MindComet

Must Subscribe: Pei Wei Succeeds With Video and Offer Email

Pei Wei’s latest email campaign focuses on their new Asian blog experience, and this is the first of the series.

This inaugural email primarily pushes for a click-through to a video of a “Japanese Noodle Master” making a batch of Soba noodles (which is quite compelling, by the way). The secondary call to action includes a unique barcode for the subscriber to print out for a 25% discount off their variety of noodle dishes. Kudos to them incorporating this, as they can easily track how well their email converted subscribers.

All in all, this email is a great example of how you can leverage two of the most powerful calls to action—a video screenshot and a coupon embedded within the email—for a very successful campaign. The email is well rounded with social media share buttons (which aren’t just links to their static Facebook and Twitter pages), further spreading the offer and awareness of their blog.

My only complaint is in regards to the supportive copy / text. Unfortunately, the copy is embedded with the images, which limits the potential communication of the message to their subscribers (since most email clients block images by default). I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

Sign up for Pei Wei’s emails here.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Mar. 04, 2011

Snapfish: A/B Testing Fail

I’ve been a subscriber of Snapfish’s emails for a good year and a half now.  Overall, I’ve been content with their emails (although they do have a tendency to over-send sometimes).  And lately, it seems as though their content has become less and less relevant to me.

Smart email marketers always conduct some sort of A/B testing to determine how their subscriber base reacts to certain aspects of email.  Whether it’s a varying subject line or call to action; knowing what your customers like and how they react is crucial to a successful campaign.

But what happens when you send both the “A” test AND the “B” test to the same subscriber?  Well, they tend to opt out or report you as SPAM…  Which is what I had to do last Friday.

I first received an email at 9:47am with the subject line “Start school with 20% off a photo calendar” with a CTA that read “new school year, new calendar!“.  Not really interested or relevant since I’m not in school.  I also need to mention that I had received this same exact email 5 days prior.  Frustration was starting to set in.
Then 4 hours later I received yet another email which looked very similar.  The subject line this time around read “Just 3 days left - 20% off photo calendars” and the call to action was “Get 20% off on Calendars”.  This email is more my speed, but by this time I had overlooked the offer since I was so annoyed.
This is sloppy email marketing, plain and simple.  Always make sure you split your database down the middle and exclude any subscribers from the previously sent list.  This prevents any duplicates and overlap in your subscriber base.

And I’m sorry to say that Snapfish has lost this subscriber.  And if this issue was across the board, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who hovered over and clicked the “unsubscribe” link.

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Posted by MindComet on Sep. 02, 2008

Images Are Fine in Moderation

This post is about deliverability.  Specifically, it’s about getting your message across.  I don’t mean getting it into your recipient’s inboxes…  I mean the content within your message.  How is it being displayed?  Are the most important parts (calls to action, etc) of your email within images?  If this is the case, you may want to reevaluate your strategy for email marketing.

Most email clients block images by default.  The only exception I can think of is when a user adds you to their address book. So if the majority of your users open your email and all they see is x’ed out boxes – or if you’re lucky the alt text attached to your images will display in their place – how can you guarantee that they’ll all choose to display the images?  It’s ultimately risky to put nothing but images in your email to drive your message across.

If you want to see an email campaign that gets it right, subscribe to The Home Depot’s mailing list.  They use large, embedded text over enticing images / calls to action.  See for yourself:

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Posted by MindComet on Sep. 19, 2007