JANE FINETTE

Email Marketers - relationships start at the very beginning

According to Matthew Kelleher, from Redeye:  on the econsultancy blog “2010 was a year in which email marketers began to wake up to the fact that email is not purely a revenue driving media but rather a ‘customer communication channel’.” Its incredibly hard to believe that its taken so long for companies to realize this. 

Heading up User Engagement at Mozilla you’ll say is an easier job if you know Mozilla is a non-profit, that our communication doesn’t need to convert to profit dollars, but we still want long term Firefox users and we use email as a channel to build relationships. The difference? We are interested in engagement, and that engagement is the path to a happy and healthy customer. The “mozilla & you“  newsletter provides tips and helpful advice, it only comes out once per month, and we’re very glad to see our readers are happy with the content and frequency. Open rates are around 25% and CTRs with 15% well above average.

Here are some email best practices we take pride in for the “mozilla & you” newsletter, sadly these are basic email operations which one doesn’t see that often anymore.

• At point of sign up, we ask HTML or Text — its an old-skool question, but people don’t ask anymore and people like choice.

• The Mozilla Privacy Policy is clearly pointed out also at sign up and in each email — how many times have you simply entered an email address for a newsletter, and have no idea if your email will be shared with third parties?

• In the Welcome email you can subscribe immediately, and we make it simple to unsubscribe from any email — how many emails do you get each day because the unsubscribe process was too complex and its easier to hit the delete key?

• An email subscriber can actually reply to the newsletter sender email address, and that email goes to a real person (often myself), and we try to help with inquiries wherever possible — email needs to be human, receiving it from a machine with a no-reply email address, doesn’t build a bond.

I would personally love to see email marketers (as well as creating engrossing content), take sign up and unsubscribe more seriously. Engagement stems from respect for the individual AND that starts at the beginning of the relationship.


Do leave a comment on your email experiences and other practices you believe email marketeers should observe