This morning I tweeted.

A few minutes later, I got an email on Facebook from a handsome real estate broker who was trying to be helpful.  Here’s that email exchange.

HIM

I heard that you might be moving to Nashville and I would love to help
you find a place to live.

If nothing else, feel free to use my website to help out with the home
search if you need it at [REDACTED].

Let me know if I can help.

ME

Thanks for reminding me to update my privacy settings.

That wasn’t creepy at all.

HIM

haha. sorry it freaked you out.

I heard this on twitter. Whatever you put on twitter, people will respond.

ME

Yeah. Respond on Twitter…

I had opened my Facebook privacy settings a little while back to show an acquaintance something and forgot to change it back. This just reminded me.

By the way, I’ve arranged for a place to live already. Thanks for your offer there.

Now, I am perfectly aware that I am all up on the internets and it is not difficult to find me.  But it strikes me as more than a little off-putting to have a perfect stranger comment on something I put on one social network (It didn’t show up on Facebook because the Twitter app there is messing up again.) in a completely different forum.

That would be like saying to your friend, “You know, I could really go for some pizza right now.” And then you get a text message from the local pizza shop about their special offers.  Creepy.

So, I changed my privacy settings on Facebook back to the more stringent ones and came away with this important lesson:

How to creep out potential customers with social media marketing in one easy step

Point out the fact that on the internets nothing is really private and everything is connected and then talk about how you intend to exploit it for your personal gain.

As a rule, folks, when using social media marketing, engage prospects only in the forum in which they’ve engaged you or attracted your attention.

PS. I ended up friending him on Facebook because his services might be useful later on.

UPDATE: Yeah, I know I’m encouraging bad behavior by friending him after he did this weird thing.  But I happened to go look at his resume while writing up this and I think he might be a useful contact later on.

UPDATE 2: Reader Qwertz posted an interesting comment about a parallel principle in law:

The mirror image rule is a rule in contract law that says that the acceptance must be made in the same form in which the offer was made in order to be valid. The reasons for it are exactly the same – so the offeror knows where to look for the acceptance, and so there are no misunderstandings that might lead to awkwardness. Imagine you have old furniture for sale on Craigslist, and then some stranger DMs you on Twitter to say he’ll buy it. Creepy, unexpected, and not a valid acceptance of your Craigslist offer.

Funny and true!

via Swiss Miss

Unless your work lets you look at pictures of naked and semi-erect penises, then you’re totally fine.

Also, it’s kind of hilarious.

So click it! CLICK FOR COCK!

Via VGL

BisReport is reporting that Ben & Jerry’s has dropped email marketing from their marketing toolbox in order to embrace social media.

Just kidding.  Actually, that IS what their headline says, but here’s what the body text says:

According to reports on both mad.co.ukand newmediaage.co.uk, the iconic Vermont-based premium ice cream maker is dropping its regular email newsletter after customers aired their preference to be contacted via social media channels.

Here’s the part that I think is a bit myopic on the part of the writers there at BizReport:

The decision appears to fly in the face of recent research that suggests social media and email have a symbiotic relationship.

It is true that the email stream and the social media stream play well together.  As I noted earlier, they are different types of communication, though.

But Ben & Jerry aren’t tossing email in their custom-made recycling bin to have it turned into playground equipment somewhere.  They’re just throwing away their newsletter.

Newsletters are not the only method of email marketing. You can do special coupons, events, promotions, yadda yadda yadda.

I did a little Googley search and guess what I found? The smarties over at The Email Guide spoke with Ben & Jerry’s PR folks directly who said this:

In general, I think it’s a bit of a misunderstanding.  The announcement came from our UK team, who was basically sharing that they planned to reach out to their fans via social media moving forward.  I think they wanted to alleviate any fears from fans who previously received a newsletter style email to think that they had somehow fallen off the list.  I believe they’re still keeping email as a venue for special events/opportunities as they mentioned they might still reach out via email.

So, there you have it.  The notion of dropping email as a marketing tool is plainly idiotic reporting.  Anyone remotely familiar with marketing and email marketing in particular should have been able to make that prediction.  Not sure what’s up over at BizReport… and all the other places that reported this same, absurd story, but folks really should ask more questions about these things.

I just wish I had finished this post last night when I saw the original story so that I could make this prediction without the benefit of seeing it confirmed first!

Would brands please stop treating social media like regular media?

Regular media is a one-to-many communication type.  You take one message and you blast it out to a zillion people.

Social media is a one-to-one OUT LOUD communication.  When brands interact with customers, prospects, fans, whatever, it’s between the brand and that individual and it’s in front of everyone else.

Email marketing is a one-to-one semi-private communication.  It’s between the brand and the recipient and, for the most part, no one else sees it.

Brands should treat each according to its nature and their users’ relationship to it.

In the eyes of the law, there are two general types of email: Transactional and Promotional.

Promotional emails are anything that isn’t transactional including newsletters, special offers, coupons, etc.

Transactional emails, however, occupy a special place in the world of email marketing because they are messages exempt from many CAN-SPAM requirements, not the least of which is the requirement to include an option for opting out of the messages.  That’s right: transactional emails do not have to allow you to opt out!

So, for marketers, transactional messages are a treasure.  By their very nature a list of addresses gathered by way of online transactions are qualified emails for people who already value your product, so marketers see a transacational list and dollar signs appear in their eyes with thoughts of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Depending on the restrictions outlined in your privacy policy and terms and conditions, you may not be able to just mail your transactional list.  I’ll come back to that in a second.

Many marketers also have a very strong desire to treat all of their messages as transactional.  I am not clear about their motivations on this, but I suspect they simply want to keep their audience captive and don’t want to allow users to opt out.  If I am correct in that, I would offer an admonition against it. That is no way to treat a customer, let alone a prospect.  Can you imagine if stores locked you in until you bought something?  You’d be outraged.

Assuming benevolent intent for my fellow marketers, I share the following rules for determining whether or not a particular message is transactional in nature:

• facilitates or confirms a commercial transaction that the recipient already has agreed to;
• gives warranty, recall, safety, or security information about a product or service;
• gives information about a change in terms or features or account balance information regarding a membership, subscription, account, loan or other ongoing commercial relationship;
• provides information about an employment relationship or employee benefits; or
• delivers goods or services as part of a transaction that the recipient already has agreed to.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t include promotional messaging within your transactional message.  The rule of thumb is that you can include 30% promotional content to the remaining 70% content dedicated to the transactional information.

Marketing to existing customers is really a fundamental aspect of the US marketing industry.  A lawyer I spoke to recently even used the term “bedrock.” In traditional media, if you provide a business with your information, the assumption is that you wish to receive marketing messages.  The internet works a little differently, and some business do actually specify whether or not the provision of that information warrants consent or not.

As a rule — and bear in mind that I tend to be a pretty rigorous defender of the consumer perspective on this things — I usually assume that when I give my information to a company that I will soon receive their marketing messages.

PERMISSION PASS ~or~ The First Bite

First, let’s talk about a situation in which your privacy policy stipulates that you will NOT market to users simply because they provide their contact information to you.  Some marketers are overwhelmed by the opportunity to market to the transactional list.  The way to approach that is with a “first bite” permission pass message.  This is a message that says, “Hey! You should opt in to marketing messages!” And then anyone who opts in is marketable.

Some people like to use the opt-out approach and call it permission pass.  This is when you send a message that says, “Hey! If you don’t opt out now, we’re going to start sending you marketing messages from which you can opt out later.”  I’m not personally offended by this, but this is not a best practice and a number of email entities, like Spamhaus, do not regard them as permission pass at all.

In general, I would tell you to follow the best practice, but I know how tempting it can be to mail all those email addresses.  It’s a risk.  But if you want to mitigate the risk, you should think about the age of the last transactional message that was set to them.  Anything over, say, six months should probably just be let go.

Free For All

Now, let’s say that your privacy policy is pretty liberal and grants you permission to mail people who’ve transacted with you. I have basically just one thing to say about that: START MAILING THEM IMMEDIATELY.

I’m not saying you should bash them in the face with a million emails the moment they click “submit,” but you should immediately ramp them into your customer marketing lifecycle.  Don’t let those addresses sit there are age without communications.  The older they get without any touches, the less viable and less risky they are as marketing targets.  So, go ahead and fold them into your marketable population.

I think that’s about it!

DISCLAIMER: This post does not constitute legal advice.  Consult with your own legal counsel regarding compliance with CAN-SPAM or other relevant legislation in your area.

I’m about to commit marketing blasphemy.  I hate the expression “marketing is a conversation.”

It’s not an illegitimate expression, particularly when it comes to interactive and online marketing where feedback from customers comes so quickly, easily, and readily.  Truthfully, things weren’t fundamentally different before the internets, but this series of tubes has increased the speed of the customer-brand interaction on such a scale that it has become a different animal even if there is shared DNA.

So, yes, it is very much like a conversation.  The brand does/says one thing, customers do/say something back, the brand responds… and so on.

But I hate the expression all the same.

The reason I hate that expression so much is largely due to the fact that when it’s employed it’s only by marketers and it’s usually by marketers who talk so much you can’t get a word in edgewise.  Maybe it’s the meta-nature of the expression or the irony… or the meta-irony.  I don’t know, but I find myself questioning whether or not the person referring to “the conversation” really understands the nature of “the conversation” itself.

Imagine going on a date with someone once and then suddenly getting bombarded with flowers, cards, candy, text messages, stuffed animals, and whatnot.  Regardless of how well you think that date went the overwhelming unilateral nature of their follow-up is unsettling.

But, of course, we need to acknowledge and understand the nature of our various channels and streams.  And analogies to conversations and stalkery dates are bound to happen.

I just want marketers to remind themselves that this “conversation” needs to be more about the customer and less about our new car, vacation plans, or whatever.

I’m writing this post for Rational Jenn who asked me about webinars and this just happened to pop into my mailbox the other day.  Also, it’s a LOT easier than the comparison of email vendors that I’m working on for Diana.

First, this subject line is OK. Not great. I suspect Microsoft’s marketing department was involved in this some how.  And if one marketing department weren’t bad enough, two is just begging for trouble. If it were up to me — and clearly it’s not — I would make this shorter and instead of “complimentary” I would test using the word “free.”  I wouldn’t INSIST on using the word “free” because that can sometimes trigger spam filters, but I would test it out to see if it performs better.

I should note that I heart Rackspace.  I’ve used them for hosting and I’ve stopped by their booth at trade shows. Every interaction I have with them is a pleasure.

There’s no preheader and this link here is kind of weak.  Why does it use headline capitalization? Why is it aligned to the left? (I don’t object to aligning things to the left, but it goes against the rest of the design which has things centered.) Why doesn’t it include a whitelisting message?  It could be that my objections are based on the fact that this seems to run against convention, but I think there are legit improvements that could be made up there.

Something is wrong with this email message.  That little white line might explain why the web link isn’t centered.  This is a good example of why you should always carefully check your emails BEFORE sending them out to your customers and prospects. Don’t sit around waiting for some d-bag to talk smack about you on his blog.

I just want to call attention to the simplicity of the message here.  As marketers, we often get caught up in how SO TOTALLY OSSUM AND REVOLUTIONARY our products and services are and we fill up our marketing communications with lots and lots and lots and lots of text explaining all the nuances and various aspects of ossum in whatever we’re talking about. But the truth is that rarely do others see things the way we see them and just because you can make an email as long as you want without incurring additional printer fees doesn’t mean you should.

Email marketing messages should be short and to the point.  The longer your message, the more likely it is to end up in the trash or, worse, marked as spam.  Here’s Rackspace has done me the great service of using bullet points so I can skim their message and see if it’s something I want.

Do I need to ’splain how important it is to have a clear call to action?  I hope not, but here I go.  If you want people to do something like sign up for a webinar, then you should make it simple and obvious.

What I find particularly notable is that after doing lots of testing, I’ve found that people respond best to buttons.  I’m talking about full-on bevel and emboss treatment (like my little numbers here in this post) BUTTONS.  They perform better as a CTA than links, tabs, or even just solid blocks of color. Maybe that’s not such a deep insight, but when people see a button they want to click on it. So, I guess, use buttons!

This footer doesn’t a lot to say about this CAN-SPAM footer but two things caught my eye: 1) the zip code in their address is inexplicably on a separate line and 2) the unsubscribe message is a little odd.

What makes the unsub message odd is that it’s very specific. It seems to suggest that if I unsub from that message, I will only unsub from Rackspace’s communications about webinars.  Typically, unsub messaging implies that you will be unsubscribed from ALL communications from that sender even if that’s not really the case.  Also, the option to send an email is confusing to those who aren’t familiar with HTML and mailto links.  If my mother saw this — and I can’t believe I’m making THAT remark — she might think she has to send an email to mailto:optout@rackspace.com?subject=Unsubscribe rather than sending an email to optout@rackspace.com with the subject line “Unsubscribe.”  Really, they ought to write out those instructions instead of being clever like that.  Of course, this could be another coding error/QA fail.

“Email,” “e-mail,” or “electronic mail.”  Which do you prefer?