To kick things off, let’s look at some elements of their online sign-up. There are a lot of email opportunities for Quicken Loans. For first time buyers in particular, a great deal of education is desired to help them guide through the process. Even for seasoned borrowers, there are opportunities for education, rate announcement, market news and more (not to mention cross-sell opportunities for other products in the Quicken family). As many home buyers are shopping around, email is critical to keep the brand top-of-mind and help nurture the sale.

When going to sign-up for their email list, a few good things were going on but there were also some areas of improvement:

1. Where to Sign Up? On the home page there was no clear option to sign-up. You have to click on About Us and then Email Alerts. This is a key area of improvement: make it easy to sign up! Steve Krug notes says this well in his book title: Don’t Make Me Think. It’s inevitable that there are some lost opportunities here.

2. Sign Up Page: (1st screen grab below). Some nice things here. First, it’s very user-friendly w/ email address and two preference options. The Rate Alert was a very cool feature! You can select your desired rate to receive notification when it is available. I was excited to see this in action. While there could have been a few more preference options or opportunities to collect data for further personalization, it was a decent sign-up page.

3. Thank You Page: (2nd screen grab below).

A. Starting off with the good: I like how they have 5 links for “Looking for info Right Now?” — Direct users to helpful information and keep them active on the site. Nice job.

B. One piece of copy though that threw me off: “…you’ll receive your requested emails as soon as we write them” – To me that sounds a bit lazy and uncertain. On the sign-up page I thought I was signing up for the monthly newsletter and rate alerts. So wouldn’t it be more relevant to say something like: “…you’ll receive your information packed newsletter each month and rate alerts as soon as they become available!”

C. Finally, there was no confirmation email — or welcome email. I’m not 100% sure I was added to the list, and I’m waiting for a welcome email! This welcome message is a great opportunity as open rates will be sky-high and you can kick the relationship off on a positive note.

Sign Up Page – Click to Enlarge

Thank You Page – Click to Enlarge

While they are off to a decent start, there are several areas of improvement that will quickly improve the QuickenLoans sign-up process. In Part 2 we’ll discuss the first email received.

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or inputs? Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Originally Posted: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Youre-Out-Youre-In-No-Youre-Out.html?yhp=1

Article In a Nutshell:

• About 17,000 student were offered admission for the fall
• 29,000 were not accepted
• Acceptance email was sent to all 46,377 students who applied for admission — including the 29,000 rejects — welcoming them to the campus.
• Almost two hours after the first note went out, a second e-mail was sent, apologizing to 28,889 freshmen applicants for the mistake.

When I see an article on the front page of Yahoo that deals with email marketing, I get excited. This was most notable during the general election with commentary on the effect of President Obama’s email list.

Today’s front page article had an eye catching preview: UC San Diego sends a warm welcome email … to the wrong list of students.

Come on now. We’re not talking about a complex segment here. We have Group A: Accepted Applicants and Group B: Unaccepted Applicants. This task does not need an email marketing expert, but shows how even simple mistakes can happen to large companies.

I’ve seen blunders from top retailers, sending a test message to a live group, leaving personalization tags in a subject line, typos in body copy, and even sending to the wrong list. But the outcome in most of those cases is rather minimal. There may be a few opt-outs or confused customers, but most will forget about it and move on (providing it is not a constant mistake).

In the case of UCSD, the fallout from a simple mistake is more devastating. On one end, you’re dealing with anxious email recipients that are now frustrated, confused, and possibly hurt. I bet the open rate on that email broke records. On another end though, the sloppy mistake gets the school national attention (and likely a lot of angry phone calls).

Fortunately they caught it relatively quickly and issued an apology statement. Think about the outcome if this was not caught for several weeks, students pass on other schools, make plans etc.

Outside of the intensity of this mistake, mistakes do happen. I have not met one email marketer that has never made a blunder. You need to learn from this and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Review your deployment process. Review your segmentation methods. If you have a very sensitive email like this, you must have more than one eye on the campaign before deploying. I would be surprised if an organization like UCSD didn’t have a fairly lengthy approval process for blast emails. But something obviously went wrong.

This definitely makes it into my red flag mistakes category.

- Forest Bronzan

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I was recently reading an article by Future Now Inc. (leaders in conversion optimization) that mentioned the top 10 converting online retailers for Jan 2009. Pro Flowers was on that list — and given that flowers are a great product for the email channel I wanted to sign up and see what they were doing. Time will tell if there email practices are in line with their high converting web site, but their welcome letter is off to a decent start.

Some good elements:

1. Not heavy on the images: for a welcome email, you will have some of your highest open rates so you want to make sure you quickly get your message across, and not risk confusion with blocked images.

2. Thanking the customer: On one level  this is a simply a nice gesture, but it also provides subtle confirmation of the original opt-in. Some email marketers prefer a dedicated ‘confirmed opt-in’ prior to the welcome letter.

3. Sign-up promotion: the 20% off your first purchase was not advertised as an incentive for signing up, but is a nice surprise. Starting the email relationship off on a positive note is very important, and this is helpful.

Elements to improve on:

1. Notice in the screen grab below that is says: “Dear ,” without my name. During the sign-up process, they did not ask for my name, so it makes sense it is not there. Why then have that piece of copy in your welcome email? It doesn’t start things off too well. Solutions: 1: Ask for their first name so you can personalize it more 2: Put a general field in there such as “Dear New Subscriber” “Dear Value Customer” etc. 3: Remove it and start off with Thank you…    Just don’t have it blank there.

2. Preferences: In a previous post I discussed the benefits of having an email preference center. In the welcome letter, you have a great opportunity to ask subscribers to update their preferences. On one end you get more valuable information, and on another you can communicate how you respect their preferences — win, win.

3. While I very much lean towards minimalism with email design, the header was quite dull in this email. I’ll leave it at that, as this is a welcome letter and I’m sure their future promotional emails will have better elements.

- Forest Bronzan

5 Things Olive Garden Did Well:

1. They kept the welcome email simple in design with a layout that would show with images disabled.

2. They established expectations by giving a preview of how often the email would be sent and what type of content would be provided.

3. They thanked the subscriber for signing up. People are picky about how they let into their inbox. It’s nice to show some appreciation.

4. They built trust by stating that they would never share personal information with anyone.

5. They kept it short and sweet.

- Forest Bronzan

To start, in Gmail with images blocked, they have a very poor first impression. Being a brand that is concerned with their image, this introduction is poor. Below is a screen grab of the disabled image version of their welcome email.

At first glance this is chicken scratch. I do see some navigation links, and then a brief welcome note, but mixed up in a creative that was trying too hard to have visual appeal.

Note: The welcome email is a fantastic opportunity to establish that relationship with your subscribers. Open rate are likely to be sky high (they just signed up and are wanting your communication!) and you have a rare opportunity to establish expectations and get your communication with the subscriber offer to a strong start. Unfortunately, the welcome email is overlooked or very poorly executed.

Looking at this email with images displayed:

Here we see what we likely would expect from a brand like Sephora. But with images being disabled by default in so many email accounts, they are missing the mark and a great opportunity to connect with a new subscriber. One good element though to note here is the “Can’t see everything? Visit us here” above the header of the email. Definitely needed and let’s hope it was used.

-Forest Bronzan