Eggblogg

Company Christmas cards - traditional, electronic or none at all?

If you are a B2B business, do you send traditional Christmas cards to customers and partners, or opt for an electronic alternative? Or send none at all?

A few years ago I went through a stage of sending e-cards, (although always created in HTML in the body of the email, no Flash, attachments or the need to follow a link to view the card on the web.) The card included a greeting and 'thank you for your support/business' message, and a note to say that I made a donation to charity in lieu of buying and posting actual cards.

But I went off the idea after a couple of years. Perhaps it was the fact that e-cards had become so common, I suspected that people no longer opened them. Or that I started to feel that as my client/suppliers/partners list wasn't huge, it really wasn't too much trouble to send an actual, handwritten card, and it was a nice way to make personal contact with people I've worked for for years but rarely see face-to-face. 

It's now that time of year again and I'm being regaled with various e-cards ranging from the simple & fun 'big fat merry christmas thank you' variety to the the sightly take-it-or-leave-it 'I'm not sending cards this year but here's the charity I'm donating to if you're interested' type of message.

Much as I applaud the charity angle, as an alternative to sending Christmas cards I tend to feel it's been done. Why not adopt a charity and support it in small ways, year-round, and send a few personal Christmas card 'thank yous' once a year in your own handwriting, one person to another? It just feels a little warmer, particularly in a recession. For me it will probably mean missing out some work acquaintances (it's easier to add a ton of contacts to an e-card list than to write everyone a card, agreed) but  hey - I can't see anyone being that offended at not making the cut. (Others feel more strongly about alternatives to corporate 'holiday' cards - here's Chris Brogan's post on it.)

Do you agree? Are you an e-card or a traditional card sender, a bit of both or none at all?

Farewell to the e-mail

I must admit I've been writing 'email' rather than 'e-mail' for some time now (but not always - as evidenced by a 1999 paper on 'E-mail in the workplace' - bit of a museum piece now but here's a link to the PDF if you're interested...)

But apparently the Associated Press has just issued an edict to the effect that the hyphen is to go. E-mail shall henceforth be known as email. The good peeps at the Email Experience Council have been lobbying for this for some time, and their petition makes interesting reading. Who'd have thought that the lack of a hyphen would be so loaded, "signifying the ubiquity and power of this form of communication".

According to this chart, the non-hyphenated version has been winning the battle for the last few years, so perhaps it really is farewell to the "e-mail".

Why email marketing is cheap to do and expensive to do well

In comparison to ten years ago when I first started learning to do email marketing, there's now a huge choice of providers. In the early days, the only DIY solutions were Smallbizmailer and Microsoft Listbuilder, both clunky as hell and I think long gone. Now, it costs no more than a few pounds a month for access to a powerful hosting, sending & tracking facility, and there are hundreds to choose from.

So why would a business pay someone like me to manage their email marketing, when they can do it themselves for a fraction of the cost?

The answer is because there's plenty more to email marketing than learning how to use Constant Contact, or whatever system you've signed up to.

By way of illustration, here are the kinds of questions from clients that I answer on a regular basis:

1. When is it OK to start emailing people with our newsletter/email offers? Will it be spamming?
   
   
2. We're thinking of changing email marketing providers. Which would be the most suitable for us and why?
   
   
3. We've heard that it's no longer good enough to send the same thing to the whole list. How would you recommend we improve the relevancy of what people receive?
   
   
4. Our open rate has been steadily dropping. Why is that and should we be worried?
   
   
5. We've acquired an extra 14,000 addresses to add to our list, but the name fields are incomplete. How do we integrate the new addresses without messing up the mail merge? And is OK to just start sending the newsletter to the new combined list?
   
   
6. How can we purge our list of those who haven't opened or clicked on a link in six months?
   
   
7. We've been told that some images in our newsletter (but not all) don't show up in certain email clients. And sometimes the layout is completely messed up. Our developer says the emails are coded correctly. What is causing the problem?
   
   
8. Our newsletter has worked well for us for several years. Now we are using Twitter and Facebook - how can we use email to enhance our social media efforts, and vice versa?

These are problems to be solved by human ingenuity and the knowledge that comes from both email and general marketing experience, over many years and across a range of clients and sectors.

Email marketing is a valuable customer retention tool and it's fantastic that the cost of entry is within reach of even the smallest startup. But to do email marketing well, rather than just adequately, a business needs access to someone who understands all the issues - technical, legal, social, behavioural, marketing, design - whether in-house or an external consultant. Whichever way, it does not come cheap.

Quality not quantity matters when it comes to email lists

When I talk to businesses about their email marketing I still quite often find them concerned about the list size rather than list quality. It's all very well having 10,000 'active' addresses on your list, but if it's the same 10% that opens each month then the reality is that 90% of your list is inactive.

I was reminded of this today when I read 'Google releases Gmail's priority inbox secrets' on eConsultancy. Basically Google has release information relating to how it prioritises messages in Gmail's Priority Inbox, by using  'certain features to decide what emails are important to the recipient'.

One of these criteria is social - looking at the total of email correspondance received from any particular sender, and comparing that to how often the recipient opens and clicks. So if you have people on your list who never open your emails, even if you suddenly go on a re-engagement mission the likelihood is that, as far as Gmail is concerned, the recipient won't want to see anything from you so your emails slip lower down the inbox.

What if your list doesn't contain many Gmail addresses - is there anything to be concerned about? Probably, yes - as pointed out in the eConsultancy article, Google is sharing this information with ISPs and if could well be that they and others adopt Google's criteria in the ongoing war against spam.

The second article that caught my eye was 'A Valentine's Message for Marketers: If You Love Your Customers, Let Them Go' at Advertising Age. Josh Bernoff makes an impassioned plea for marketers to cease and desist when it comes to making it hard to unsubscribe from email marketing.

You know the kind of thing - 'do not reply to this email as it is not monitored', forcing recipients to register or 'sign in' to a site if they want to unsub, stating 'please allow 28 days (for your unsub request to take effect)...'

I'm with Josh on this one. Doing everything you can to stop people from unsubscribing really sucks.

And culling your list, so it contains just the people who welcome your emails, is a pretty good idea. Unless you want to be mistaken for a spammer playing the numbers game.

Email still a valuable tool for sharing content

I saw some research about a year ago that suggested email was definitely dying out, and that virtually no-one under 30 used email any more because they preferred to communicate via text, IM or Facebook.

It sounded reasonable to me - in my own experience, the activities of my 20-something nephews/nieces/stepkids seemed to bear this out.

So I was interested to read on eMarketer today that 'email still tops Facebook for keeping in touch' according to a new report from Chadwick Martin Bailey. Granted, this was a US survey, so the results may not be quite the same as if the study had been done in the UK. But it was interesting nonetheless.

When it comes to sharing, the survey found that 'the youngest users, who care the least about whether the recipients of their content actually want to see it, are most likely to disseminate the information to the widest group.' Older age groups, however, were more likely to share content which they thought their contacts would find interesting, so shared in a more targeted way.

But is it just age? It could be partly down to the technology. In usability parlance, Facebook affords sharing with all contacts (it's quicker and easier than selecting individual friends to share something with), whereas email affords sharing with individuals - even when the process is automated, 'send to a friend' links generally allow you to enter a maximum of 5 or 6 recipients, and usually you have to add them manually to a form.

So the next time you look at your email campaign stats and think 'oh, 3 people forwarded to a friend, big deal', those three 'shares' may still be more effective than hundreds of Facebook fans promoting your latest promo to their mates, (that's if they find it entertaining enough to do so).