Learning from our own mistakes, while effective, can be painful. That’s why some of us prefer to learn from the mistakes of others. With that in mind, we asked several e-mail marketing experts to share a few cautionary tales.
Kristen Gregory, e-mail marketing strategist, Bronto Software
Oops: “One example of a subject line test gone awry was a client who sent out test segments at 10 pm Pacific time and had the winning subject line sent to the remainder of the list at 4 pm PST,” she recalls. Because of the difference in time of day between the test and the rollout, the results were not what the company had expected.
Lesson learned: When testing, make sure to factor in all extenuating factors, such as time of day and day of week. If you normally send e-mails in midmorning and plan to continue doing so, your test e-mail should be sent at midmorning as well.
Marco Marini, president/CEO, ClickMail Marketing
Oops: At a previous job, Marini sent an internal e-mail test to the powers-that-be for their approval to broadcast the message to the house file. That request for approval proved to be academic, as he had inadvertently pushed out to the test message, which referred to the e-mail being a test in the subject line, to the entire list. The e-mail ended up generating the largest open rate in the company’s history.
Lesson learned: Check, check, and check again is the obvious lesson. But Marini says that the incident also taught him to look beyond the usual rules and practices when trying to increase response. After all, who could have predicted that an e-mail labeled a test would encourage so many people to open it?
Andrea Orvis, group director for strategic services, e-Dialog
Oops: A client ran a sweepstakes as a means of building its e-mail list. The promotion garnered the company 50,000 new names, which was cause for celebration—until the business realized that more than half of those names subsequently unsubscribed, rendering the sweepstakes a less effective and more costly acquisition tool than immediately thought.
Lesson learned: Don’t rush to conclusions. You need to evaluate results over the long term.
Chris Rowe, vice president of data enhancement services, Melissa Data
Oops: “We were getting blocked for a while just doing normal business transactions because we had ‘data specialists’ in a subject line at some point. Guess what red-light word is in this? Cialis.”
Lesson learned: “Really dissect the words within your subject line—and if you are creating a new company, you may want to avoid these spam terms as well by not naming your company Viagra Data.”
