Becoming the Sally Field of B2B Email Part Three

First, thank you to everyone who took The Pledge from Sally Step One. I am looking forward to receiving at least 17 fewer pieces of crappy B2B direct. Sally Step Two was all about getting to the point in your email messages. Today, let’s talk about consistency.

Now if you are sending consistently stupid, misleading, boring time-wasting junk, I am not about to give you permission to keep doing that. Let’s assume you’ve figured out how to stop that nonsense and you actually want to score some click-throughs and responses.  Well a good start is keeping Gidget out of the jungle. And by this I mean we need to make sure that our victims, when they are brave enough to click, don’t end up in some jungle they need to fight their way out of.

Clicking a link in an email is, fundamentally, an act of faith. Faith that you won’t waste their time, steal their data, scare them or confuse them. Yet this is what so many crappy emails do.

If your email message is promising, say, some research that a customer might useful, it’s pretty dumb to have them click a link and end up watching a product demonstration video. Nothing wrong with either, but what got the victim’s attention and trust was research, not product.

Another jungle vista we want to avoid is the home page. I recently received this email with all kinds of fun trinkets to look at.

Each item on the list should have taken me to the appropriate page on this company’s site. But instead, I ended up time after time on their home page. Stuff like this is the work of a marketer who is either lazy, stupid or sleazy. The lazy marketer couldn’t be bothered to provide the right links to the geeks or to check the link on the draft. The stupid marketer believes that all links should lead to the home page and the sleazy marketer is trying to pull a bait-and-switch to drive traffic to a page with different messaging. Given the lack of offers on this page, my vote is for lazy.

As bad as a homepage landing is, waking up in someone’s store or product catalogue when you didn’t want to is kind of the B2B equivalent of the gift shop being at the beginning of the ride instead of the end. Unless the link in your email said “buy now” or “view our product list”, it’s scummy to drop your victim into the checkout line. Marketo pulled this recently with this subject line: “How to Budget for Marketing Automation in 2012”

Now I’m no rocket surgeon but I would expect this link to take me to some helpful planning content, maybe a worksheet — the kind of excellent content Marketo is famous for delivering. But here’s where the first link goes:

A price list?  Not nice.

Also not nice are the presumptuous twits who drop their victims into a list of things that may or may not include what they were after in the first place. Like this page that popped up on a recent attempt to download a white paper:

This company has every right to try to sell me other content, and I’d be delighted to consider their recommendations, but AFTER I get what I’m looking for, guys.

Or how about this ironic piece from Ryan Group about trust.

See that link down near the bottom? The one that offers more information about implementing trust at work? Would you expect a webpage? Maybe a nice infographic? How about a fact sheet? All of the above would be lovely. But this link is a mailto which helpfully lets me ask their sales guy, by email no less, to help me learn to trust again.

These are fairly jarring examples of inconsistencies between email and result. More common and less obvious are the disconnects between Comfort andJoy (and do we really need these two at each others’ throats so close to Christmas?). What I mean by this is that if our victims are comfortable enough with our brand, offer and message to take that faithful step of clicking, the onus is on us to deliver them to a place that lives up to its own hype.

We want a consistent look and feel, the same wording on a landing page as on an offer, the same pricing, the same value proposition, the same calls to action or we create dissonance. Dissonance gets you no further than a great click-through rate; if your downloads or purchases or registrations are out of whack with your CTR, chances are you threw Joy right under the bus.

So here is your Sally Step Three Checklist:

• Do your links go where they are supposed to go?
• Did you make sure they actually work?
• Is what you promised in the headline, what the victim gets on the click?
• Does the email look anything like the page where your victim will end up?
• Will your victim know what to do when they get to your page?
• Will they be able to do it in one click?
• Did you let sales write the email?

Next Time: Why sales should not write the email.