How NOT to send out a newsletter

Posted on 25 May 2009 Marketing

I received a newsletter this morning from BusinessDay, telling me about their newly launched website and functionality. That’s nice and all, but when the newsletter is missing some glaringly obvious mistakes, you have to wonder who advised BusinessDay to send out the newsletter in that format. In this case, it was their e-marketing agency, Cambrient.

businessday-newsletter

Here are the mistakes Cambrient made

Firstly, you fail to offer a reply email address. noreply-businessday@cambrient.com. Surely if you have the right to email me, I should have the opportunity to reply? Setting up a noreply email address smells of spam.

Secondly, the most important part of any newsletter is the subject. “Business Day”. That heading tells me nothing about the contents of the email. It does not garner any attention whatsoever and you are actually lucky I opened it as you are now getting some valuable feedback from me. :)

Moving on to the opening line – Dear Valued Client. I have never subscribed to any newsletter from BusinessDay neither have I ever visited their website, so I can only guess Cambrient bought or are using some of their personal mailing lists. In that case, I subscribe to their Digital Edge podcast newsletter, which has my name in it. Use it! My name is not Valued Client, it’s Jason.

One other thing I noticed is there is no web version of the newsletter. Luckily it came out fine in Entourage on my Mac, but I’m sure it won’t look to good in all 2700 other email clients across the world.

And lastly, the cardinal sin of any newsletter campaign, not including an unsubscribe link. Seriously? You add me to a newsletter database, send me this poorly constructed email and then do not give me the opportunity to never receive an email from you again!

Some advice to Cambrient

Guys, you produce a brilliant podcast on a weekly basis and you bill yourself as a digital agency SPECIALISING in e-marketing, which includes email marketing. You shouldn’t commit so many mistakes in 1 email marketing campaign! My words of advice? Read Quirk’s e-marketing book from cover to cover. I promise not to tell anyone and you really will make your future clients look like rockstars online. For now, BusinessDay are looking like a huge fail.

Tags: BusinessDay, Cambrient, Newsletters

http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

After thinking about it for a while, my advice could be redirected more to BusinessDay, as it looks like they are using Cambrient’s newsletter software, more than Cambrient sending the newsletter out on their behalf. But there are still huge issues at bay, even if Cambrient had no involvement, which I highly doubt.

I’ll await feedback before maybe updating the post. :)
http://10and5.com Johann Schwella

I am pretty sure that according to the ECT Act not having unsubscribe functionality is illegal.
http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

Hey Johann, I wasn’t too sure about the whole ECT Act regarding unsubscribe links, so didn’t want to include it – but I have heard what you just said before.

Maybe Rob Stokes or some other genius that has experience with the ECT Act could pipe up?
Jonathan

Sounds like you are quite frustrated about being “spammed” by this newsletter ;-)

Have you actually given the feedback to Business Day or Cambrient?

One thing I disagree with you on though is the noreply address. The return address for newsletters NEEDS to be a “blackhole” address otherwise your email support systems get loads of returned mail with “sender unknown” or “out of office” replies (or any other number of mail server responses).

Not having an unsubscribe link is criminal though.
http://10and5.com Johann Schwella

“CHAPTER VII

CONSUMER PROTECTION

45. (1) Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications to consumers, must provide the consumer—
(a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the mailing list of that person; and
(b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request of the consumer.”

Two points here:

1. As per 45.1.a of the ECT Act of 2002, “…must provide the consumer with the option to cancel to the mailing list…”

2. You can request them to let you know where they got your information from and legally they are forced to oblige.
http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

@Johnathan We will then have to agree to disagree. :)

The reason why you should NOT use a noreply email address is you are actually sending people a personal email – as much as a newsletter is “news”, its not a one way street. People must have the ability to reply to you in the exact same way as you sent them an email.

Sure the out-of-office replies and bounces are a nuisance, but there are hows and ways to properly manage them. You should not inconvenience your subscribers – rather inconvenience yourself. :)

@Johann – Boom! There we have it. Thanks for finding it.
http://webtechlaw.com Paul Jacobson

Johann’s right. The newsletter should have had an unsubscribe option. In fact, all unsolicited mail should have that option in the email.
richard

Jason, one can always fish out the replies to the newsletter. I think newsletter should have their own email address for the sake of processing bounces. Once the bounces are processed then you can deal with the replies. I also find that most ‘average’ computer users don’t even look at the email address before hitting reply. I think the only people who notice no-replay type of addresses are us not the average users.
http://www.invisible-ink.co.za Kobus Myburgh

Hi,

Actually, I believe both Jason as well as Jonathan are correct with regards to the reply to e-mail. I did not see the full newsletter, and the screenshot is too small for my challenged eyes, but at the bottom part of the newsletter screenshot there is indeed a mail address. It may or may not be an address for responding, but, point being:

If they set up a black-hole address as reply to address, they should have another form of contact us link in the newsletter. In other words, the black-hole, per sé, is not wrong, but the fact that there may be no way to contact them, is wrong in my opinion.

Kobus
Jacqui, Cambrient

Jason, thank you for raising these points, they are valid, and we would just like to respond with an apology for not including an “unsubscribe” facility. Yes, it is critical to implement best web practice and we will certainly take this into consideration for our next mail sent on behalf of Businessday.

The mailing list provided was selected from a list of clients who have previously engaged with Businessday in the past. We will forward your response to client service to ensure you are removed from the list.

That being said, Businessday is in the process of reviewing their digital offering, which is clearly demonstrated through the content of this mail. Let’s hope this will not detract from the major improvement of the website.

Again we acknowledge and appreciate your comment.

Please be assured that the next e-mailer will include the appropriate best practices. Again, thanks for the feedback.
http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

@Jacqui – thanks for taking the time out to reply. It wasn’t so much the fact that I received the newsletter, it was the way the newsletter was constructed that upset me.

So, please don’t remove my email address from that newsletter DB – I want to see how you are going to improve it!
http://outthink.co.za Darren Gorton

Jason, glad you found the time to write this as I was just as surprised to get the same email today.

Also have no problem receiving it – I would be happy to have a look at the new site, but the context bothers me – “We look forward to extending the benefits of the new website to you, our advertisers… “. As far as I know, I have never advertised on their site, meaning that the email is totally irrelevant to me.

A once-off email saying “Hi, we’re just sending this now to let you know about our new look site” would have been happily received.

Oh well, we live and learn.
http://www.quirk.biz/team/tim-shier Tim Shier

Hi All,

Rob is in Eastern Africa doing a 8 day conferencing tour across 4 countries so his response may be a little slow as connectivity is limited.

From my perspective the legalities are almost immaterial, if you annoying your subscribers and they are having a bad experience then things needs to change. The Direct Marketing association of SA (www.dmasa.org) does a good job of setting guidelines for its members including a rather robust set of provisions to cover Email marketing (read http://www.dmasa.org/core/images/stories/DMA_COP_2007.pdf sections 12.5 &12.6).

@johathan, I’m sorry but I disagree with you. The point of Email marketing is to build a relationship with your reader and start a conversation with them. Having a human reply to address helps reduce bounces and allows for readers to quickly reply if they want to use you for business etc. In my experience it vastly improves the newsletters conversion success improving justifiable ROI.

My 2 cents,

Tim
http://www.joomlajunkie.com Tess Neale

I giggled when I saw your post, since I just had a fight with a SA company sending me newsletters that did not comply at all with the do’s and dont’s around email marketing. (yes, I might take things like that to serious sometimes but it makes people in the same industry, emarketing etc, look bad) ;)

At the end of the day some stuff is illegal, but mainly it’s just plain annoying getting newsletters like that.

As always, it’s the little extra effort that makes a good brand great.

A good and very easy-to-read resource around email marketing is Mailchimp: http://www.mailchimp.com/articles

When using Mailchimp it’s (almost) impossible sending newsletters that isn’t following the do’s and dont’s, so I warmly recommend their services to any noobs (as well as advanced users). :)

Lots of love sent to all email marketing peeps – lets educate rather than just complain.

Cheers,
Tess
http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

@Tim – thanks for sharing and I definitely agree with you on the email address thing – you just put it into a more solid argument than I did. :)

@Tess Mailchimp as well as Campaign Monitor are both excellent resources on how newsletters should be done and this post was definitely more of constructive criticism than a full blown rant – so yeah, much love to the e-marketing okes. Just get it right! :)
http://www.skillsportal.co.za Alan Hammond

@Jacqui if I had a company called Business Day and our emarketing agency referred to us as Businessday I would sack them! But they maybe that’s just me, and maybe brands (and grammar) don’t matter.
Can’t work out how a company that has been around so many years can break the law in such a shocking way by not even including an unsubscribe link.

I have subscribed to the Business Day daily email for a while now – I didn’t receive one today and I didn’t receive this notification of the new site (although I did see it on Friday).

BTW – did you do redirects on the old URLs to keep the page rankings for the new site? I think I know the answer. You are lucky that BDFM are so completely clueless about the internet.
http://imod.co.za/ Chris M

It just got warm in here! @Jason – Ah man, it’s so fantastic to see someone else who’s standing up against this nonsense. The number of times I’ve been emailed newsletter when I’ve not opted-in is quite scary and what really ticks me off is when it’s from local companies.

I hate to say this, but I will, The Digital Edge provided an “unsubscribe” on their newsletter, but when you clicked it, it loaded a huge page of errors and you were not able to unsubscribe, eeek.
Jarred Cinman

I have been out of the office and only seen this discussion now.

We appreciate people noticing when we make mistakes — of which both this and the first Digital Edge newsletter were good examples. It’s frustrating when we miss stuff, and we work hard not to. The community plays an essential role in helping us to spot mistakes and fix them.

I think anyone who knows me and who knows Cambrient knows we’ve been around in one form or the other for a very long time. The fact that we make errors just makes us human. I’m sure our reputation speaks for itself and I don’t need to spend time proving that we know about basic stuff like unsubscribe links.

I want to be clear that we are not disputing the points raised by Jason — I feel I would have written a similar post myself if I had been in that position. I guess I would appeal for a little goodwill in not starting a witch hunt for our business based on it. We manage over 100 websites and send out literally hundreds of thousands of emails a month, so I guess we get stuff right a lot more than wrong.

Again, I want to stress that we want and value feedback from the community — if the podcast which we pay for in its entirety every week demonstrates anything its that we want to listen and improve both ourselves and the industry as a whole.
http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

@Jarred – the point of the entire post was surrounding the BusinessDay newsletter and that it was littered with basic e-marketing errors.

There definitely is no witch-hunt going on here with regards to your company – more along the lines that this client of yours needs extra special care as they do seem to be doing a number of things wrong and as their digital marketing agency, you should know better too. :)

Thanks for stopping by and setting the record straight.