Marketing 101: Leveraging Your Email and Common Email Mistakes

As people will learn in the coming weeks I know all too much about email.  Here are my credentials:

• I had a fairly viscious internal rant contribution to my leaving a job about a year later
• I have sent and received thousands upon thousands of messages
• I have exceeded Outlook folder capacities numerous times
• I have every message I've sent and received since August 96
• I designed and implemented large scale bulk mail systems (300K plus messages sent at a time) (it was opt-in!, I swear!) 
• I've written relevancy ranking algorithms for email and lots of cool stuff
• I understand SMTP and POP3 and can write code in Perl and PHP to manipulate mail messages
• I wrote a Mime tutorial on the standard Perl Mime classes
• I have a new product coming out shortly that, as I and the other developers describe it, "We Make Mail Suck Less" (not a great marketing slogan but true)

So, I really do know a lot about email both technically and from a business sense.  I keep seeing a few common mistakes that people make and a failure to leverage email as a marketing medium.  Here's some suggestions.

Avoid Non-Alpha Numeric Items in Your Friendly Name

I can't tell you how many people I've seen that have " Kurt" or ".Jeff" (i.e. a space or a period as the first character in their name) as their email client's friendly name.  Let me tell you what this means for me -- the poor idiot who has to get your email: When I sort my inbox you are aren't where I expect and I lose your messages.  I'm sorry to squash your attempt at cool artistic expression but this is just plain stupid and vanity.  Lose it right away.

Read and Answer the Full Questions that People Send and Anticipate the Common Questions that Result

We all bitch and moan about the quantity of email that we receive -- but a lot of it is our own fault.  Here's an example.  I got an email from a contact about his posting of a story that I wrote for his site.  He referenced that it was task 4669.  I then had to write him and ask him what that meant and when it would be out.  He wrote back to tell me that there were 4668 tasks since the project started.  He never told me the date.  I could have emailed him back but a little bit of extra thought on his part would have saved 5 or 6 useless emails.  When you multiply that across your network of contacts, you quickly understand why you have so much email. 

Humor is Cultural -- Use it Wisely

As I write these essays and correspond with my readers I am realizing that my dry humor which seems to work well in the states works less well internationally (jokes you have to explain aren't much good).  You'll continue to see the humor here but less so in emails with individual people beyond the U.S. borders.

If You're a Little Company Setup the Standard Email Aliases But...

NOTE: Every email system basically supports Accounts and Aliases.  An account is just that, a mailbox on the server which collects and stores mail for a user.  An alias looks like an email account but just sends email to another person.

Every company has some degree of employee turn over.  Little companies often have more than their share.  Here's a standard set of email aliases that I recommend you create:

• info@company.com -- A general information query, goes to the pre-sales group
• sales@company.com -- Sales questions, straight to the sales group
• support@company.com -- Support questions, straight to the support group
• help@company.com -- Support questions, straight to the support group (sale as support@company.com)
• press@company.com -- Information from the press.

Now, here is what you do when there is turn over.  Let's say that bill.smith@company.com was responsible for support questions.  When bill leaves, turn his account into an alias so that bill.smith@company.com is now routed to support@company.com.  If you really want to help Bill after he leaves then whoever gets the email can forward it to him at his new address if it's personal.

Now, what I would also do if I was in charge of these aliases is route each of them to an archival mail box i.e. sales@company.com goes to brad@company.com (who is in charge of initial sales leads) but also route it to sales_archive@company.com.  I'd then just let these emails collect and periodically look at them, en masse, for trends.  It's easy to go off track from just one customer email and a lot harder when you look at a group of 50 or 60.  This is really, really useful with respect to support emails -- you can see what the real issues are in a second or two.

NOTE: There are privacy issues here of course and your company should have an item in the employee manual that says "There is no expectation of privacy.  Email is a company resource.

Not Leveraging the Company Tag Line in EVERYONE'S Email Signature

Every company has (or should) some kind of corporate tag line that in 10 words or less expresses what the company does.  Examples are:

• Search Tools for Blogging
• Software for Enterprise Information Access

I've always been amazed that companies don't simply require that every employee have this as part of their email signature.  Think about it for a second.  If you have 100 people in your company, each sending 5 outbound messages per day that's 5*100*5 (days per week) or 2,500 times you can expose people to that message per week.  As I said in another essay, marketing is all about persistence.  What this does is reinforce your message over and over and over.  I'll be the first one to comment that people don't always notice it but if they do then it helps and it's marketing that costs absolutely nothing.  How can you not take advantage of free marketing?  Also, never forget that emails get forwarded from person to person to person.  The person who ultimately gets any email that your company sends may never have seen your tag line before and lead to new business.

NOTE: If you haven't seem my posting on why you MUST HAVE sales@company.com then read it.

© Copyright 2002 The FuzzyStuff. Last update: 5/15/2002; 7:42:28 AM.