Bronto Blog

Moments after I booked my hotel from Hotels.com for the Email Insider Summit (plug) in Park City, Utah, I received an email from donotreply.

Had my purchase not been top of mind, I probably would have marked this email as spam. Who the heck is “donotreply?” Why not keep it simple and use the brand that I know - Hotels.com? It is too bad that Hotels.com ignored this simple step.

Also, the subject line read, “Hotel Booking Confirmation.” Again, considering I had just purchased, the subject was relevant to me. However, it seems like a missed opportunity to use the Hotels.com brand to personalize based on my destination, date of travel, etc.

The good news is that the Hotels.com did a great job on the copy of the email. It rendered nicely with images off and images on and provided detailed booking/receipt information.

After reading this email from Hotels.com, I did a quick search in my Gmail account for “donotreply.” To my dismay, I found another example of this terrible from name from Chipotle.

Additionally, a well-known brand - Vonage - used “donotreply@vonage.com” as their from address.

As many studies have shown, one of the two most important factors in the subscriber open decision is from name (subject line being the other). Why not spend the extra few seconds to ensure that your from name is not “donotreply?” Take the “extra” step and make the from name your company name or brand.

Think about it in terms of an old school letter. Imagine if you received a snail mail letter like the one below. Do you open it?

I often hear marketers talking about the silver bullet of email marketing, the next wizbang that lead to crazy high open rates and conversions. Let’s first make sure we have the basics down. It’s time to start tackling some of the easy stuff - the “low hanging fruit” as my old boss says.

DJ Waldow
Director of Best Practices & Deliverability at Bronto

Much has been written about how people determine if an email is spam. We typically look at the From Name and/or the Subject Line and decide if the email is wanted/expected/desired and act accordingly (read, delete, file, mark as junk). However, as I was sucking down my first cup of Bean Traders coffee this morning and plowing through the 253 emails in my spam folder…I began to think:

Do we use the same thought process in our “delete forever” decisions (purging from spam folder) as we do for “mark as junk” decisions?

In order to answer this question, I thought about how I make that decision when faced with a spam folder that looks like the one below (some words redacted to protect the innocent):

DJ's Gmail Spam Folder

The big difference for me between marking a message as spam from the inbox and deleting it forever from the spam folder is the decision time. I actually timed myself. In 5 seconds, I scanned the entire folder of 50 messages. I then clicked “select all” followed by “delete forever.” Bam. Gone. Done. Never to return. Read the rest of this entry »

I just started reading Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better penned by Gina Trapani, the founding editor of the blog Lifehacker.com. The book is described as a mashup of a computer user manual and a productivity system. It is neatly segmented into 11 chapters and 116 “life hacks” (workarounds or shortcuts that overcome the everyday difficulties of the modern worker). Chapters range from “Control Your Email” (Hack #1 - Empty Your Inbox; Hack #3 - Craft Effective Messages) to “Automate Repetitive Tasks” (Hack #61 - Automatically Back Up Your Files Online; Hack  #65 - Make Google Search Results Automatically Come to You).

I’m only a few chapters in and have already found parallels between managing your own inbox and managing the inboxes of your subscribers. Think of it as personal emailer meets email marketer.

Similar to what any email marketing expert would tell you, Upgrade Your Life stresses the importance of composing a good email. The 3 suggestions they provide under the “Composing a New Message” section can easily be applied to an effective email marketing message:

1. Determine Your Purpose
2. Use an Informative Subject Line
3. Be Succinct

Looking at each recommendation in detail… Read the rest of this entry »