I love Amazon Web Services and I’m always in awe of their frequent upgrades. Lots of exciting innovation there, it seems. But man, someone there needs to invest in a thesaurus (which are actually really cheap on Amazon). Has anyone else noticed they’re always so excited there? Here are some screenshots of the intros for almost all their emails I’ve received this year:
I get these automatic alerts whenever Zappos gets new ugly shoes (I’ve blogged about my fondness for ugly shoes before). Anyway, I just noticed they changed their email alerts format from plain text to HTML.
Read the bullet points. Particularly, #2 and #5:
When you’re writing your emails (especially automated inventory alerts like this one) you can get away with boring, functional, corporate writing and nobody will mind. But can you get away with sneaking in a little fun? That’s a lot more challenging imho.
You know the hardest part about (and therefore the secret of) good email marketing? Telling a good story. Those quarterly newsletters you write should all come together to tell the story of your brand. If your story is all about saving money, then your daily email coupons should tell that story. Starving artist? That automatic email campaign you hooked up to your flickr or dribbble should tell your story (in pictures).
But curating a story for your emails is hard. Sometimes, I want to make a point in my email newsletters, and I end up spending days just writing the back story for it on our blog. Other times, the story is scattered across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Finding them, bookmarking them, clipping and saving them into your story can be a pain.
There’s now an app for this painful process. It’s called Storify. And Storify now integrates with MailChimp…
I’m subscribed to GigaOm Pro newsletters. I get weekly technology news from them, and I love it. Hard to put my finger on it, but their news just seems — smarter. Anyway, here’s their footer:
As a publication, they obviously would prefer that you not unsubscribe from their list. They’d prefer that you change your settings. But they don’t hide their unsubscribe link (in fact, they make it more immediate). They’ve just prioritized the “change email settings” button. Smart.
I guess it’s been a while since I’ve bought anything from Photojojo, because they recently sent me this “we miss you” email from them. It’s plain-text, and I love it. Shows how powerful good writing can be. It starts with:
Hey Ben,
Look, there’s no easy way to say this, but we miss you. We miss your smile, we miss the way you smell, we even miss the dumb jokes you used to tell.
That put a big smile on my face, and made me read on…