How to Be the Sally Field of B2B Email

If you’ve been sitting smugly by while I berate your analogue brethren about their crappy printed direct pieces, time to wipe that smirk off. The sad truth is, most B2B email marketing is pretty lousy too.  So let’s agree to take a pledge. Yes, you. Put away that DayQuil, raise your right hand and repeat after me:

“I solemnly swear that I will not send or cause to be sent any email marketing messages that are stupid, lazy, crappy, misleading, time-wasting, pointless, sleazy or that might get me sued.”

Ok. Sit down. Do you feel better? No? Not sure how to stop sending bad email? Start with the user experience. Do you like getting crap emails? Then pay it forward, friends and don’t send them.

Depending on your source, the average office worker receives about 75 pieces of email a day. Which is 50% more than some studies suggest they are really able to handle.  So most workers view email as a day-long contest which they can win only if they leave with fewer emails than they started with. This gives them plenty of incentive to flush anything they don’t like or can’t read. Which means they’re predisposed to dislike almost everything in their Inboxes, even the stuff from well-meaning African royalty.

How do you become the Sally Field of junk email?

First, don’t let sales write anything. They can’t spell and most of them can’t write. We don’t want to be tossed out on a technicality like a typo in the first line or this engaging bit of prose:

We need tightly written text with a compelling, but not misleading, headline. More on that later.  Let’s assume you or your agency can put together a literate message, and let’s turn our attention to how it looks. Now I am all in favor of lovely things with muted palettes that channel Architectural Digest and fairly purr off the screen. But let’s be real here. Your job is to generate demand, not decorating ideas. Besides, pretty things in email, as in real life, come at a cost.

Like this thing from BtoB Magazine (you’d think they would know better). Nice to look at, but look what happens when I forward it? The default blue type in Outlook doesn’t really show up on the background.

If I want to send it along to a second victim (remember, this is the viral thing we keep hoping will happen) I either need to send it without comment (like that would happen) or I need to be arsed to change the font colour in my email (see parentheses above). Most people, faced with this dilemma will choose Door Number 3 and just nuke it. But what if I forward it from my mobile device, where I can’t tell what the outgoing message actually looks like? That’s right, I’m going to send an illegible mess with that organization’s logo on it. Don’t let your agency talk you into some stupid template with a dark background.

And speaking of mobile devices, I think this is where we suck the most. It’s a safe bet at least half of your email marketing is being evaluated on a screen smaller than a beer mat. And it looks like this.

Are you helpfully suggesting to people that if the email looks funny, they should go online to consume it in a browser? Just how good do you think your content is?

By the way, I am including e-newsletters in here too. I don’t care if people asked to receive it: if they can’t read it, you have wasted your time and theirs.

Sally Step One: take the time to build something that can be at least partially digested on a mobile device. Like this note from Ed:

Next time: Sally Step Two: getting to the point and more about not letting sales write marketing emails.