Here we are in the worst economy of our professional lives, and yet every day in my inbox I see marketers making it too hard for subscribers to act on email messages.  If you want to keep your revenue at a lackluster level this quarter, try some of these "sales prevention" strategies – all examples taken from real live messages in our inboxes this week. 

Don’t laugh.  I mean no disrespect.  There are many reasons why marketers don’t always follow best practices. Some of them are legitimate.  However, these practices will take a toll on your sender reputation, inbox deliverability and response rates.  So if you are going to do it anyway, at least know the risks involved.

Review this list of "don'ts" and if you see yourself doing any of these, please reconsider.  Be sure you aren’t actually preventing sales from happening!

(NOTE:  These practices are not good.  They will prevent sales from happening!  Avoid them!)

1.  Put everything into an image.  That way, your subscribers can’t see anything when the email opens, or find the call to action.

2. Hide the links.  Use really soft colors or don’t call them out with highlight colors or underlines. Oh, and don’t put any links on your images, either.

3. Clutter up the template with lots of sidebar offers and secondary news.   Every touch point is an opportunity, so be sure to tell your ENTIRE story in every message.  Don’t let your subscribers focus on the main message, instead, distract them or confuse them into inaction.

4. Make the unsubscribe link in the footer impossible to find. Put it in a really small font.  Bury it in a paragraph of other type.  Call it some other thing, like “Feedback” or “Preferences.”

5. Don’t bother to sign up for ISP complaint feedback loops – easily available from most major North American ISPs.  And if you do get that data, don’t worry about actually using it to clean your file of complainers.  Consider the complainers a bunch of whiners, and don’t review the data to see if perhaps a particular source or type of customer is most likely to complain.  Keep your mailing pace and content the same, even if you realize that it may be untenable to some of your subscribers.

6. Segmentation is for expensive channels.  Even though response and revenue will increase dramatically when targeted messages are sent to key segments, it’s cheap and easy to just blast the whole file.  Take a short term view of this – we need revenue now, and who cares that in future our file will be less valuable.

7. Send a welcome message using a different brand than where the subscriber signed up (e.g.: the corporate brand), and do a lot of heavy selling in it.    Many new subscribers have little knowledge of the products or benefits, so push hard on the sales message even though they have no basis for which to evaluate.

8. Be vague about frequency and message type.  Subscribers who are in the dark about how often you send and what types of messages to expect will surely be delighted to get a bunch of mail about things they didn’t want or expect.  Although that confusion drives higher complaints for many other brands, which can depress response for all your mail, your brand is well enough known to withstand it.

9. Pull out any old file you can find – even inquiries from five years ago.  You don’t (legally - in the U.S) need permission to mail them, so blast away an introductory letter and see if you can dig up a few new leads.    A lot of these messages will bounce, many others will complain and that will have a negative impact on your ability to deliver to your main file.  Most all of them will have forgotten that they ever were interested in your company.  But hey, it’s pretty cheap to send to them, so might as well try it, even if it prevents more engaged subscribers from seeing the message because your deliverability dropped and everything went to bulk mail. 

10. In this economy, people are bargain hunting. So anything on sale – whether it’s relevant or not to the interests or past purchases of the subscriber – send to everyone on the file.  Sales are good service.

11. If you have a catalog or offline list which doesn’t  include email addresses, append email address to this file and send them a note welcoming them to the email family.    Assume that just because these customers have a relationship with you that they want to receive email promotions.  We might piss them off enough to prevent their buying from our catalogs anymore, but at least our email file will have grown.

Just typing out this list makes me blush with embarrassment and shame for our industry.  I know there is a lot of pressure to optimize short term revenue, especially in a recession.  But I do care about the email channel and our long term viability in the marketing mix.  I know you do, too.  Let's all stay focused on the goal:  great subscriber experiences that build brands, drive response and delight customers.

Comments

Interesting post Stephanie. Lately I have had some very bad experiences around trying to unsubscribe from some emails. Some very large brands make it far harder than they need to. I can see why they do this but, and you will know far more about this than me but this will ultimately hurt their reputation from a brand and delivery standpoint.