Ever send something out to your customer list that you immediately knew was wrong?
Well don’t feel too bad – it even happens to folks like Amazon.com. File this example away somewhere for the next time you have to explain your “oops” to your boss!
Category: E-mail Marketing
The “email signature”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block (“sig file”) is probably the oldest online marketing tool. Sig files originated when email did, way back in 1965. Originally the domain of geeks (and I use the term with the utmost affection), they often contained only basic contact information, but also elaborate creations of “ASCii art”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art, pithy quotes and self-classification systems (e.g. “The Geek Code”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code — yes, this collections of numbers, letters and symbols actually means something to geeks, such as my feelings about Star Trek, my dislike of Windows and my level of education).
And then, the marketers invaded.
Well, invaded is a little strong. Marketers figured out that they could use that space for more than just basic contact information. So, forty-some years after the advent of sig files, where have marketers taken them? The earliest true marketing use of a sig file (and one that is still considered one of the “best uses of sig files as a viral marketing device”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing#Notable_examples_of_viral_marketing ) was by Hotmail; even prior to its acquisition by Microsoft, all Hotmail emails went out with an advertisement for the Hotmail service itself in the signature. This is now standard practice across email services and not nearly as effective as the early days. What has been the next step in the evolution of sig files?
As part of the enhancements we’ve been doing to One Degree to celebrate our first anniversary we’ve moved to a new outbound e-mail system. Our intention from Day One was to provide _daily_ e-mail alerts but we never had a nicely automated (and cost effective) way to do this.
We added “Feedblitz”:http://www.feedblitz.com to the site a few weeks ago and the uptake and feedback from new subscribers has been great.
But we still have a load of subscribers from the past year who came to expect a _weekly_ e-mail digest rather than an overnight push of links to all posts from the previous day.
What to do, what to do.
Well,
* We could just move people over to daily, but that didn’t seem right.
* We could tell them to sign-up for the new list and kill the old one (not good from a retention and customer service standpoint), or,
* We could let them know about the change and give them a chance to get out before we made the switch.