YBO Interactive Blog

Israel has a new Anti Spam law. It is so strict that it allows you to get a compensation of 1000 NIS for every spam email you get, without proving your damage.

Globes sent me today this message:

Are you sending newsletters to your customers? If you do, you must get their permission to send them your newsletter and keep the records, or else you might be in trouble.

Regarding the Globes email, I think that there are lots of marketing mistakes here. The header is irritating, the content is boring, and at the bottom line, they didn’t give the user any incentive to sign up. They didn’t promise anything, they didn’t tell me that I’ll be happier in one way or another or smarter if I sign up. So why would I click yes? “Do you want our spam? Say Yes!”

I would do something to make my users signup. May add a some examples of the best alerts they sent this year, maybe even something like the good old “sign up now and be the first to know” kind of slogans. There are many ways to do it.

I would never send such an email. I think that the conversion rate of this campaign will be extremely low. Maybe even lower than extremely low…

One more thing, their message doesn’t looks good without all the images that gmail blocks. Didn’t they ever try to see how it looks on gmail?

Update:

There is also a right way to do it. Take a look at the email from Eyron

Here is the incentive I was talking about: Wana win a free GPS? sign up to our newsletter…

look at this perfectly written email I got from MIVA. I think it is an excellent example for a ‘bring back old customers’ letter.

From: Ed Chambers
Date: Tue, May 20, 2008 at 11:01 AM
Subject: £25 for your thoughts…
To:

Dear Yair,

We noticed you have stopped using MIVA, and we wanted to gauge your thought about why this is the case. We have put together a very short survey (you should be done in 3 minutes or less), and your feedback is very important to us as it helps to improve the service we provide to advertisers like yourself.

We understand that your time is valuable, so by means of thanks we are offering all those who complete the survey £25 in free MIVA advertising – just reply to this email to claim your credit.

Thanks in advance for your feedback, and please do reply to this email with any questions to do with the survey or your MIVA account.

Regards,
Ed Chambers

When you try to bring back old customers, you can’t just tell them ‘come back’. You must give them something in return. And this guy, he didn’t even say come back, he just asked to fill in a survey and in return he will pay £25 (in MIVA credit…).

I’m sure this email has a super high conversion rate.

In case you are interested, MIVA offers $25 free advertising for new accounts. The fact that their traffic didn’t work for me doesn’t mean that it won’t work for you…

Look at this email I got from Plaxo. How many colleagues do you think they can find from YBO Interactive?

Stupid emails like these make me look for the unsubscribe link (I just did!). If you are sending newsletters to your customers, make sure they won’t feel the same. Treat your customer’s mailbox with respect the same as you treat your customer with respect. If your message is not useful for your customer, don’t send it. And if you do, make sure that there is a very easy way to unsubscribe in one click, something like that:

“This email was sent to xxxxx@example.com. If you believe this message is a mistake and would like to remove your address from our system please click here ”

Don’t make your customers hate you just because of your newsletter. It is not worth it.