Joel Pinkham

I don’t ever remembering subscribing to AA Travel (I am an AA member though), but today I received their newsletter.

Top line of the message contained one of those “this is why we’re emailing you messages” explaing how and when I subscribed. This time it’s a little different though.

You are receiving this email from AA because we want to keep you informed of special Membership travel offers

So they’re emailing me because they want to keep me informed? That’s not how it works, and it’s pretty much admitting to spam. Good work AA.

Chumps.

So often I receive newsletters and promo emails that are obviously under-thought about. People rave about how easy and effective email marketing is, and it usually is. However, the attitude of “just flick out an email campaign to drive sales on unit x” prevails.

These come from the types of marketing managers who send email campaigns to tell their Head of Marketing they’re doing email, because that’s REALLY progressive. They don’t seem to understand any strategy behind what they’re doing, and appear reluctant to pay for any type of strategy to be formulated. It goes from brief to send in 60 seconds.

Emails should contribute to your other marketing and goals, not just a tactic chucked into the mix in the middle of the year.

If you’ve got the core elements of your marketing perfected you shouldn’t have any problem sending out an amazing and effective eDM campaign. The elements of the specific campaign will matter much less and you can get it right, even if you get some of the specifics a bit wrong.