OK its fair for you to be asking yourself what the heck I’m going on about since Santa doesn’t do email marketing. Indeed, but considering I wrote
10 things Sesame Street can teach us about email marketing
and
5 things The Flintstones can teach us about email & social marketing, well, what do you expect?

Here’s some wisdom for email marketers from the jolly old elf himself!

7 things Santa can teach us about email marketing

Segment
Santa has been segmenting his list since day one. He’s got the naughty list and the nice list. And he checks it at least twice!

Permission
Excluding over enthusiastic parents, Santa’s list is 100 percent opt-in.

Relevancy
Santa’s clients (as every parent knows) are always convinced they will get what they expect from him.

Spam
Spammers are all on the naughty list.

List Hygiene
It’s vital because the naughty and nice lists need constant updating.

Subject lines are important
Can anyone top “Dear Santa” for a subject line?

A strong call to action
“Be good!” Beat that.

There’s one thing I can promise you about social media, email marketing and the internet in general and that is that you will screw up at some point. It might be a small misstep or it could be a rake slamming right into your face, but you will have to deal with an “oops” or worse at some point.

In the past, traditional channels and the push marketing model meant that at worse, if marketers made an error, they would perhaps have to deal with only a few critical voices and could (in most cases) hunker down till the storm clouds passed. Social media and the switch to pull marketing has changed all this and while no one likes to have people looking over their shoulder, the fact is that today, it’s a reality and we simply have to be far more accessible and accountable.

So, what do you do when you make a mistake? Well, it’s certainly not rocket science. In most cases, you can lift yourself out of these pitfalls with common sense, transparency and sincerity – not too mention some humility.

Apologize and take responsibility

Life is 90 percent made up of how you react to any given situation. The only real control you have is how you react. You can’t control the reactions of others, but you can step up, acknowledge your actions have caused a negative response and apologize for that. Reacting in a negative or defensive way will guarantee more negative backlash.

Respect the vent zone and don’t take it personally

This isn’t about being right and it sure isn’t about you having four more years of college in marketing than any of the people you’ve upset. Don’t take it personally because it’s not a personal issue and it won’t be a seriously negative reflection on your character unless you make it one by reacting in a negative way.

Don’t delete or censor reasonable negative comments on Facebook or your blog. Let  people have heir say and view these comments as an invitation for you to demonstrate your sincerity in your responses. Censorship assures people will get even more upset with you and increase the volume.

Tell them how you will fix it

Have a plan on how you will address the error and post it to your blog then point people on other channels such as Twitter back to the post.

Be grateful

Thank those who took the time to point out the error or misstep and be sincere about it. If the problem was in a brick and mortar, wouldn’t you want to know something needed to be fixed, rather than people just quietly leaving your business to shop elsewhere?

Rise up

The information super highway is littered with brand road kill because some marketers decided to react badly and let pride go before the fall. It’s no different online than in real life; the most important thing is not so much how you fall, but how you rise.

Just after I posted on the Facebook messaging roll out, I had an interesting call from a reporter who had read the post. He wanted to know what was wrong with email? Why is it that some folks seem to want to kill it or at least totally change it? Why did Mark Zuckerberg want to make it so clear that his new messaging service wasn’t email?

First of all, I don’t think Mr. Zuckerberg wants email dead — apparently they do still use it at Facebook HQ.  What he was attempting to do was point out that his new offering is different and not “just another email service”. Facebook has been working on this for a year now and after all that effort and what they consider to be substantial innovations, even if it was just another email service, they sure wouldn’t describe it that way — that’s marketing.

What we are really talking about here is what in the past has been referred to as “unified messaging” — bringing all your communications into one single “inbox” regardless of format. And yes, it’s been tried before with less than stellar results.

Mark did make some interesting points about email which are well worth mentioning:

Kids view it as a formal means of communication

We humans love to drag along certain practices and rules because it’s the way we’ve always done them. When email came into it’s own, we hauled along a lot of old rules and formalities simply because that’s what we established with traditional correspondence. The older generations viewed email as  “electronic mail” and insisted on applying the formatics of snail mail to it in general. If you want to alienate youth from anything, make sure you use that kind of logic.

Email carries a lot of baggage with it because we didn’t think out of the mailbox for a change.

Email is message centric and not people/conversation-centric

A good point. Remember when Microsoft first made the leap into document centric-applications with Windows 95? No longer did you have to open the program then hunt for the right document — just click a Word doc and word opens. It appears Facebook is attempting to make the same kind of leap with messaging.  Email in general would be better off if it intuitively sorted messages based on people and their conversations, even if those conversations are not linear.

This new messaging system may indeed make our communications much richer simply because (as demonstrated at the news conference) it will give us a kind of scrap book of conversations to look back on.

What I’d like to see in email

I think it all has to go further still. We need a desktop which thinks along the same lines as Mark Zuckerberg suggested, where messaging is messaging and it’s the conversation which counts more than anything else, including the platform. A desktop which learns from us and intuitively helps sort information in ways that is more relevant to the individual. All the myriad apps we now use to interact and process information need to go away or at least be seamless to the user. Sure email is sorted by date for most of us which provides a linear progression, but are most conversations really linear? Certainly the  interactions making up the relationships which give those conversations any substance often are not.

Takeaway: I don’t want to have a conversation with an inbox anymore. I don’t want spend time thinking about anything other than the conversation.  While Facebook’s new product may not be the cure for what ails email, it might be good medicine.

Email marketing: A love-hate relationship…Yipee!

A love-hate relationship is defined as a personal relationship involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and enmity. This relationship does not have to be of a romantic nature, and may be instead of a sibling one.

This relationship also exists between people and inanimate objects such as appliances – sounds crazy, but we humans do that. In fact, just about everyone has a love hate relationship with the major appliances in their lives. The tools and devices we’ve come to most depend on engender this odd contradictory behaviour in us.

From our cars to our phones to the washer and dryer in the basement, we’ve come to expect the thing to just work and depend on them — we love them for what they do and hate them for what they sometimes fail to do.

Hooray! We have a love-hate relationship with email!

Recently I’ve had a few conversations about email where the term “love-hate relationship” popped up. It got me thinking that if we do (and we really do) have a love-hate relationship with it, that’s a good a thing! It means it has arrived as one of those “appliances” which we depend on can’t live without! Sometimes we love it and sometime we hate it depending on what it does or does not deliver.

We can’t afford to under value what the inbox means to people. I’ve come to depend on my inbox as one of my primary communication appliances. I love it when email marketers provide relevant useful information and I hate it when they waste my time with fluff or worse, spam me.

Show your email marketing subscribers some love or they will hate you

So email has arrived, but has email marketing arrived with it? When was the last time you sat down with your team and put yourselves in the subscriber’s shoes? Are you sending subscribers what they want to get or pumping out what you need to push? Have you asked those subscribers how you are doing lately? When was the last time you included a survey in your newsletter or on your website to ask what they want? You know (or should know) what you want from them, but what about what they want? You won’t know if you don’t ask on regular basis.

Your subscribers want to be able to depend on you for value and consistency. Don’t disappoint them by wasting their time with irrelevant content. If you do, they’ll know you don’t care about what they want and they won’t care about what you want.

Unlike those other appliances I mentioned, it’s we email marketing pros who have to perform regular maintenance to ensure email marketing functions as people expect it to.

Takeaway: Run regular surveys and ask what your subscribers want from your email marketing newsletter!