Most email marketing and marketing automation platforms require you to name email campaigns when you set them up. Often, marketing departments will give them names that mean something internally, but don’t necessarily have the same meaning to your target audience. As long as the recipient never sees the internal name, there’s no problem. But many systems use those names for the contact preferences and unsubscribe pages.
Here’s an example of email campaign naming gone wrong. I discontinued services with a particular vendor a few years ago. Today, I received an email from them attempting to reignite the relationship. Apparently, they named the campaign “Raise the Dead 2014,” and their email system automatically included that campaign name in the unsubscribe page. When I clicked their unsubscribe link, this is what I found:
Every Touch Matters
Every time you touch a contact, you have the opportunity to influence his or her thinking about your brand, your products, and the benefits you provide. But while most marketers think very carefully about the audience’s experience on their website, with their emails, and on landing pages; they often forget details like the opt-in and unsubscribe processes. Ideally, your process should give the contact new ways to engage with your brand – whether via options to reduce email frequency or the ability to subscribe to more relevant content.
Here’s an old, but excellent set of examples of good and bad opt-out processes.
Here’s a more recent list of great unsubscribe and preferences pages.
And another with 18 tips for improving the unsubscribe process.
Being Customer-centric
In closing, have respect for your audience. If you’re disrespectful internally, it’s likely that it will somehow slip out, like in the example above. But if you’re customer-centric in every step, you’ll seek to bring value and relevance in everything you do – even your unsubscribe process.
If you’re thinking about the customer’s experience in every step of the process, you won’t name your campaign “get the boneheads back.”
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