What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?
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I can't believe that even now, in the Year Of Our Satan 2018, marketing companies are still sending out emails that are front-loaded with non-information.
I'm signed up to the daily "news" blast from the local news radio station. I honestly don't know why. I never read it. It might have been to get bonus points to a contest.
Now, I MIGHT be more inclined to read it if I had any indication of what was in the newsletter. Something to draw the eye and entice me. Instead-- and this is a screenshot from a 1920px wide monitor...
https://i.imgur.com/Q6jMXgY.png
Instead I get:
- The shitty campaign title (Be The First To Know). Twice. I don't give a fuck. I can see from the sender it's from 680 News.
- The date, twice, in two different formats. Hey, assholes-- every single mail client already displays the date. And what might be even more shocking and surprising to you-- since this is a DAILY newsletter, I can kind of assume that when it arrives, it's TODAY'S newsletter.
- The text of a link to view it in the browser-- despite the fact that the newsletter is all text (plus some pictures, but the content is all text). The "View it in browser" link is supposed to be for shitty one-single-image-with-text emails, when the image is blocked.
- ANOTHER introduction describing what the email is. Yes, I know this is "what's making news right now". THAT'S THE ENTIRE GODDAMN POINT OF SIGNING UP FOR A DAILY, CURRENT EVENT ALERT EMAIL.
If I see this email on my desktop, which with a wide monitor, is displaying the MAXIMUM possible amount of preview data, I have literally zero idea what's inside the email.
If I saw it as a "u gotz mail" notification on my phone, I would have even less idea of what it is.
Why is this not in the format of:
FROM: 680 News
Subj: #TorontoStrong vigil; election polls; Richmond Hill car crash; SIU investigating overdose; Pink Moon!
Body: (note these would by hyperlinks to the stories, and the actual story preview copy in the body of the email-- looks like I get 114 characters)
Faith leaders at #TorontoStrong vigil; PCs maintain strong lead: poll; Single car crash into tree leaves driver dead; Police administer naoxone, man dies, SIU investigating; Pink moon, 1st full in April, delights;Okay, that's a bit over the word count, but they have editors to tighten it up. Then at least, on any device, I'd know what the email was about without opening it-- which means I'd been tempted to open it to read those wonderful stories.
Fucking hell.
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@lorne-kates You mean you aren't immediately driven to click by your overwhelming desire to be the first to know?
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@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
but they have editors to tighten it up.
You sure?
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@lorne-kates On the flip side: At two different places I've worked at (not sure if coincidence or a common brainworm), receptionists/secretaries/etc. (so basically people whose job is to email) had the tendency to write everything in the subject. The full email, including "best regards, Jane Secretary". The body only contains their default email signature.
The first place was worse, as we were forced to use that horrible abomination Lotus, which then allowed multi-line subjects.
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@topspin said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates On the flip side: At two different places I've worked at (not sure if coincidence or a common brainworm), receptionists/secretaries/etc. (so basically people whose job is to email) had the tendency to write everything in the subject. The full email, including "best regards, Jane Secretary". The body only contains their default email signature.
Oh, you mean like Lotus No--
@topspin said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
The first place was worse, as we were forced to use that horrible abomination Lotus, which then allowed multi-line subjects.
Wait, what did the second place use?
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@tsaukpaetra said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@topspin said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates On the flip side: At two different places I've worked at (not sure if coincidence or a common brainworm), receptionists/secretaries/etc. (so basically people whose job is to email) had the tendency to write everything in the subject. The full email, including "best regards, Jane Secretary". The body only contains their default email signature.
Oh, you mean like Lotus No--
One of my greatest joys in life is that I haven't had to use Lotus Notes in nearly 10 years.
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@el_heffe said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@tsaukpaetra said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@topspin said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates On the flip side: At two different places I've worked at (not sure if coincidence or a common brainworm), receptionists/secretaries/etc. (so basically people whose job is to email) had the tendency to write everything in the subject. The full email, including "best regards, Jane Secretary". The body only contains their default email signature.
Oh, you mean like Lotus No--
One of my greatest joys in life is that I haven't had to use Lotus Notes in nearly 10 years.
And mine is that I never have. A coworker (when I first moved to CA 20yrs ago) did. He had to support integrating our product with that. I just had to deal with Win32s.
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Wait, is that entire line Subject? I would assume the blue part is subject, and the gray text afterwards is auto-generated by your email client.
If not... jeesh.
BTW, an example of a mailing list that does it right: https://www.codeproject.com/Feature/Insider/
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@el_heffe said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
One of my greatest joys in life is that I haven't had to use Lotus Notes in nearly 10 years.
17 years
soberNotes free!
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@cartman82 said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Wait, is that entire line Subject? I would assume the blue part is subject, and the gray text afterwards is auto-generated by your email client.
If not... jeesh.
BTW, an example of a mailing list that does it right: https://www.codeproject.com/Feature/Insider/
No, only the black text should be the subject. The grey stuff is a preview of text in the body, and most "email marketing" places put the "View this in your browser if your email client is crap" and other useless things first before doing any of the styling so that's all you end up seeing in the preview.
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@e4tmyl33t said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
No, only the black text should be the subject. The grey stuff is a preview of text in the body, and most "email marketing" places put the "View this in your browser if your email client is crap" and other useless things first before doing any of the styling so that's all you end up seeing in the preview.
In that case, it's the email program that's TRWTF.
If it's gonna generate preview, it should do a better job of picking out relevant parts from the email.
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@tsaukpaetra said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Wait, what did the second place use?
A flamethrower.
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@e4tmyl33t said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@cartman82 said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Wait, is that entire line Subject? I would assume the blue part is subject, and the gray text afterwards is auto-generated by your email client.
If not... jeesh.
BTW, an example of a mailing list that does it right: https://www.codeproject.com/Feature/Insider/
No, only the black text should be the subject. The grey stuff is a preview of text in the body, and most "email marketing" places put the "View this in your browser if your email client is crap" and other useless things first before doing any of the styling so that's all you end up seeing in the preview.
The black part is the sender friendly name. The blue part is the subject. The grey part is Hotmail's preview-- presumably just the first "however many will fit" characters of the plaintext version of the email.
Contrast it with these examples:
https://i.imgur.com/r1EP3lM.png
- Brief subject line that tells me exactly what the email is about
- Body is front-loaded with information, so the preview shows useful text
eBay does this really right, because that's an example of the daily email I get for one of (many) saved searches. Without even opening the email, I can tell at a glance which search it is; if the item is Buy it Now or Auction, and I can even see the price ranges to tell if it's even worth me looking any further.
In fact, ebay DID once switch the format of the email to "useless" with lots of "hey there here are you saved searches for today. be sure to check out these items that match you search. There are {cutoff}", which completely destroyed the usefulness of the email. I put in a customer service ticket saying "Hey guys, the old format was useful for these reasons..." (as above, but nicer). And they replied with "Oh, that's true, we didn't think of that, thanks"-- AND THEN WENT BACK TO THE OLD USEFUL FORMAT. I think that is the first and only time a large company has undone a "lol let's make changes" change, and gone back to an older, more useful version. So kudos to them.
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@tsaukpaetra said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Oh, you mean like Lotus No--
@topspin said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
The first place was worse, as we were forced to use that horrible abomination Lotus, which then allowed multi-line subjects.
Wait, what did the second place use?
Normal email. They just don't use newlines in the subject and make it slightly shorter, but still write the whole mail in subject.
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@lorne-kates I'm still saying the software that's yanking out that preview should do a MUCH better job. Surely they can pick out H tags or guess headlines based on surrounding whitespace, instead of just grabbing whatever is the most convenient.
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@hungrier said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates You mean you aren't immediately driven to click by your overwhelming desire to be the first to know?
By definition you can't be the first to know. At best, the second to know, and that's if the reporter wrote the email.
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@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
I think that is the first and only time a large company has undone a "lol let's make changes" change, and gone back to an older, more useful version. So kudos to them.
I'm sure they only switched back because their engagement metrics dropped after the change
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@bb36e said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
I think that is the first and only time a large company has undone a "lol let's make changes" change, and gone back to an older, more useful version. So kudos to them.
I'm sure they only switched back because their engagement metrics dropped after the change
Maybe. Though normally Chief Sociopath Officers look at a negative outcome from their decision, and rather than admitting their error, blame it on someone else.
"OUR real customers enjoy this change"
"Works on my machine"
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@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
In fact, ebay DID once switch the format of the email to "useless" with lots of "hey there here are you saved searches for today. be sure to check out these items that match you search. There are {cutoff}", which completely destroyed the usefulness of the email.
Reminds me of that guy I used to know who hated getting texts more than 30 characters long because his phone screen was half-broken and he couldn't read further. I assume you have a similar issue making you unable to actually open the emails so you have to rely on the preview?
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Reminds me of that guy I used to know who hated getting texts more than 30 characters long because his phone screen was half-broken and he couldn't read further. I assume you have a similar issue making you unable to actually open the emails so you have to rely on the preview?
broken flip-phone == 1920px wide monitor
Gotcha.
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@lorne-kates it's the only explanation I can think of for why you can't just open the fucking email.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates it's the only explanation I can think of for why you can't just open the fucking email.
He's not suggesting he wants to.
In fact, it's the opposite.
What he's saying is that the emails are worthless waste of his time, since they gunked up the available space, which could have been used to introduce a teaser, with generic marketing stuff.
And probably at some point (at least, it happened for me) marketers were so focused on branding for the stuff he worked on, that it ruined the experience for his users.
Which is exactly why UX is rather ironic. Because the introduction of UX has done anything but UX.
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@xaade said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
What he's saying is that the emails are worthless waste of his time
They are...
since they gunked up the available space
...but not because of it.
It's not about the email being wrong. It's about the email being designed for human reader with HTML-enabled client, and the non-human parser automatically generating a short digest from it, and failing spectacularly. You can't really blame the sender for not making the mail easy to parse by the bot they're likely not even aware of existing - unless you're the kind of person who expects every employee in every Starbucks to already know what's your favorite coffee.
which could have been used to introduce a teaser
What's a teaser? Is there any standard - official or just common practice - of how teasers are extracted from emails so you can easily create teasers that are compatible with wide variety of email clients in a way that doesn't make the actual email less readable?
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
and the non-human parser automatically generating a short digest from it, and failing spectacularly
You continue to be wrong about that. There's no parser. It's showing the start of the email. That's it. And the start of the email is useless. Neither the subject line or preview give any indication of the content.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
You can't really blame the sender for not making the mail easy to parse by the bot they're likely not even aware of existing
Outlook and Outlook Express have had that feature since 1998. GMail's always had that feature. I'm pretty sure it's been in Lotus Fucking Notes for a while as well. There's no excuse for them not knowing about it.
@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Neither the subject line or preview give any indication of the content.
Of course not! "Opens" is their engagement metric, not "reads of the subject line". So by making sure the subject line is opaque, you have to open every e-mail to know if there's anything interesting, so you open more of their e-mails! Brillant!
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@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
and the non-human parser automatically generating a short digest from it, and failing spectacularly
You continue to be wrong about that. There's no parser. It's showing the start of the email. That's it. And the start of the email is useless. Neither the subject line or preview give any indication of the content.
So, being preview-friendly is directly at odds with being people-who-open-emails-friendly. Unless there's a working hack to insert text that gets into preview but isn't actually displayed in the email.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
So, being preview-friendly is directly at odds with being people-who-open-emails-friendly.
Being preview-friendly is what gets people to open the email, and that's why gets people to click the mailchump link.
Being opaque means I'll give it one glance in the sea of other marketing emails I get, instantly lose interest / not get interested, and then never open it.
There's a reason those "here's a bunch of coupon" physical mails have some coupons and text on the outside, rather than just a plain white envelope with "your envelope is here" written on it.
They are also completely ignoring the section of people who only get emails on their phone, and whose entire interaction with their inbox is the preview/notification that pop up (or show on the notification tray). I can't remember the last time I intentionally launched my Outlook app... versus clicking on a notification to directly open an email (because the notification gave me enough info).
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@gąska This is a multi-part post in MIME format.
--NextPart-DEADBEEF
Content-Type: text/plainThis will show up on the preview line and should have important stuff here. Having different text than the HTML section can be an indication of spam, but since newsletters have all that SPF/SenderID/DKIM/DMARC good stuff, most MTAs will let them through.
--NextPart-DEADBEEF
Content-Type: text/htmlProblems reading this post? Upgrade to Discourse ADvanced! So good it has two capital letters!
<logo-real-new-DO_NOT_USE.jpg>
This is the post that people will actually see.--NextPart-DEADBEEF--
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@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
So, being preview-friendly is directly at odds with being people-who-open-emails-friendly.
Being preview-friendly is what gets people to open the email, and that's why gets people to click the mailchump link.
Maybe I'm weird, but I open every email I receive. If I received it, it already means it's of interest to me (otherwise it would go to spam folder, or spam mailbox I use for registering on various sites).
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Maybe I'm weird, but I open every email I receive.
You're weird. And have far more spare time on hand than I do.
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@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
There's a reason those "here's a bunch of coupon" physical mails have some coupons and text on the outside, rather than just a plain white envelope with "your envelope is here" written on it.
Actually, I get those inside a mostly-white envelope with no company name and Big Red Scary Letters that say "IMPORTANT DISCOUNT WARNING NOTIFICATION". From @Weng. Sort of.
Which I shove directly into the shredder without opening, because like all spam, they targeted so, so wrong.
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@dkf I receive one email per week. I also don't read spam folder and unsubscribed from everything I could.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
I receive one email per week.
18 today so far, with very heavy filtering. Of which about half come from our own marketing department.
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@twelvebaud said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
multi-part post in MIME format
TIL. Sounds like it solves the problem entirely. So it kinda sucks that @Lorne-Kates's radio guys don't get it right. But the important thing is, he was wrong that it just shows the beginning of human-readable email (it shows human-unreadable one).
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
It's not about the email being wrong. It's about the email being designed for human reader with HTML-enabled client, and the non-human parser automatically generating a short digest from it, and failing spectacularly. You can't really blame the sender for not making the mail easy to parse by the bot they're likely not even aware of existing - unless you're the kind of person who expects every employee in every Starbucks to already know what's your favorite coffee.
Then why isn't it a multi-part email, with a plain text version?
EDIT: Well, seems like several people already brought this up.
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@twelvebaud said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
--NextPart-DEADBEEF--
Thanks for reminding me that my new grill arrives later this week.
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@gąska Amusingly enough, minutes after writing that post I got an e-mail from eBay. The subject line was about them updating their privacy policy. The auto-preview patiently explained that my eBay Android app was end-of-life and I needed to start using the website or something like that, whereas the actual e-mail was about GDPR rearing its ugly head. Even when companies try to get it right, nobody in marketing ever borrows a brain cell from anyone in IT.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Maybe I'm weird, but I open every email I receive.
My inbox currently has 6629 unread messages in it. Someday I'll get around to cleaning it out.
If I received it, it already means it's of interest to me
Umm... No.
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@twelvebaud said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Having different text than the HTML section can be an indication of spam,
I know that's one of the rules my ISP checks. I thought it was a fairly strong indication of spamminess, but I just checked and it has a score of 0 — neither spam nor not-spam.
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@twelvebaud said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
minutes after writing that post I got an e-mail from eBay. The subject line was about them updating their privacy policy.
Me, too. It's currently among the 6629 unread emails. Maybe I'll get around to reading it; maybe not.
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TRWTF is people who can't configure tgeir spam filter properly.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
the non-human parser automatically generating a short digest from it, and failing spectacularly.
You overestimate what's at play here. There's no "generation" of "digest" going on. It's "Snip the first 200-or-so readable text-like characters from the message, and display it". Much like NodeBB's post previews in topic lists.
Or would you accuse NodeBB of "failing spectacularly" to generate a digest when the last post starts with " @Gąska said in What the fuck can't" ?
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
So, being preview-friendly is directly at odds with being people-who-open-emails-friendly.
Being preview-friendly is what gets people to open the email, and that's why gets people to click the mailchump link.
Maybe I'm weird, but I open every email I receive. If I received it, it already means it's of interest to me (otherwise it would go to spam folder, or spam mailbox I use for registering on various sites).
Yes you are weird.
I used to be like you. My Inbox was consistently less than 20 messages, all read.
Now?
Fuck the noise. And I don't have the time to go and unsubscribe and filter it anymore, so it just collects.
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@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
TRWTF is people who can't configure tgeir spam filter properly.
Is it? I believe there are much more real WTFs than that.
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@topspin said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@lorne-kates On the flip side: At two different places I've worked at (not sure if coincidence or a common brainworm), receptionists/secretaries/etc. (so basically people whose job is to email) had the tendency to write everything in the subject. The full email, including "best regards, Jane Secretary". The body only contains their default email signature.
The first place was worse, as we were forced to use that horrible abomination Lotus, which then allowed multi-line subjects.Dog knows I'm glad I escaped from the one company I've worked for that used Notes. There were many other things wrong with the company, so Notes was not on the list of things that drove me to quit, go figure.
Anyway, the company had an in-house chef/cook (Cordon Bleu-rated), and her competence level with IT would be best described as ... inept. She would send announcements about the day's menu, and they frequently arrived with the entire three-paragraph message in the subject line.
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Some marketing people can't seem to understand that people don't care about your product. They're not going to install apps or scan barcodes to see your ads. That's the exact opposite of how ads work.
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@tsaukpaetra said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Fuck the noise. And I don't have the time to go and unsubscribe and filter it anymore, so it just collects.
The few seconds of work to unsubscribe from a certain mailing list will significantly reduce the noise in the future and make your inbox much more useful.
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@anonymous234 said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
The few seconds of work to unsubscribe from a certain mailing list will significantly reduce the noise in the future and make your inbox much more useful.
The problem is that clicking an unsubscribe link confirms your email address is active, and it's suddenly much more value to resell. But maybe the problem's a little exaggerated and less than Sisyphean. (E.g., your email address gets resold but it gets resold to advertisers that are more easily caught by your spam filter.) Dunno.
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@heterodox said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
@anonymous234 said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
The few seconds of work to unsubscribe from a certain mailing list will significantly reduce the noise in the future and make your inbox much more useful.
The problem is that clicking an unsubscribe link confirms your email address is active, and it's suddenly much more value to resell. But maybe the problem's a little exaggerated and less than Sisyphean. (E.g., your email address gets resold but it gets resold to advertisers that are more easily caught by your spam filter.) Dunno.
I think he's assuming the list is legitimate, like the radio thing that Lorne signed up for or ads from an online store from which you purchased.
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@twelvebaud said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
"Opens" is their engagement metric, not "reads of the subject line".
Joke's on them, all my mail clients are set to prefer plaintext, and even after switching to HTML email I have it set to not download any remote content automatically.
@gąska said in What the fuck can't marketing people write a proper email?:
Maybe I'm weird, but I open every email I receive.
I open like 5%. Other 95% is just me seeing the preview in the notification, deciding that I don't care / can read the relevant bit there. Have to do an inbox cleanup every week or so because I just swipe most things away so it gunks up the inbox, but since I know I already read all the things I needed to it's just
Select All -> Mark As -> Read
