message, the problem is that we're missing out on some important clickthrough information. I'd imagine that for Nicks, like with any retailer, enriching your database with customer clickthrough information (ie, leads!) is a huge benefit of online and email.

Just like the finish on an old peaty Islay Malt, this email goes on forever! There's about 7 full page lengths of content crammed into the one piece of communication.

It begs the question. Why is there a need to cram so much into the one email? I'm sure that a simple introduction to each of the 9 (!!) featured items with a click for more and a 'Buy Online' button would have sufficed. Were short and long versions tested?

I'm wondering why it doesn't seem important to collect information on those that have expressed interest by clicking through on a product - and not necessarily gone ahead and purchased. One would think that a re-campaign to that segment with a special offer would yield some nice results.

And it's not just in the articles that we're missing clickthoughs. I'd really like to have seen the header image click though (especially when it contains a web address). Perhaps also having the site related nav elements - Your Account, Login etc up the top near the header would have been handy.

The shame is that the link to their email service provider is one of the most attractive and best executed CTA's in the whole email...

I'll bet you a Laphroaig 25 Year Old that we can't help you improve your next email campaign! Just drop a comment or contact us!