Recently in Email Marketing Category

This week I found myself wandering through Brookstone and admiring their crazy gadgets and ended walking out with a gag gift (think giant sized remote). During the checkout process the sales rep/ cashier offered me a $20 gift certificate to which I responded "no thanks" thinking it was a credit card offer or the likes. But when he explained all I had to do was provide an email address (to send it to he said but capturing it for marketing was clearly the goal) I provided one without hesitation.

Creative sample & comments inside.

Black Friday may be the day where we all look to the malls and traditional retail for success but if my inbox is anything like that of the typical consumer, the internet is playing a larger and larger role in how we all find deals. To sum up what I saw it's definitely all about the deal and while every Black Friday has been founded around sales, this year had more offers and stronger offers than I ever recall seeing; free shipping with [and mostly without] strings dominated the online offers while offline was all over the place from percentage discounts to bogo and beyond.

Click in for screenshots from emails and pages from all over the web.

As I sit in a session at the World Online Marketing conference in SF there's been a lot of talk about using email and getting emails through even segmenting emails. For the most part I see a lot of people getting it... relevancy connects, personalization makes people happy, etc... but I'm also seeing [and getting] a lot of questions about how exactly one does this. It's one thing to try and personalize your emails if you have a database with 500,000 client records, a statistically derived model and so forth but what if you're just a small business? Not a problem, segmentation still works and won't break your budget. So here's three ways to get some basic segments you can be using in days, not months [seriously].

This afternoon I opened up my email on my phone only to see a message from Boingo, my wireless roaming provider entitled "A Special Invitation from Boingo!" Given that I've used Boingo for the past 6 months and had logged on as recently as last night I figured it was some sort of refer a friend, annual subscription or affiliate company offer so it was only out of curiosity that I took a second look from my desktop. You can imagine the surprise I got when I found out that Boingo wanted me to reconsider leaving their services and that they wanted to offer me a special rate to come back - I never left!

I've been doing a lot of traveling lately so when Priceline sent me their first bonus cash email from their rewards program, I was pleased to get the discount. A day later when I got the same email again I was confused but let it slide. Well a couple more days have passed and yup, you guessed it, there have been a couple more emails - same offer, same details. It should go without saying but no one wants to see the same message twice... and definitely not three or four times. Now I imagine Priceline is still working out a few kinks in their rewards emails but I've encountered the same issue from other providers in the past and sometimes it's pretty clear the repetitive emails were intentional.

Click in for more on email frequency & annoyances as well as a few screenshots examples of optout pages.