Now I’m not even going to suggest that I am perfect, the master of marketing or
even the one with all the answers. Far from it... Like yourself I’ve made and
continue to make mistakes, blunders, and outright bonehead decisions. But
mistakes can be good, it’s
all a matter of looking at it the right way.
One of my secrets to learning is to see how the professionals do it. My next
secret is finding out that even the most high profile Fortune 50.companies
make terrific bloopers that we can learn from and NOT duplicate.
Recently I entered a couple of online contests. One was a contest for a camera
from a big name film manufacturer, the other from a to.company which is hardly
known here in North America, (Some sort of stuffed toy was the prize in this
case).
As expected I received a generic "Thank You" e-mail delivered by autoresponder
- nothing shocking or strange about this... But it was the lack of substance to the
simple "Thanks For Entering Our Contest". That was just about it - there wasn’t
much else that they said!
Here’s What Else They Did Wrong:
- In the "From:" field of the e-mail they used an acronym as opposed to a name
or e-mail address. Now how is someone supposed to remember what an
acronym stands for, especially if one is not familiar with th.company in question
but also particularly in light of what else these tw.companies failed to do.
- In the body of the e-mail they made no attempt to personalize the message. As
they were larg.companies with large ad budgets, they certainly had enough
money to at the very least, hire someone to make them a template that said
something like:
Dear { name }, or even Dear {
E-mail name>
E-mail name },
Now granted for many "smaller operations" this may not be possible in every
situation. E.g.: I can’t personalize my listserver, or my Sendfree autoresponders
but I can personalize my domain autoresponders. However a generic friendly
salutation would not be out of line... "Greetings," or "Hello," for example. But they
chose not to when they sure could have done it.
- Next, there was no signature block. Yes, I know these are autoresponders, but
at the least, one could simply write:
Regards, (Good Luck, Cheers, etc...)
The Widget Team
widgetcompany.com And lastly, they both failed to entice me back to their web site. No URL = No
reminder of who and where to go back to. There were no incentives, no
back-end offers, no "P.S." or "By the way...", no "Keep updated...", or "Subscribe
to our mailing list..." Nothing, 0, blankness, zilch.
Do you make any of these mistakes in your e-mail marketing? If so, correct them
and you’ll be one step of the "Big Guys".
Robin Forbes is the Pencil Dude, Proud Publisher of "Pencil Dude’s Picks" and
"Pencil Dude Says..." Visit the Pencil Dude at his latest site:
pencildude.net/ for practical Internet Marketing advice and resources for real people
