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.

You have the idea.

You have the copy.

You have the creative.

Everything is done and you have an email marketing program/campaign that you are ready to get out the door. Check, Check, Check. But what happens when it leaves your location and enters into email inboxes around the globe? Well you could get on your knees, pray to the gods of the WWW that all will be well, OR you can continue to go blind into battle hoping that you do not get flanked by image or HTML rendering along the way, the device or the inbox. IMHO both of those methods are not aligned to produce the best results.

So what if you had the ability to know before hand what you need to do to have your hard work pay off when it arrives? Do you know that you can see this before you send it? At eROI we always test our emails for delivery and rendering with projects that we work on. So why doesn’t everyone else?

Maybe it is costs, but there is very little cost to test an email. Maybe it is time, well if you don’t have the time then maybe you should move to HR or Building Maintenance. It is typically just not having a provider, partner or solution to use. If you work with us, you have it all.

I have added an example of our latest email newsletter to show you what we see before it goes out the door which allows us to make design or coding changes to give this campaign the best possible chance of working. Testing is the norm and if you are not testing you are fighting battles at half speed.

Let us know if you would like to run some tests to gauge inbox rendering performance and be in a position to share with your team, agency, execs what needs to be done. We will help you build a case in 24 hours or less.

We at eROI are excited to have another new restaurant opening in our neighborhood. After walking through the new space the other day I wondered if they had a website up yet. Of course being in email marketing and working with so many restaurants I wanted to sign up for a newsletter to keep in the know of our new neighbor. 

Well they did have a landing page up for the location but that was it. Okay no big deal as they are not opening for a few weeks and there was a newsletter sign up. So I took the next step to opt in. WARNING: this might be a new shocker to some of you as it was to me. So l clicked the link and found that whomever had put up the site was using a Google Docs form to capture the leads. Well to tell you the truth at first I thought this was an interesting way to go about it, but then I was floored at the way that it actually went down.

Not only was it in a frame, but it then linked to everything about Google’s privacy policy and not their own. Really odd and rather alarming from a data integrity/closed loop opt in standpoint. Not only that but I have no confidence that this data is date stamped, web page stamped, or even close to a double opt in. Now what kind of way is that to do good business.

You can bet that I will be back over there soon to bring it to their attention and even donate our emailROI email marketing platform for a hot plate of dim sum. Can’t have this in our hood, not with me on watch.