everything flows » email

How to email a CEO

Luke Rodgers — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:20:18 +0000

Karen Gedney has some good tips on emailing CEOs (and other high-ranking officials within an organization) in C-Level Event Invitations: How It’s Done.

Probably her best advice, though, is that email should be a backup to your personalized letter or courier package. If email is all you send, you’re unlikely to get through.

No video in email for 2009

Luke Rodgers — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:22:29 +0000

Campaign Monitor has a nice writeup of some research into the current state of including video in email. Basically, the verdict is not good, which should come as a surprise to no one involved in email communications. Confirming a recent post from MailChimp, the CM people state that, for now, animated gifs are probably the only (more or less) reliable way to go.

How not to do a call to action

Luke Rodgers — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:00:04 +0000

As any email marketer knows, your call to action is a crucial element of your campaign. When tweaking your text can double your conversion rates, you can’t afford to ignore it. Even a 5% increase in conversion rates can translate into huge sales if you’re talking about thousands of customers.

So why PayPal, a company who you might think would know better, would use this confusing and non-clickthrough-inspiring call to action text is beyond me.

Though the analytics of the campaign will of course be the final arbiter, I can’t imagine many people being inspired to “shop smarter now.” Not only was the email fairly unintelligible with images turned off (a big design no-no), but the call to action was so vague and un-motivating that I instantly hit “delete” when I saw the actual copy.

Thoughts such as “I already shop online,” “why would I buy anything from paypal?”, “paypal sells things now?” and “I’m at work, and don’t want to be shopping” ran immediately through my head–not the kind of things you want potential customers to be thinking.

Actually clicking on the button takes you to a really slow-loading “campaign redirect” landing page, which then takes you to another slow-loading product shopping page. No deals, no prominent explanation.

I can only hope for PayPal’s sake that they were running an A/B split, or perhaps even an A/B/C/D split, and I got the worst copy of all the offerings.