MindComet

Must Subscribe: The Toilet Paper - (Almost) Daily Email

The Toilet Paper has been unrolling spared squares of wisdom via email since January of this year. The (almost) daily email (Tuesday-Friday) was born out of a love for the “introspective time spent on the can”.  Sometimes these potentially introspective times would be squashed from a lack of interesting reading material. This is where The Toilet Paper comes in. Their mission statement sums it up perfectly:

We don’t lose sleep over taking ourselves too seriously, but we work hard to provide you with provocative, intelligent and reliably good content; stuff fit for the thinking man in everyone.

Be it be ripped from the headlines or the current buzz in pop-culture, we take one interesting news topic each day and put our spin on it. You’ll get the basics boiled down into quickly digestible bits including quotes, facts and cool stats and numbers on the subject.

One e-mail a day.  Whether you laugh, learn something or nod in appreciation, The Toilet Paper will be there for you when you need it most.

I received a confirmation email after signing up and they really knocked it out of the park. It included witty copy (“Thanks for rolling with us”), a contest to win an iPod and all of the standard best practice elements such as a whitelist request, privacy policy link and a physical address.

Their emails are organized and laid out intelligently. They reflect a similar daily email that I praised about before, Very Short List. Each has a main focus with six related areas of interest: number, quote, word, fact, list and the bottom line. I really can’t do their emails justice in trying to explain how awesome they are. They include something absent from a lot of emails I receive these days: personality. Check the email sent out today and see for yourself…

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 30, 2009

YOU FIX

The Email Standards Project by way of Campaign Monitor is pleading with the developers at Microsoft. Microsoft are insisting on keeping the Word HTML rendering engine (most recently used with Outlook 2007) in place for their next release of a predictably disappointing and bloated email client, Outlook 2010.

For anyone who has designed and coded an email in the past three years knows how big a pain in the butt Outlook 2007 is to work with.  There has been an outcry from day one about it’s drawbacks, as it has done nothing to push the flexibility and growth of email forward.  It’s done quite the opposite, I’m afraid. For starters, it doesn’t allow background images and it has crap support for CSS. See Campaign Monitor’s example here:

Microsoft wants to continue their reign of mediocrity, and I for one, have had ENOUGH.

If you go to fixoutlook.org you can use your Twitter account to send a clear message to Microsoft:

“Wow! @msofficeus is breaking HTML email by using Word to display emails in Outlook 2010. See http://fixoutlook.org and RT”

The site displays every Twitter user who has included “fixoutlook.org” in a tweet. As of 9AM this morning, there have been over 10,000 tweets.  This is an incredibly effective way to help our pleas resonate. It puts face to the name for the petition, which I’m not sure has been done before. Hopefully, this will force Microsoft developers to second guess their decision… Hopefully it will make a difference.

So let’s show the fatcats at MS what the mob mentality can accomplish.  Let our voices be heard!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 24, 2009

Use Facebook For Additional Email Opt-Ins

This process is relatively simple and only takes a few minutes to execute. You’re going to need two things in order to do this: a Facebook fan page and an HTML opt-in / sign up form code.

If you don’t already have Static FBML on your Facebook fan page, you need to add it here.  With this app added, you can create an “email list” tab to your page.

Once you add the app, click on “edit page” below your main graphic.


Next, select FBML from your list of apps (click on the pencil, then edit). 


You can edit the tab title in the “box title” field. In the FBML section, paste your form code in. If you have any HTML knowledge, you can edit the form to accurately reflect the rest of the page’s look and feel. Click save changes.

If you or one of your colleagues are having issues with the rendering of the email sign up form, click “add another FBML box”. This should nip it in the butt.

And there you have it. Check it out for yourself!

Thanks for the inspiration, returnonsubscriber! (link)

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 19, 2009

StaleMail

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably opted into dozens of email lists over the years and have agreed to receive newsletters from your favorite industries, companies and sites of interest. I try to keep my newsletter, marketing and third party promotion emails organized, each with its respective folder.  Depending on my schedule, I’ll either mark these messages “all as read” or if I have the time, go through each email one by one and see what’s what.  Overall, the majority of the messages that land in my inbox are just “good”... I’d say the average score of my non-personal emails would be a 5.5 out of 10. Some really nail all of the best practices, some completely miss the mark, but most are simply good enough.

From doing this for the past 3 years or so, the one thing I’ve grown to despise more than anything is lazy, uninspired and un-engaging email marketing.  These “stale” emails are a waste of inbox space, don’t serve a purpose in the long run and offer nothing new to their subscribers.  It’s sending email merely for the sake of sending email.  Take this newsletter from Sony Pictures, for example.

*yawn*

Gold face on the left v. Blue head on the right.  Oh… I’m excited now!

And yes, I’m aware of Year One since we were inundated with ads during the NBA finals… but could you at least try to inject some personality into this? There’s simply nothing to this email.  It’s tired and calls for a much-needed makeover. Much like it’s social media counterparts, email needs to be a conversation (to a certain extent), which this completely lacks.  Even the call to action about their Twitter account manages to stifle any excitement or speak from a personal point-of-view.

Final summation? Opportunity lost.

Sorry to be so complain-y as of late, I think with this post I’m subconsciously taking out my frustrations for the Magic’s loss last night.  None the less, my issues with email evoke a desire to call out the BS.  Hopefully some people may get an idea of what works in executing email the RIGHT way opposed to treating it as some mindless afterthought.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 15, 2009

Triple Opt In?

I signed up for a slew of gaming emails last year. We were working for a few video game production houses & developers and I was researching their competitors. I was trying to gain insight into what worked for their competitors and where they fell on their faces.  I took notes vigorously of how email for video games worked.

The majority of the competitors had decent email programs. Most had a painless sign up process, engaging emails and all were CAN-SPAM compliant. I also found that they—collectively—know when to scale back their sends when a subscriber isn’t responding or when they’re inactive.

This morning, I was checking my “B2C Emails” folder and I noticed that for some reason or another my SEGA emails were going to my personal account. For the sake of consistency (and unhealthy OCD patterns), I needed to change this to my work email address.  Upon logging back in, I did so… and it was rather painless.

Shortly thereafter, I received another email from SEGA… this time asking me to re-opt-in.

The copy reads:

“To activate your account and join the SEGA PASS community
click the confirmation link below:“

What? Why? My account is already active! To SEGA this means that since I updated my address, I need to re-double-opt-in… or triple-opt-in, as it were. It seems like this is either a matter of list integrity or a redundancy issue they didn’t test for. I think a quick and easy fix to this confusion would be a change in copy… Maybe something along the lines of:

“Thanks for updating your profile. Confirm your change below:“

What do you think? Am I wrong to be annoyed by this? Or am I just being overly critical?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 09, 2009

My Eyes Hurt

I received this sales email from Urban Outfitters today, and I must say… this is the LOUDEST email I’ve ever received.  Which basically means it makes for great use of an animated gif with the alternating background colors.  And if by “great use” you mean attention-grabbing, then yes, it was used well. But the email is hard to look at for more than two seconds. After a couple seconds, my eyes literally started to get sore. So what do you think is better? Grabbing someone’s attention to look and scan your email only to have them shy away? Or is is better for someone to casually glance at your message in hopes that they may click through?

See the Urban Outfitters email below:

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 08, 2009

I Almost Opted Not to Opt Out

I love my personal Gmail account.  I’ve had the account for about two years and haven’t received any spam until so I thought the other day.  I received an email from “Plow & Hearth.“  I’m not familiar with the brand and therefore am pretty sure I didn’t ask to receive their marketing emails but assume I must have opted in somewhere to somebody’s partners communications, thus how Plow & Hearth ended up in my inbox. 

Regardless when I went to go opt out I was pleasantly surprised in their opt out process.  Upon clicking the opt out link, I was presented with options including the option to stay on Plow & Hearth’s list if they reduce the number of emails they sent to me.  Although it was a nice attempt, since this was my first email from them and I knew I wasn’t interested from the beginning, decreasing the amount they mailed to me wasn’t going to weigh in on my decision to opt out.  So I clicked the unsubscribe link and was taken to the confirmation page saying I had been unsubscribed.  However this page also had additional data points the brand was collecting which included questions inquiring on why I had opted out. 

I responded with not remembering signing up for Plow & Hearth emails but also liked that their was an optional box that I could fill in, in case none of the options were relevant to my opting out.  After submitting my answer, I was taken to one last page which again confirmed I had unsubscribed but also included a nice little message from Plow & Hearth and a call to action to shop for gifts or to shop the outlet.  Although it was only a two click unsubscribe process, the opt out process in total took me through 4 clicks but they were all clicks that I did not mind.  All in all, Im left with a postiive brand image of Plow & Hearth and am now more familiar with their brand.  I may not opt back into their newsletter but I may consider checking out their product offerings in the future. 

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Posted by MindComet on Jun. 01, 2009