How to make your bulk emails unreadable

You have to wonder if companies ever test how their marketing emails look or behave in the real world. I use Outlook 2003 and Thunderbird (Mozilla). Now I know my version of Outlook is ancient by any standard and Outlook itself (all versions) is notorious for not being standards compliant. But, it IS still the #1 email program in use today.

Yet, in the quest to create bigger, badder, more graphic-y emails, much of what I get these days isn't even viewable. It's like someone did a cut and paste from some CSS heavy code generator like Dreamweaver. Hell even if they'd used Word for HTML, the results would at least be viewable.

I've looked at the source on these abominations and there's often only two lines of real text and info surrounded by tracking links and graphic links that are 5 miles long. Even a simple "Unsubscribe" link from the most recent offender of unreadable emails (klout.com), was something like 300 characters long.

Sadly, Twitter, Pinterest and others have fallen into the trap. Maybe they assume people only read their mails in IOS or with Word as their HTML renderer? And half of them don't even show up for me correctly on my Android phone using the default mail program or K9.

Does anyone actually want their corporate to user communications read? Some words of advice -- always preview your corporate emails on other platforms and email programs. Don't assume that because your bulk mail platform (whether in-house or something like Constant Contact) is doing what you want. All the tracking data and graphics in the world are worthless if the customer unsubcribes or never opens it.

Comments (0) 03.30.2013. 00:28

Groupon SPAM - Signs of a dying company

A good sign that a company is dead and dying is when it resorts to email spam. Groupon, the once high-flying local marketing phenom, has sadly fallen into that category. Having bought two Groupon daily deals (that weren't much better than regular newspaper or coupon discounts), I necessarily gave Groupon my email address.

Since Groupon's deals have become poorer and less appropriate to my tastes, I decided about 6 months ago to opt-out of their Daily Deals and updates. After 3 unsuccessful attempts to get them out of my inbox via unsubscribe links, I've finally resorted to reporting them to Spamcop and Knujon.

Spamcop actually forwards spam emails to the spammer's upstream provider in hopes that the provider will stop the spamming. Knujon is more of a tracking service that uses spam data to fight registrars that enable spammers.

Spamcop had been sending Groupon's spam emails to it's email provider (exacttarget.com) but today I noticed that Spamcop is now sending all spam notifications for Groupon to "devnull". Devnull, in Unix-speak, is basically a black hole where things go to die. It essentially means Spamcop has found exacttarget.com to be non-responsive in dealing with spam reports so now it only tracks the spam source. Such abusers often wind up in email blocklists (or blacklists) meaning that companies providing anti-spam services like Barracuda and Cisco may start moving Groupon into the status of being blocked before their emails ever hit your inbox.

This may take awhile because spammers often move their mail servers to different IP addresses in hopes of keeping them off the blocklists. Regardless, companies that don't honor opt-outs cleanly and efficiently are not worth doing business with and Groupon will certainly never see another dime from us.

UPDATE: As predicted, Groupon's latest SPAM email came from a new provider "he.net".

Comments (2) 11.14.2012. 18:12

Aaker & Ries -- who's right on branding?

Pretty good overview of two competing philosophies about branding here.

I responded as follows:

Both Aaker and Ries still agree about the “one idea” that encompasses the brand. I used to be a diehard Ries acolyte but there are too many cases where brand extension works — AT LEAST FOR THE SHORT TERM. And really, in some business models, the short-term is all that’s required. Some brands in fact, are too powerfully associated with a particular concept and fail utterly when that concept is paradigm shifted out of existence. Polaroid is a good example. Instant prints. Their failure to move aggressively into other spaces tied themselves to instant prints forever. It’s sort of like the actor who’s only known for playing gangsters. They get typecast. Sometimes it takes a major shakeup to move beyond the typecasting.

Comments (0) 06.22.2012. 20:27