Here's a lesson in how not to handle opt-out functions in your small business' e-mail marketing endeavors.
I finally got fed up with the constant stream of marketing e-mails aimed at me by e-commerce powerhouse Barnes and Noble.com. I ordered one book there two years ago and I have just been too lazy to go to the site and take my name off their list.
You would think that there would be a one-click opt-out feature in their way-too-numerous commercial e-mails. There isn't.
Instead you play a game that's all too common with many e-commerce sites: escape from the e-mail newsletter. I went to the site, where I have to sign in to my account. Naturally, I have no idea what the password is because I can barely remember creating this account several years ago. I'm not even sure about my user name.
After going through the whole rigmarole of attempting to sign in and having no success, the first thing I'm presented with after clicking on a link called "Name, password and communications settings" is a request to provide my e-mail address.
Frustrated, I offer up my e-mail address with the hopes of having them send me my old password -- but up pops a screen that wants the last five digits of the credit card number stored with my account. Of course, I have no idea what card I used two years ago. For further assistance I was asked to dial an 800 number. Not wanting to go to voice mail jail, I simply gave up and resigned myself to simply deleting all communications from BarnesandNoble.com, now and forever.
So, repeat after me: In any future e-mail marketing campaigns, I promise to make it simple and easy for customers to opt out.
I was thinking about all this in conjunction with my recent baby-step efforts in e-mail marketing. It's clearly one thing to write about this stuff, and something else to actually do it, especially in the small startup phase of a business.
After writing about
AuctionContact.net, I finally decided to implement the service. AuctionContact allows a small, eBay-reliant business like our orchid operation to invite our customers/visitors to sign up for a weekly newsletters summarizing our current auctions. It's strictly opt-in, and we manage our own subscriber list.
The service from this small, family-owned start-up starts at $4.99 a month. Once a week their software collects my active auctions and sends a newsletter to customers, showing them my new eBay auctions with direct links to each one.
Signup was a breeze, and they even have a new feature that automatically includes thumbnails of the pictures that go with my listings. During the signup process I was able to customize the header message on the newsletter, and can go back and update or change it any time. I even included our business phone number. (I love to get calls, I can usually close a sale over the phone.)
In the signup form message (the one that will be presented to prospective subscribers) I said:
"Be among the first to find out about our new auctions!
By subscribing to the free Sun Coast Orchids weekly auction update newsletter, you will receive a list of our active auctions by email every Monday. This way you can easily check all of our new listings. Just enter your email address below and hit the "Subscribe" button.
We promise it will be easy to unsubscribe later if you change your mind.
Thanks!"
At the bottom of each newsletter there is a direct link to the page where customers can unsubscribe by clicking on just one button.
The user agreement bars customers from using the e-mail addresses collected for sending spam, and that's fine with me. We want to do things right. This application comes with an opt-out interface designed to make it easy for us to remove the e-mail address of those who decide to opt out. And opting in is a double opt-in system, also known as a confirmed opt-in process.
After completing the signup process, AuctionContact sent me an e-mail outlining how to proceed. Basically, you log in and get a piece of html code that you can then insert into any of the e-mails that you send to your eBay customers (receipts, confirmations, correspondences, etc.). The code essentially is a link for those who want to subscribe to your auction newsletter. You can't paste it into the actual auction listings, however. eBay frowns on that. AuctionContact also has code for putting a similar newsletter subscription button on our main Web site.
This whole process was done in about half an hour -- I liked that a lot. I also like dealing micro business to micro business.
AuctionContact founder Alex Stankovic told me that the service is keeping him pretty busy these days. He said he has several advertising initiatives coming up and they are working on improving the current system and making it ready for heavier loads.
"One area where I will be adding new features is statistics," Stankovic said. "Currently, users can only see how many clicks they got from a newsletter. Providing more insight into the performance of the list will bring significant benefit to the user."
We're just getting started with this, of course, but some of our customers have already signed up. I'll monitor the progress (read sales results) as we go along and report back on our results in a few months.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
