6 emails that devalue your brand
1. The [insert holiday] email
Like forgetful relatives picking up a souvenir gift from their arriving airport, brands feel obligated to kluge together an email for every major (and often minor) holiday. Some holidays are perfectly paired for certain brands and may have major sale days, but there is no brand to which every major holiday applies. Since holidays are often personal and dripping with cultural and historical significance, the potential blunders caused by a tenuous holiday email should make your brand err on the side of not flooding Easter inboxes with “Jesus is our Lord and saver of 20% with free shipping!”
Example: Let’s take a look at the above email from Upstart. This brand is jumping through hoops to connect a holiday with a company that provides loans. Instead of coming off as clever, the message feels forced, as if the company were obligated to send a Valentine’s Day email. The fact that it’s pushing the recipient to bring in his friends as clients adds the feeling of being used to the brand-subscriber relationship. It’s not enough that the subscriber is a customer, there’s a whole email trying to press him for more value. We’ll explore this aspect in #5.
Send instead: Emails for holidays to which your brand is closely tied. Vacation rental companies, hotels, etc. may focus on big holidays. 4th of July is fine for a grill company to send a holiday email, but not necessarily for a SaaS enterprise software company.
2. The reminder email
It may be very important to you that a sale is ending, or that free shipping is only offered for till midnight, but place yourself in the inbox of your subscribers: They’ve most likely signed up for your emails to get a one-time discount or to get future coupons. Every day they’re getting emails from dozens of brand about sales, new products, etc. Seeing multiple emails from your brand in a short period of time with roughly the same content will train your subscribers to skip reading your emails altogether. They’ll mark as read, delete, etc, but they wont’ engage.
Example: Guess Factory is notorious for sending multiple emails for the same sale over and over. The emails above are at least one per day for a 25–50% off sale. That’s one email every day to a subscriber about the same thing, which makes the subscriber feel hounded. If even three emails in a row wasn’t enough to drive the subscriber to purchase, two more will only encourage the subscribe to filter out, delete, or unsubscribe from future emails from the brand.
Send instead: A well-timed, targeted sale announcement. Has this subscriber self-selected a type of product he or she is interested in? Has he or she recently placed something similar to your sale in the cart? When your brand sends infrequent, extremely relevant emails, your subscribers look forward receiving your email in their inbox and they’ll be more likely to engage with the email and your brand.
3. The did you hear email
Almost every brand is guilty of sending one of these emails letting everyone know about a new product, mention in the news, or restock of inventory. The worst offenders are those that send subscribers who have recently purchased news of an upgrade to the product they just bought. Not only is this group not primed for another purchase, it’s likely to get annoyed by being prodded for cash and will unsubscribe or learn to ignore your brand’s emails. Similar to these announcement emails are event reminders. If you have an event in Los Angeles, unless you know based on past data that your subscribers in New York would be interested and willing to make the journey cross country, don’t send the same reminder emails to people in New York as you would to people in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Email has the power to be intensely personal and customized, so don’t craft your message in the same way you would a billboard.
Example: This one email from Casper (which generally has decent emails in terms of design and content) isn’t terrible enough on its own. However, it’s a piece of a pattern Casper has of sending non-targeted emails to its subscribers. It treats the inbox as a news feed for information on the company, blasting out information that subscribers may or may not be interested in. I like receiving updates form Casper, subscribe to their newsletter, and even sleep on one of their mattresses, but the lack of personalization and inability to tweak my email settings sometimes makes me want to unsubscribe. Gathering more information and allowing the user to self-segment would be a great improvement for what overall is an excellent brand.
Send instead: A message targeted and segmented to interested parties. Instead of a general announcement tailor-made for no one, use the data your subscribers have given you to personalize for different personas. Subscribers who have purchased several years in the past may be ready to upgrade while subscribers who have never purchased yet may be looking for something new. Even if you have the most basic data on your subscribers, simple engagement data, use that information to determine whether or not this particular message is worth sending. Look at it this way: if you could only send one email in the next three months, would this be the email you choose? If not, it’s a good idea to let your less active subscribers skip this message, especially if you’re also promoting on other channels.
4. The déjà vu discount email
Here’s the scenario: A subscriber create’s an account, opts in to emails (knowingly or not), abandons his/her cart or otherwise doesn’t make a purchase. You generate an email offering free shipping or a nominal discount in hopes of driving the subscriber back to complete a purchase. This practice is standard and usually leads to happiness for all. However, many brands continue sending the same discount again every week or so. Like a clueless lover holding out hope that some day you’ll respond, the brand comes off as desperate and out of touch, and the subscriber will be turned off to desperate attempts to get his or her purchase.
Example: Overstock.com makes it difficult to take their discounts seriously. The very first email they sent was a 10% off coupon they claimed would expire in 24 hours. However every email since (sent within 1–2 days of each other) has offered the same coupon. Now not only do I feel like the initial offer wasn’t a deal, I’m likely not to purchase something if I don’t have a 10% off coupon, and I’ll just be waiting for higher discounts knowing that 10% is their base.
Send instead: An email that’s enticing, limited, and succinct. If you’re going to offer 50% off of something, it’s much more valuable if it’s rare. When it’s 40% off here, 30% off there, 50% off isn’t that crazy of a deal in comparison. Such a stream of deals dilutes your brand and trains your subscribers to wait for deals to make a purchase. Keeping discounts few and powerful makes your subscribers crave them and look forward to them. Playing hard to get may not be right for every brand, but giving it all away up front is a recipe for unsubscribes.
5. The quick favor email
You’ve just met someone new. You’ve given him your number and you’re excited to learn more. But soon he starts asking you to follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and asking you to meet your friends too. It’s all a little much. Then a few weeks later when he asks you to vote for him in an online contest and write a review; you feel a little crowded and you start regretting giving any information to this person. This behavior is obviously creepy with a person, but it’s just as off putting with a brand. Your subscribers have just given you access to one of their most intimate communication channels, their email. Why sour that relationship by asking for engagement on less valuable channels? Asking for referrals is fine, but it's something that should be done after your brand has built up a long, healthy relationship with a subscriber, not done up front in an attempt to squeeze as much value from her as possible.
Example: Rare’s welcome email cross-promotes their social channels while also asking me to sign up friends. This is not unlike more popular newsletters like theSkimm, but letting a subscriber see the value in subscribing to before asking for a referral will not only make the referral more valuable and informed, your subscriber won’t feel like he or she made a mistake giving you an email address. A plus for Rare is linking to a preference center prominently.
Send instead: Nothing. If your brand hasn’t built up a long, happy relationship with a subscriber, you don’t need to send anything in regard to social channels or favors. In the early parts of a brand-subscriber relationship your brand should spend energy learning more about the subscriber, providing value, and taking things slow, just like any other relationship.
6. The f*ck you, buy something email
Some brands look at a list of email subscribers and see a giant cash-filled piñata that’ll drop bills every time it’s prodded with a strong enough email. This view causes non-stop deal emails, notifications multiple times a day that all have different subject lines but say the same thing: “F*ck you, buy something.” Treating subscribers as sacks of cash will have them treating your brand in the same demeaning way. They’ll unsubscribe, ignore your emails, complain on Twitter, and turn off to whatever you’re trying to push. This email also appears as “f*ck you, read something” for the thousands of newsletters floating around out there.
Example: Club W sends in their first-time buyer series 5/6 of the emails in the list. With their repeat discounts, asking for referrals before I’ve even made a purchase, links to random news articles, reminders, and an overall sense of “dude seriously, buy something already,” making a purchase from this brand becomes less and less appealing each day. Instead of trying different offers, asking for more information, giving a prominent opt-out option, the brand continues to spit out the same discounts in an attempt to wear the subscriber down to a purchase so the emails will stop. I have no inside information on the short-term results of these emails, but the long-term impact on subscribers and the brand cannot be worth whatever short-term sales they’re getting.
Send instead: Thoughtful, relevant emails. Learn things about your subscribers and send them information about things that they’ll find interesting. Allow them to choose how often they receive emails, what types of emails they receive, and how your brand communicates information. Hiding all of this behind a preference center link won’t do. Make personalization an integral part of your email program from the beginning and allow subscribers to change their preferences with things like a prominent link in an email saying “getting too many emails?” and allow them to fine tune their messages. At the same time, notice if a group of subscribers rarely engages. Test your sending frequency, content, and timeline to see if they respond more favorably.
