Brand Messaging: Issues Central to CMO Viability

Clorox, Wells Fargo, JetBlue and Home Depot are all well recognized names and brands. For nearly an hour, the executives of those companies discussed a range of hot-button issues central to CMO viability. Here’s a link to the complete story and a video recap of that conversation. http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=116493

  — Gordon Bayliss, DEI Advisor for Corporate Support

Hi there, I know I haven’t emailed in a while…reconnecting with your list

We know many DEI members  are collecting email addresses from donors/listeners, but haven’t been communicating regularly or ever with those individuals.  Many of you are in a conundrum what is the best way to reconnect .  Here’s some easy advice from the monkeybrains, the mailchimp blog:

A quick reminder: best practice tells us that donors who receive e-newsletters are more likely to give again versus those who don’t. 

 Q: “I have a list of 9,000 customer email addresses. I haven’t emailed them in a while, and now I’m ready to start sending them email newsletters. How can I do this without getting blacklisted, or angering my customers?”

A: Very carefully. If these recipients haven’t heard from you in a long time, chances are they already forgot opting in. Or, your emails just aren’t relevant to them anymore. And just because they bought something from you 5 years ago, it doesn’t mean they want to get email newsletters from you today. The chances are very high that they’ll click that nasty “this is spam” button in their email program. If only a handful of recipients click that button, some ISPs will start blocking all future emails from your company.

So you’ve got to be extremely careful. Here’s some advice we gave someone yesterday, who asked us this very question:

1. Send a “Re-introduction” campaign. The tone of the email is the most important factor here. Think more “Letter from the president” than “Boy, have we got an offer for you!!!!”
2. In that email, try to remind them how you got their contact information. If they’ve purchased something from your site, or if they’ve opted in, put that in your message. Got an order ID? Name of the product they bought? Mail-merge it in.
3. Give an incentive to stay opted-in. If I did business with you years ago, why would i want to do business with you again?
4. Send the re-introduction campaign to very small chunks of your list. Don’t just blast one message to 9,000 people. Break it into smaller lists of 1,000 or 2,000. And why not spread it out over several days? That way, you can watch for abuse complaints, and tweak content for maximum effectiveness.