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.

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.

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.

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.

@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! :)

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

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.

Tim

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.

So, please don’t remove my email address from that newsletter DB – I want to see how you are going to improve it!

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.