The upstream lifecycle of emails (aka why e-mails are like salmon)

The uphill battle of our e-mail lifecycles

There are so many challenges we face, as marketers in order to make a successful e-mail campaign happen. We spend a lot of time, thought, money and energy building something we deem to be a great e-mail.
Next we send it out to our database list (all opt in of course!) , which we have carefully crafted and defined in order to maximize our reach of our chosen market segments. And here is where the e-mail lifecycle starts to face it's fight for it's life.

The salmon run parallel

An e-mail lifecycle shares a lot of parallels with salmon and their mating challenges. In order to mate, a salmon's goal is to swim upstream, get past such hazards as bears and other predators, diseases and water hazards, then find a mate and consummate the relationship. E-mails must electronically also swim upstream, get past spam blockers, stand out in over packed e-mail boxes, avoid getting randomly deleted and get the customer to open the e-mail and call out a clear call to action, a solution message, or even provide some information the customer deems valuable in order to successfully accomplish its goal, the click through. Don't you just love metaphors?

Carefully crafted databases and following the rules of e-mail protocol will help you get those e-mails into the actual inbox. This is all process oriented and not very creative really. Besides just because you have managed to get the e-mail in their box does not mean that once they open it, they will click through. This is where the actual e-mail content, design and function itself is critical. I have seen e-mails that are so overwhelming that I generally delete it immediately. I have also seen poor formatting come through, which means they didn't test the e-mail to make sure it translated correctly. My favorites and the ones that seem the most successful are simple and clean, great graphics and clearly focus on no more that 3 solutions and have clear call to actions.

There are of course, exceptions to this rule. Most online media websites will list a variety of teasers to articles and products on their websites. In most cases the goals of these e-mails are to get click through and acquire customer interaction.

An award winning e-mail

Once such media e-mail that I recently found and found aesthetically pleasing considering how many ranges of topics (music types) they were trying to cover. Ideally, it would be great if Sirius Satellite Radio could clearly identify what specific music genres customer were listening to and narrow down the length of the e-mail, but overall I think it is a nice clean design and it even won an Internet ad award.