How This Blog Might Be Useful For You

Welcome! I'm Andrey Sas and I'm keeping here my thoughts on CRM marketing, especially email and push notifications.

If you're looking for help take a look at my CRM consulting experience and CV.

Most frequent blog post topics in this blog are:

• mistakes in CRM marketing campaigns
• examples of fabulous emails and push notifications
• email deliverability notes
• list segmentation

I hope my posts might be helpful to some extent.

New IP and domain warmup explained

What a nice guide by Amazon SES. It pretty much correlates with my own experience. A must read.

Guide to IP and domain warming and migrating to Amazon SES

Clear email subscription consent confirmation

 There's a clear email subscription consent confirmation right here!

A rare example of a nice reactivation email

It's been a while since anything catch my eye in terms of email copy. But this message from a brand I didn't buy from for a decade made me smile. Let's take a closer look.

It's an email from a hockey club. I visited its game once years ago. I also didn't open any of their emails for a while.

So they did a right thing – they sent me an email asking if I still want to receive their communications. And I indeed want to – thanks to the amazing copy which made me smile.

Well done, Anaheim Ducks!

Is it your CRM system or you?

Sometimes your CRM campaign gets too complicated. Hundreds of the steps on the screen making it hard to understand, debug and support.

But is it always a business need? Maybe it's just you making it too complex?

In this specific case from my current gig it's definitely the tool. I've been setting up a reactivation campaign for a channel of Facebook notifications. And of course the tool didn't support this specific channel out of the box. This is why a quite easy logic got multiplied by the number of languages.

So it's over 200 steps in this journey.

Well, CDP / ESP providers - please finally get along with the fact marketeers want a full language and scripting support! 

PHP script to export web push subscription stats from SendPulse

Steps to use:

1. Download the archive.
2. Exctract it.
3. Enable API access in your SendPulse settings.
4. Make the needed amendments to the script:
1. set your API_USER_ID and API_SECRET.
2. add the list of your domains into $country_mapping variable
5. Run the script with php index.php > senpulse.csv (PHP 7+ needed):
6. Wait for the script to finish (average speed is ~60k subscribers per hour).

Important! The exported data  isn't enough for transfering yoour subscribers to other web push service provider. It's good only for stat analysis.

Not the best way to make you emails recognised by AliExpress

Just see the 'friendly' from name sent to a customer from Russia:

Someone else's thoughts on comms frequency

Last week I've been speaking with a marketing manager from another company. She told me a remarkable thing:

"Andrey, clients who are not engaged with our product recently should be targeted by our email notifications more frequently in order to make them buy our stuff"

I've been shocked, to be honest.

Reply by email to a reported issue which impressed me

It's really hard for me to find a thing to write about in this blog lately as I've basically seen it all in email marketing. But today I've got an epic story for you.

Last week I've reported my bank an issue in their mobile app. And asked to provide a reply via email address. Few days after I've got an email, below are the steps I had to take in order to actually read their reply:

1. I opened the email, it said that the reply is provided as an encrypted email in a second email message. The first email also had a pdf manual attachment explaining how to open an encrypted email (sic!).
2. I scrolled down to the second email message and found it has some kind of an attachment (probably the encrypted email reply) and a link to read it.
3. After clicking the link I had to set up some sort of an account in a system allowing to read encrypted emails in a browser (sic!).
4. Then I've seen a content of an encrypted email, saying that the reply itself is attached as a pdf document.
5. I opened the pdf attachment and found out it's just saying 'sorry for the bug, you can do this in an office'.

OMG, that was sick!

Renault email marketing manager probably is a good guy, but...

Why did I get an email saying 'While you're waiting for a car to be delivered...' when I've been driving the car for 2 weeks? Yes, I understand that usually, you have to wait for a car to be delivered, but that's not my case.

Not enough details in a LinkedIn email

I'm not a fan putting all the possible information in an email and turning it into a landing page. So I personally prefer to keep 'em short and effective in terms of CTR. Anyway, sometimes I feel that an email is missing really important information which just *has* to be there.

Here's an example of this situation - an email about my LinkedIn job application. Will you be able to guess what's missing?

Guys, the company name is missing. Email marketing positions are named pretty much similar, so I need the company name in order to remember my application. And it's just not there, and I have to click on a link (no button or CTA, by the way) in order to learn it. And I won't be doing so 'cause I'm reading it on mobile.

Nice email marketing where you don't expect it

I've visited a nice karting place a week ago. I have to admit it has a great management system right from the start - initially you create you racer's profile with a PC stand and then you actually get a chance to drive.

I've been impressed a day after the visit when I finally checked out my inbox to find an email... coming from the venue. And it was just great - not the usual marketing bullshit, but the results of the races I've had on the previous evening.

We're so obsessed with finding best touch points with our customers that we totally forget about the businesses and cases when desirable email content comes straight from client's situation.

Anyways the email isn't perfect. Take a look at its poor view on mobile:

Collecting Email Addresses Offline

Collecting email addresses offline is always a struggle. Frequently you either find your approach having an extremely low conversion or having a cost per email which doesn't make sense.

Here's an example. This is a back side of the boarding pass for a Lufthansa flight. It took me 3 years to see the offer on its back. And most of them just go directly to a recycle bin.

Product Integration into Gmail

Take a look into this opportunity: https://gsuite-developers.googleblog.com/2017/03/bring-power-of-your-apps-into-gmail_9.html

I'm curious if it's going to be premoderated and therefore not available to most of products like Actions.

3 Months Since AliExpress Russia Hired a New Email Marketing Manager

3 months have passed since AliExpress Russia hired a new email marketing manager. Let's take a look at their emails for the last 30 days. You can see the 'results' even if you don't understand Russian:

He Seems to Be a Good Email Marketing Manager But ...

Imagine you know an email marketing manager. He's speaking on the same conferences you speak and shares some findings with public. He seems to have a reasonable understanding of the industry.

Then this happens - you sign up with the product he's working on. And you get 3 different emails within a minute after signup. And you still didn't confirm your email address.

What would be your thoughts?

Customer Care Request Form Confirmation Email

I've sent a request to customer care via a form on a website. Seconds later I've been checking my email and I found this:

This is an epic fail, isn't it?

And here's why:

• Sender isn't recognizable. If I would check my inbox minutes or hours after request submission I'm likely to not understand where it's coming from.
• There's no request ID or something similar that will allow me to check its status later.

• Actually there's no content at all!

Finally I Understood Why Email Designs Frequently Are So Bad

Finally I've got a feeling of what happens when a company is sending out an email campaign with a poor design. At least it should be one of the most important cases.

I've been reading through web designers CVs lately. A lot of CVs as I'm looking for an email designer for a top 3 Russian cell phone operator. And I see a situation when web design is being done by designers with a printed design experience.

At first they're starting doing things for web - and it's a mistake #1 as they don't fully understand that media. And at some point some person asks such a designer to create a mockup for an email campaign. But email as a channel is different even comparing to web design! And here we go - the designer who totally doesn't understand email marketing is guiding the way email are going to look like.

iOS Mail is going to support List Unsubscribe method

Read more here: http://www.spamresource.com/2016/06/apple-ios-10-to-support-list-unsubscribe.html?m=1

DMARC, SPF and DKIM aren't what you expect them to be

I've been blogging recently about wrong picture of DMARC nature and abilities supported by DMARC-based solutions.

Here's a nice new post on the web regarding REAL goal of DMARC, SPF and DKIM technologies: https://www.spamtacular.com/2016/03/08/drafted-for-the-wrong-fight/