From: Brookstone
Subject Lines:
1) FREE Sitewide shipping with $95 minimum purchase
2) Hurry, only 4 hours left for FREE Sitewide Shipping at $90!
3) Deal of the Day: $20 OFF our Men's Fleece Heated Vest plus Sitewide FREE SHIPPING!
4) Discover this year's hottest holiday gifts plus FREE Sitewide Shipping!
Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009



Brookstone has stepped into one of the most common holiday traps: over-sending.

I have received up to four emails in one day from Brookstone, and an average of more than one email per day overall. While a small handful of people may enjoy getting blasted by that many emails, I think you're more likely to lose subscribers by over-sending.

Make sure if you're sending more than one email a day that the messages differ enough to make it worthwhile. On 12/15 I received two postcard-style emails, a deal of the day AND a general product collage email. The two postcard emails were essentially the same: Free Shipping on orders over $95, and the other, Free Shipping on orders over $90 - baffling. The other two emails mentioned the free shipping offer again in a top banner. Were four emails really needed for the free shipping promo? I doubt it.

If you're not sure how many emails to send, I would suggest creating a "my account" option where the subscriber can login and choose the amount (and type) of emails they would like to receive. If you already have an option like this on your website, make sure to include a link in each email to "change my email preferences." If that's too much work (on you or your subscribers), place a survey at the bottom of each email with a simple one-click answer.
EXAMPLE: How many emails would you like to receive from us?
[ ] More than two per week  [ ] Two per week  [ ] One per week
[ ] Bi-weekly  [ ] One per month

If you give the customer a chance to control how many emails they receive, you'll be more likely to retain your subscribers by giving them a program that fits their personal needs.

From: eBay
Date: Friday, December 11, 2009

Have you ever wished for a quick sign-up form on a web site? I recently heard an ad on the radio for eBay's 'Daily Deal' - limited time and quantity offers that are usually 20% - 90% off, all with free shipping. All I have to do is visit eBay.com and sign up to have these deals delivered right to my inbox, or at least that's what the lovely voice on my stereo said. Pretty cool, right? Well, in reality, not so cool.

I found the daily deal page and email acquisition module with no problems. Unfortunately, I had to register in order to sign-up for this email. Determined to get these great deals, I forged ahead and registered. During the process I was told that I'd be able to adjust my notification preferences once I was done registering. Hmmm... I clicked through the confirmation email and still couldn't find a place to do this. Luckily, they sent me a welcome email with some language and a link in the footer on how to make these changes. Unluckily, it "may take up to 10 days to process" change requests. Also, the preference center didn't include a single reference to daily deal emails anywhere. (I THINK that was why I started this process 30 minutes earlier.)

I'm still not sure if I'm going to get these emails at all. If I do, it may be too late for my holiday shopping. I think a better time to smooth out this process would have been before the holiday season, and before you invest in a radio campaign.

From: net-a-porter.com
Subject Line: What's new for you on Wednesday
Date: Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Earlier this month I wrote about a positive experience with an email message from net-a-porter.com. While I maintain that their intention to message on favorite designer new arrivals is a good one, I have some reservations about the execution. I've been receiving emails literally every day highlighting relatively random (not email-worthy) Burberry product such as this mish-mash of sportswear.

It's a tricky balance. Moving toward systematic automation based on either stated or inferred preferences is definitely "the way of the future," but there's something to be said for the value of human input. I'm not sure that the net-a-porter.com merchandising team would have highlighted this particular "Cotton waffle-knit top."

Perhaps it's a simple matter of adding a "hot or not" flag that indicates whether a particular item should or shouldn't hit the inbox.

From: UrbanDaddy (and J.Crew)
Subject Line(s): Read below to see the good ones... :)
Date(s): Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - Soon to be Discontinued

What is UrbanDaddy? Is it a "Who's your Daddy" kind of a Daddy and got my copy of Maxim magazine ready for toilet reading material kind of a Daddy... or a stroller pushing, farmers' market shopping, diaper changing, father of my children kind of a Daddy? Methinks J.Crew is betting on the former which is a bummer... because the latter type is more my kind of man.

I'm just not getting it... What exactly is the relationship between J. Crew and UrbanDaddy anyways? Is it a cross-promotion email campaign or full-on corporate sponsorship (like Johnson & Johnson being to BabyCenter what J. Crew maybe is to UrbanDaddy?) or something else entirely? And whatever it is, why is J. Crew pushing it so hard?

Fellow Smith-Harmon blogger Darrah MacLean wrote in an earlier blogpost about her annoyance with the difficulty she had trying to enter the contest for an NYC trip for two that J.Crew was promoting (said prize being J.Crew's enticement to get people to sign up for the UrbanDaddy emails). While I didn't experience the same troubles Darrah mentioned, I do think J. Crew could/should have done a better job of trying to figure out who the target demographic would be for UrbanDaddy before they sent out the contest email (clearly, they missed the mark with me!). My guess is that J.Crew sent the NYC trip promo email to their entire subscriber list without taking into consideration any segmentation. I'm know that I'm not that difficult to track - my cookies are always on - and I've only browsed/clicked/purchased in the women's and kid's departments... and now I am seeing these subject lines in my inbox:
*Rattlesnake Sausage, Belgian Beers and Satan's Whiskers
*Re: Meeting Up Tonight
*Your 7am Beer Is Here
*Late Night Booze and DJs in the Mission
*Endless Happy Hour, Bacon Biscuits and Gin for Days
(IMHO, some of these bear a strong resemblance to SPAM Subject Lines!)

To say that I find the whole "UrbanDaddy experience" offensive might be overstating it a tad, but something about their emails make me feel a smidgen uncomfortable and/or irritated. I know I have the option to simply unsubscribe (and I plan to - just as soon as I finish writing my little rant here), but I'm annoyed that I have to take the steps to do so. While I realize it's up to me to read the fine print, and that there's no real harm done, I kinda feel like a sucker for getting roped into signing up in the first place.

Ultimately, whatever the relationship is between the two, I'm having a hard time figuring out why J.Crew is associating itself with UrbanDaddy. The J. Crew man I picture is handsome, rugged and dresses with mad style (like my 'BabyDaddy') - UrbanDaddy is just its loser wannabe hangin' in Las Vegas Lothario friend.

This is just my 2¢... thoughts/comments anyone? :)

*Addendum - I am adding a little edit to this piece (strike-through on the last sentence). I did unsubscribe from UrbanDaddy and when prompted for my reason for leaving, I put the link for this blog in the comments section. Shortly after, I was contacted by Urban Daddy's Business Development Manager who wanted to know if I would be open to having a conversation about this piece. Uh-oh! No, actually, I called her and we had a lovely conversation, after which I realized that my words in this post came across a little bit meaner than I had intended. I guess publicly breaking up with somebody is never nice to do, and for that I can be "man enough" to apologize.

From: Hollister
Subject Line: Woke up in shreds
Date: August 23, 2009

First things first. Love this subject line. Love it. I had 30+ emails waiting in my strictly retail email inbox this morning and this is the first one I opened. What I also love is that the subject of the email delivers on the promise of the subject line. It's all about torn-up jeans.

Two big misses for me: 1) At first, second, and third glance, I didn't realize this was a horizontal email. I love that they're exploring a new perspective, but they need to offer some copy to help their email subscribers along. This is a shift in the norm, so a little help would be good. A cool "Keep scrolling" would've helped me figure it out, at least. 2) An even bigger issue for me is that there's no CTA. A simple "Get shredded" would do the trick. 

But, even without the CTA, I clicked on the image anyways and was taken to a fantastic landing page within the chick portion of the site. What I can't figure out is how Hollister knew I was a Betty and not a Dude. They never asked when I signed up for email, so I'm thinking they just guessed. Rather than taking a 50/50 shot, my suggestion would be to just add a question to the sign-up a process: Are you a Betty or a Dude? Or better yet, add two CTAs to the email, Betty Shop and Dude Shop. 

At any rate, the subject line rocks and so did the landing experience. Now, to try and fit into those skinny-leg shredded jeans... but that's another story for another blog.

Setting aside the fact that Whole Foods is probably not the most economical place to shop, I still feel somehow healthier when I buy my food there. I just signed up for their emails yesterday, and while the Welcome letter was a little boring, I'm loving their newsletter! Here's what I heart about it:

Preheader: Althought it's a bit wordy, the fact that they have a preheader is a step in the right direction. I do think they could streamline it a bit and still get the messages across.

Relevancy : The Renegade Lunch Lady is a perfect feature story for back to school. Even if the meals she's suggesting are more what Claire would eat vs. Brian (that's a Breakfast Club reference BTW), the idea is timely. Plus they include links that go directly to the recipes, which makes life easy for busy moms.

Dynamic Content : Love the fact that they were able to populate the "What's on sale?" story with the deals for my specific Whole Foods store. Hint: they could do that because they asked me for my zip code when I signed up for their emails.

Recipe Reviews: This is a smart way to bring me into their community and encourage me to try a recipe as well as write a review.

Smart Design: They really broke up the content in any easy to digest way (pun intended) and maximized the right rail.

From: CB2: Unsubscribe Request
Subject Line: CB2
Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Unsubscribe verification emails: good idea, or "too much" when a subscriber's request is already confirmed on a landing page at the end of the opt-out process? I'm interested in your input.

From: Smith-Harmon
Subject Line: Retail Email Year-End Trends for 2008
Date: January 6, 2009

If you're in the midst of planning your 2009 email marketing strategy, this free reportlet from Chad White, Smith-Harmon's research director, is a definite must-read. It's packed with stats, trends and charts about the overall retail email volume, frequency and timing among the top online retailers in 2008. Want to know which days of the week were most popular to send retail emails? Interested in the top 20 retail email days of the year? Ready to learn what the SECOND biggest retail email season was, behind Christmas? Fasten your seatbelt and get ready for a few surprises.

Download the free reportlet now to get the panoramic view of what happened in the world of retail email in 2008.

Company: Gardener's Supply Company

I don't unsubscribe to emails very often, but this website had a nice feature that I hadn't seen before; Instead of opting-out of the email, I was given the option to send my emails to a different email address. Coincidentally, this is exactly what I wanted to do. Customer saved, and it saved me an extra step!

It would be nice to see some additional options, like the ability to adjust email frequency. And I can't help but notice the dash in e-mail. But I'll still give them credit where due. :)