The Pontiflex Blog

2012 Email Marketing Recommendations

January 17, 2012 at 3:20 pm Jordan Cohen Leave a comment

Rather than predicting what will come in 2012, I have 3 recommendations to make. They are:

1) Launch your mobile website if you haven’t already.  It just makes sense that the easier you make it for people to shop on their smartphones, the more likely they will be to do it (and to do it again, and again…)  Nothing bothers me more than receiving a brilliantly mobile-optimized email template that then links to a non-mobile optimized web site.  Seriously, what’s the point?  Those who create an end-to-end mobile optimized experience will reap the rewards in 2012 and beyond.

2) Adopt an email first mentality.  Email marketers are feeling a ton of pressure to weave “social integration” and even, gasp — “Social CRM” — into their 2012 planning, when many aren’t even using their own email clickstream data yet to improve email messaging segmentation and relevancy.  Tell your CEO/CMO/Power-That-Be to chill and explain how much more you stand to gain by being given the resources you need to get the foundation of your email house in order.

3) Be CREATIVE.  Regardless of where you stand on Groupon, those guys are email marketing royalty, with 150MM+ subscribers, a daily send schedule, and virtually zero problems when it comes to deliverability.  That’s right — Groupon is a company that knows how to get into the inbox every time. The secret to their success?  Check out the video or read the transcript of their feature on 60 Minutes last Sunday.

Stahl: What you did was you took a spam business, a junk mail business, and somehow made it entertaining and cool.

Mason: We do realize that we’re sending people an email every single day, and that could get annoying. So there’s gotta be something else there that keeps you engaged and keeps you from un-subscribing.

That something is the absurdist humor in the daily deal write-ups. Four hundred writers and editors – more than most newsrooms – come up with hundreds of these pitches a day, with twists of phrases and logic. Here’s one for a dentist: “Humans developed smiles as a way to deflect predators in the wild and former bosses in the grocery store.”

The loopy write-ups give Groupon its personality, which seems to seep down from the very top….

Aspire to make your emails craved by recipients in 2012. Invest in great creative and witty writing, and the world will be your oyster.

Good luck!

Jordan Cohen, VP of Business Development

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