Customer Driven Email Templates and Color Themes

Is the choice of email templates/color themes used in your mailers customer driven?

Why not let your customers pick an email template and color theme from a set of available themes when they register/optin to your marketing campaign? It could be something similar to how blogger lets you choose a template and color theme for your blog. Your mailer program could then leverage this to send out visually personalized email.

A customer driven email template/color theme should bump up your open rates too, especially since your visually personalized email has a higher chance of recognition during a preview pane scan of emails.

List Poisoning

What if Mr. Smith your competitor, goes to your opt in page and signs up as Mr. Idiot by entering one/some of your potential prospects email addresses and your automated mailer program send's out a highly personalized unsolicited email addressing them as 'Dear Mr. Idiot'?

Welcome to the murky world of 'List Poisoning'. Not only do you get flagged as a spammer, but your company would have earned a set of die hard enemies, who'd do anything and everything to tell everyone who the real idiot is.

Another ploy of list poisoners is to optin using mulitple spam trap email addresses to get you flagged as a spammer. Often the optin's originate from the same ip address in quick succession.

Preventing List Poisoning: Unfortunately you might not be able to prevent someone entering incorrect data in your opt in page, but you could always quarantine the opt-in list, review/validate it for data accuracy, and then send out a confirmation email before actually adding them to your mail list.

This would affect your opt in rate adversely, but sacrificing on a few not too eager prospects might be worth it if you can prevent making a set of seriously annoyed prospects. It's all about choice.

Optimal Send Time of Your Email

When is the best time to send out your promotional email?

I'm sure you would have done your research and know the latest recommended weekly optimal email send time slots, but so does every other e-marketer and SPAMMER. Infact your email could end up competing with scores of other commerical email's send at the same time slot.

So why not make this process customer driven and give your customer the choice of 'opting their preferred email send time'? You could find their preferred time in the following ways
  1. Ask your customer when they subscribe (Direct)
  2. Conduct an email/web survey to find out (Direct)
  3. Find previous mail open time from email open metrics (InDirect)

So you'd have to add another segment criteria based on 'preferred send time' to ensure your emails reach your customers at their preferred time.