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! 

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.

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.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

I've been already blogging about not successful email marketing segmentation approach of French parking company Neoparking. In March they've sent me 2 more emails with a 5 days difference.

The first one gave me a hope they're going to make things better - the email was in English. But few days later I've got another email in French again. Come on guys, you almost did it!

This Is Why UGC Might Be Dangerous

This is a digest email from a blog platform with fun stories:

Such fails with user generated content in email campaigns may be easily prevented by adding premoderation of automatically selected UGC prior to sending.

Another thing to mention regarding this campaign - I wasn't using this product since 2008 (sic!) when it was a geolocation based social network (innovative idea back then). So it's a mystery why they still try to reach me.

When Personalization is Totally Possible But Ignored

I'm pretty sure most of the worlds largest railroad companies don't use any data on their customers for email campaigns. At least I've seen French SNCF  and Russian RZD sending me only non-relevant campaigns only.

How does their average email look like? Here're the deals on routes I'm not interested in. Here's a new train to be introduced on the other part of a country. Etc...

But these companies are of the ones that know most about my travel habits, cities I'm visiting, my seasonal behavior and so on - all of this because I was buying tickets from them for years!

What do they know?

• where I'm likely to be at this point of time (based on my latest trip)
• what are my regular routes and destinations
• what kind of fare I usually use - economy, business, first class

I'm not even going to mention my age, gender and other personal data I shared with them when buying tickets...

All of that gives a great opportunity to provide me with a really personalized and therefore successful offers which will make me wish to use railroad instead of other means of transportation.

How to Write Emails Saying 'Sorry' to Your Customers

Earlier I was writing about an epic fail in an unsubscription process of a Japanese hotel booking service.

But now those guys did something incredibly not intelligent. They decided to write me an email about 3 days long downtime of their whole service despite the fact I've unsubscribed from all their email earlier!

Their fault #2 is not trying to filter their subscribers list for this campaign. It's obvious the email had to be sent only to those customers who were likely to be affected by the issue. Let's take a look at my profile info:
- I'm unsubscribed from their emails
- my last activity dates back to January (and I was only unsubscribing but not booking!)
- I never booked anything on their website

So the chances I was affected by their epic downtime is almost non-existent. You shouldn't been mailing me!

Ok, let's say you've selected a simplest way and are mailing all the customers who were online during last 6 month - try at least not to promote your failure but ask a subscriber to come back, re-engage him. Isn't it the correct goal for such kind of a campaign?

One More Email Segmentation Fail Example

Back in 2013 I've rented a parking slot for 2 days in Paris via a website.  They've sent me two emails back than - a welcome one and a payment confirmation.

But now I've got one more regarding their new deals for a long-term parking:

Might this be interesting for me? No. Why? Because I used your service only once, it was a short-time rental, and it was year and a half ago!

What kind of a customer this email had to be sent to? For a long-term customer who has been buying during last couple years. For a mid-term customer who has been buying recently.