AdamCovati.com

Have you ever received a confirmation email, you know when you bought that new pencil sharpener online, or when you signed up for the newsletter on gerbil rearing? That was a transactional email, and they’re sweeping the land.
I’ve been asked several times about transactional emails in my travels. It’s obvious to anyone who has tracked open rates that these emails can have the highest rates out there, because honestly, this is one of the few cases where the customer truly wants to hear from you. Whether you’re telling your customer that their item has shipped, or notifying them that a monetary transaction has been completed, customers tend to open these emails. So this is the perfect email to put it in the hands of your marketing department — but many companies don’t see it that way.

“There’s no way, whether due to business or technical reasons, that marketing will own our transactional emails.”

This was a response I recently heard from a leading financial transaction company whom I was talking to about email marketing. For better or worse, they had very tightly integrated these emails into their operational software, and they weren’t going to change that. For those companies out there who can make the switch, I can only urge them harder and harder to do so now while you can. There is no reason that transactional emails need be plain text! You can use text and graphics here; you can do more than just tell them what they are expecting. And by doing more, you will entice them to do more, and that’s just what you want.

Here’s a good article from clickz that expounds upon this same topic.

You see these WYSIWYG things all over the place, in fact, I’m typing in one right now. They are supposed to allow for an easy web based solution to providing rich content; basically something above and beyond just entering text. WYSIWYG (pronounced wisy-wig) stands for What You See Is What You Get, but it’s more often the case that What You See Is Something U Can’t have, but WYSISUC doesn’t roll of the tongue the same way. This is a source of constant Consternation for internet users.

It’s the classic case of “If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all,” but most web products don’t see it that way. They usually figure what they have is good enough. The problem is that good enough for one person, isn’t even close to good enough for everyone. The usual solution to this problem is just to not use the tool at all. Too bad that’s not an option with the version of wordpress that I use. I guess that means I just need to write a plug-in. I don’t mean to knock WP, it’s a great tool, but for those of you who get HTML, you can see by the image here, that this stuff isn’t always quite right. I was able to set it right, but how would some one without years of HTML experience guess at how I fixed this?

So what’s the answer? Well, these things have come a long way, and they are getting better all the time, but it’s important to remember that you need to provide the user with alternatives. Maybe this tool won’t suffice. If that’s the case, how can they work around it? What alternatives will you provide? Just remember that your user isn’t always the same person. Because if you forget that then you’ll end up driving away everyone else.

Building brand loyalty is something that companies spend billions on. Well globally it’s something that the world econimies see Trillions spent on. Some people think loyalty is something you can’t buy. Well, let me tell you Brand Loyalty is certainly something you can buy. And cute webpages can help do the trick. But there’s more to it than cute webpages; you do need follow-through. Having good retail stores, good corporate policies, and a snazzy email newsletter can all help.
Starbucks has done a good job at this. Their employees are almost always happy and this helps a lot. Case in point see this post I just found at, funny enough, the brand builder blog. They catch a lot of crap from people for having completely permeated america, you really can’t go too far in any city worth its grit without running into a few of these places. But you can also trust that if you go into one you’ll get a good cup of joe, or latte, or whatever else you fancy. To top it off they have cool promos like this Make it your drink promo. It’s fun, and it’s just the thing that keeps you liking starbucks. Good Job.

Of course, being an email junkie, I have to get in on that side of things too. I am currently reading The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing by Bill Nussey (CEO of SilverPop). So far it hasn’t been terribly enlightening, but it’s a good read. Bill has talked quite a bit about the amount of damage (or benefit) you can do to your brand via email. It’s something that is often perceived as being simple and meaningless, but email communication is often the most direct communication you have with your customer, and it can be seen as the most personal. If you screw that up you can just throw out all the hard work you’ve done and the Trillions of dollars that have been spent.

I think the major email clients are sending mixed signals. They want to help prevent spammers from getting an edge, but they are doing so at a huge cost to customers. One example of this is the act of not displaying images. This is definitely important because it is often used as a beacon to determine if the image is opened, this is very important to email marketers, but it is also used by spammers to determine if an email address is valid, and if they’ve found a sucker who will open the email. So email recipients are given the option to display pictures after they have verified that the email isn’t spam, fantastic.

One problem with this idea is Alt tags. These tags are attributes of an image, and are set by the document creator. These are used by page readers as well as in situations where images aren’t loaded. They allow the customer to understand what it is that they aren’t seeing. The problem, as brought to light by Campaign Monitor, is that most email clients aren’t displaying these Alt tags, or they are doing so in an inconsistant manner. Here is a situation where the Alts are most useful, but where they are being neglected. I understand that the Alts could be disceptive, but in the absense of any other display tool, they are the best we have.

Please put them back in…

In honor of the changing of my blog software I thought I’d talk ab it about Web 2.0. I think it’s important to realize that it’s not just a buzzword and rounded corners on image. There is a lot to the revolution of the web, it’s mass media controlled and created by the masses, instead of just marketed to them. You’re viewing it right now, and you’re creating it with every click as well… well, not every click…

This video that I found via LifeCleveris a wonderfull take on Web 2.0, well thought out and wonderfully delivered.