posted in 2 Jul, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

What is Transactional and What is Marketing?

This question has been on my mind this past week as I worked with one of our banking clients on a new project. What entered my mind was not what they were doing, but what others deem the difference to be.

Now my understanding, and I would love your thoughts, is that a transactional email is one that:

1. Confirms an order or action that you need a confirmation email

2. An alert in a change in status or account

3. A change in relationship, privacy policy or access

Now there is a fine line in transactional emails where you can (using best practices) allocate 20% of the message to allow a marketing message. Apple does this well with iTunes transactional email receipts. They do not lead with it, nor does it interfere with the transactional email message. Subject lines are clear, copy is clear and the message can be easily scanned to know what is occurring.

But then this weekend I got this email from Technorati. I had to pause to understand if this was a transactional email OR a marketing email. My first thought was that it was alerting me to changes at Technorati in regard to features and my account. But as I read through it more, it seemed to be a straight marketing message.

So then why would they not add CAN SPAM compliance to this message? No unsubscribe, no address footer, nothing. I was a a total failure. The subject line was deceiving to me in that it made me think that it was a service message about Publishing Content on Technorati. Take a look and tell me your thoughts.

It was not unsolicited as I have an account and opted in, but the lack of Can Spam compliance leaves me wondering who was asleep at the wheel over there.

Messages like this make me question what is transactional and what is just plain old email marketing. You should consider this as you prepare messages for your users/subscribers.

Should all emails have a way to unsubscribe? Is it a best practice only in regard to transactional messages? Or is it just a good thing to do to always allow people to have a preference to the emails they get?

Back on the path of banking, I had to think it through this week about the transactional emails that they send about account notices, bank cards, or the alert of a possible account compromise. You would think that you would always want to get notices like these, but what if you don’t? Spam is in the end in the eyes of the receiver.

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posted in 2 Jul, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

To Personalize OR Not to Personalize

I think that I have this discussion in some manner each and every week. The question is either should we personalize our emails and if so does personalization work? Well I can go either way on this depending on what you choose to do with personalization. At times personalization with a name seems almost spam-ish when it is done poorly or used as an afterthought of throwing it into a sentence or the greeting of an email.

But the examples I have to share actually do work IMHO. Now notice that these two email creatives are exactly the same. There is only ONE difference that I can find between the two and this is the subject line. As they arrived in my inbox back to back, the subject lines stood out. They did not use my name but they use eROI in the subject line and wrote the copy differently. They got me. It stopped me and made me want to open it more. It felt not personalized, but relevant. And I think that the discussion around personalization should actually be changed to one of relevance.

When data, copy or images are personalized in some manner that stands out and grabs your attention it is not a true factor of personalization but actually one of relevance with the subscriber. This leads me to challenge you to change the conversation you might be having with your team, vendors and in the end your email subscribers. Think about how you can use subtle changes to data to make an impact. Think about what you can do to make them stop, of only for a moment, in a cluttered inbox to take that next step of opening and clicking through to learn more about your offers.

It is time to change the questions in everything we have known this far in email and time to start talking to people in a way that will make them think about your emails.

Popularity: 1%

posted in 17 Jun, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

5 ways to engage recession battered customers…

So what approaches can help you attract recession-battered customers?

5 Ways to Engage Customers In Recession

1. Remove your customers fears. Right now your customers are watching way too many recession news stories filled with doom. They’re hearing about giants of industry going under, or coming close, they’re afraid they may be next…. How do you encourage them to lift their head and help them understand that change is a constant in life—and this economic melt-down will pass.

2. Confirm their suspicions. Your customers see danger everywhere they look, and they wonder who is really there to watch over and protect their best interests, and who is there to fleece them of their shrinking income. Don’t deny the reality your customers perceive…. Recognise that the quickest way to bond and, most importantly, become an advocate on behalf of your customers is to first accept and validate (within reasonable limits) their viewpoint.

3. Justify their failures. Don’t make your customers feel like losers. If they’ve yet to reach their goals, pat them on the back and then show them why. Show them that many factors, often beyond their control, contributed to their failure. Show them how you can decrease the number of failures they will face, and how you will increase their odds of success.

4. Throw rocks at their obstacles. Identify the immediate threat or obstacle confronting your customer’s well-being, happiness and success. Join them in a justifiable hate fest. Heap scorn, ridicule and bad intentions on the perceived roadblock. And then quickly move on. Don’t wallow in that shallow pool, but splash there just long enough to gain your customer’s attention and confidence.

5. Encourage their dreams. The product or service you sell are not made of metal, wood, plastic, bits and bytes or some intangible service, they are dream-makers. Do not deceive your customer into believing they can accomplish the impossible, or that the impossible is achievable. But if your product or service can indeed make your customer’s intentions come true, do not hide the truth.

Popularity: 3%

posted in 17 Jun, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

YouTube: Choose Your Own Adventure, Emphasis On “Ad”

As we all know, advertising has been a tough nut for YouTube to crack. While a lot of videos feature overlaid ads at the bottom, some have been testing in-stream video ads that run before, during and after videos. Today, YouTube is starting to test a new way for users to interact with those ads.

On a “small percentage of videos,” you will now have the option of watching one “Promoted Video” (a video someone is paying for YouTube to promote, so yes, an ad) at the beginning of the clip, or choose to see a few different in-stream ads throughout the clip. And if you choose the one long clip beforehand, you will get to choose which clip you watch. Unfortunately, “none” is not an option.

Joking aside, this is sort of an interesting way to do advertising. I can’t imagine that many people will have the preference to watch one pre-roll ad over another, but the option to do either a pre-roll or mid-stream ad is a nice one. Hulu has been testing a similar option, though I have yet to see it. I would definitely opt to sit through a long ad before a show or movie plays rather than having the interruptions throughout.

Of course, as we all know, most people would choose this pre-roll option and proceed to completely ignore the ad, so it will be interesting to see if YouTube sees that happen as well with this option. It seems smart that YouTube is including the pre-roll video ratings when you’re making your selection of which one to watch, so perhaps a high rating will entice some to watch it. And at least these promoted videos aren’t always just straight-up ads, and instead are sometimes people who really, really want their videos to go viral and are willing to pay for it.

user-choice-screenshot

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posted in 12 Jun, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

New Google Webmaster Tools Fully Live

found an interesting article and would like to share it with you.

Over the last few days there has been a lot of intrigue over a recent addition to Google’s robots.txt file, the new URL they added was to the new version of Google Webmaster Tools which has finally be rolled out to all users. Google

Click here to see full article

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