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All About Email - The Last Word in Email Publishing

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Why are you selling this?

Many retailers who use email as a marketing channel send their customers a weekly shot of offers. I like the idea. In principle.

But their is a perception danger which seems to get overlooked, especially when those offers appear very good. "Why are you selling these, and how come they are available at such good prices"

In other words, is this just a load of unsold crap you need to offload quickly on us poor unsuspecting punters?

Now that may very well be the case, but it's not advisable to say so. Rather than giving the impression this is something you want to sell, you have to presnt your weekly offers in such a way as to craete demand, and highlight yourself as a valued supplier to that demand.

There are three basic strategies for doing this:

1. With every email, emphasise and re-emphasise your mission - to deliver great product at great prices to your favourite customers - you email ones

2. Underline that these offers are only available by email and to email recipients

3. Theme the offers - provide a reason for them to appear in this weeks email.

It should be marketing 101, but for some reason many email markeetrs ignore it, and give their audience the entirely wrong impression - every week.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

That missing email!

Sorry, it ended up in my spam folder!

This is now in line for the most overused and underbelieved excuse of 2011.

Three times last week I heard this - from three separate clients, none of whom had ever previously had an email of mine land in their spam folder before.

By some strange quirk of fate, all 3 emails dealt with a similar subject - invoices, and remarkably all were overdue, unpaid invoices.

It falls into the "cheque's in the post" class of excuses, and curiously enough that's what two of these clients went on to claim.

In short, it is now so unbelievable that everyone automatically assumes it is a lie. I mean, nothing, especially from a trusted source, goes into the spam folder now, does it?

We have to presume spam filters work, at least to a degree, don't we?