Marc Kline has a great post on ways to optimize the landing pages. What I took from this post was the fact that you should not only check your links but check the landing page. I will take it one step further than that. You need to experience what the user experiences. Get the email, click the links and do a desired action. How easy was it for you to order the item? What was your experience like in going through the order and what sort of response or “love” did you get after it was placed. Bottom line is..the email can get folks there, but if you have no idea what they are going thru once they get there, the email wont make a difference.
I am still blocked from collecting any feeds from Technorati and STILL cannot access their site. I have contacted their support twice and no response. I had an individual contact me as a result of my blog postings about Technorati and still nothing. I was able to get to their site yesterday, but now its same old……403 forbidden error.
If you are a blogger or a person of influence in the blogosphere, I urge you to take note of all my postings about them and rally behind me to see if we can get Technorati to perhaps change their ways of blocking people and customer service.
I have been reading Douglas Karr’s blog for awhile now and he has a really good post on why go with an ASP. He provides a great explanation in his post and its something you should definitely read about if you are considering this move.
Recently, I signed up at an online retailer as an experiment into their email practices. After finding the spot on their site to subscribe, I was taken to a login screen, where I had to create and account, with my full name and postal address. I wasn’t asked my email preferences or any profiling information, but I had to create an account in order to get their emails. Ok. So beyond the frustration of setting up an account (it was a single opt in), I never received a “thank you” email for signing up to their site.
1 week went by. Nothing.
9 days went by. Nothing. So I logged back into their site to see if I indeed went thru their process right and low and behold, everything was fine.
Day 10. First email from them.
Here is what is wrong. I SIGNED UP TO GET EMAIL. THEY ARE A MAJOR ONLINE RETAILER….and I had to wait 10 days to get an email?! Heck at one of their competitors, I signed up and within 2 days I received their latest pitch. In addition, on their competitors site, I was able to set my preferences and chose from a variety of options to receive some other emails. At another competitor, I was just asked for my email address and was given the option to creating an account and was able to chose my preference of HTML or TEXT. I got a fairly decent “thank you” and am still waiting for my email. (I just did it today…just to see)
THE POINT IS: If you are a retailer trying to sell me stuff, make it easy, ask for my preferences (and not my postal), send me a decent “thank you email” and send me email (heck even if its last weeks mailing) to get my whet my appetite. Start our relationship showing that you care and not leave me hanging for 10 days, hell I almost forgot about you.
Wow…talk about viral. Tide has hit a home run here for sure. At mytalkingstain.com you get to create your own talking stain video and have a bunch of downloads. Guess it does not hurt that they ran their $2.7 million dollar spot at a good point in the game. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself…”this will stick” “what viral potential”.
So with out further adieu…I give you the one and the only……”The Scrappy Software Marketer” as THE talking stain. Look closely…
Unless you live in a cave, one of the hottest trends around these days is video. I have long talked about sending video in email but understand the limitations of rendering and blocking etc. However today, I am going to conduct a series of experiments unbeknown-st to some of my peeps in the organization about the delivery of video in emails. If my experiments work, I will start to do some testing with a group with my organization that seems keen to being the testing bed/guinea pigs of new and exciting things. In addition, if I am successful, it might change the way alot of us think about video in emails
