Unfortunately, the house is probably fine, but some third thing I hadn’t thought of came up: it was all an elaborate (kind of) scam. Luckily, I’m real smart and sniffed it out within the first sentence, somewhere in the red area:

“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa…”

I was sad, even though I knew it was too good to be true, I felt like you do when you fool yourself into believing your Powerball ticket is, “really going to hit this time,” and then, you know.

Anyway, of course the email ended up asking for a bunch of my information, and even better, the sender’s name is apparently, “Am Nice,” so clearly, this is someone with a psychology degree… but I was about to find that beyond that, this evil genius was also well-versed in the dark arts of email marketing. *cue: buh-buh-BUH!*

I did a quick search of the phone number, which, yes, goes somewhere in Pankshin, Africa (that was as far as I felt like researching), where I assume I was to pay my first month’s rent. Google showed me a blog covering this Craigslist scam with a copy of the email they had received, and lo and behold, there were slight variations – this person is A/B testing their emails, I thought… and then I told everyone in the office, then I thought, what a good blog idea… and then, erm, now.

First variant:
My email: The sender’s name is the aforementioned Am Nice. I laughed at first wondering if they really thought that would work, but then I was like, oh, maybe this person had hippie parents, I mean, I went to school with a guy whose last name was Nice. For a moment, I felt bad for Am Nice, the barely literate home renter.

Email B: The signee’s name is Howard Bradshaw. I feel like, already, this one surely has the edge out of the gate.

Second Variant:
My email:
“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa.I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Email B:
“Hello , Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church International, I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Interesting. Perhaps the “International” would have allayed my fears for a split second longer? I mean, you can’t flat-out say that you’re part of an African church off the top – the “missionary” bit hardly covers it, does it? At this point already I wish I could see this guy’s (or girl’s) analytics.

Third Variant:
My email:
“Note:  We Intend selling the property before my wife reason to it that we should not sell it any longer,that the best way is to rent for future purpose,so if in case you drive by and see a sign board with a number on it,please disregard it,be cos we have ask them to get the sign of our property that we are not selling any longer,that it’s for rent now by us…”

Email B: Wisely, this version left out the whole, “Hey, it might look like the place is for sale, but that’s jokes,” note.

Summary:
I’m willing to bet that this criminal mastermind’s B email is beating the crap out of A, but I’ll likely never know. Maybe after I post this I’ll email good ol’ Am Nice back and see if they’ll let me know how it’s going. Hmmm, I’ll have to look close at Mail Chimp’s Monkey Awards program, I may have a partnership in my future…

*ahem* Also, the moral of this story is that’s it’s smart to A/B test your email marketing campaigns, heck, maybe add a C in there if your list is large enough. Just imagine how sad our buddy would have been had he only used his clearly inferior A up there. Only the largest derelicts looking for rental property would have even attempted to follow through – imagine the headaches in trying to walk someone like that through the process of wiring money to you.

There are tons of categories incentives can fall through. Here are some types – hopefully from this list you can choose what may be a best fit for your company and consumers.

Material incentives: tangible rewards often monetary — wages, fringe benefits, patronage

Solidary incentives: intangible rewards from the act of association — sociability, status, identification

Purposive incentives: intangible rewards related to the goals of the organization — e.g., working on an election of a supported candidate

Bonuses -One of the most popular sales incentives is cash, and a great way to offer it is through incentive-based raffles. Use a chart to identify defined goals, and each time an employee achieves one of the goals she is given a raffle ticket. Hence, the more goals an employee reaches the more raffle tickets she receives and the better the chances are she will win.

Gifts – Offer the winning staff member a gift from your store’s merchandise, which could be a new flat-screen television or an all-expenses-paid vacation. They key is to ensure that your staff members all continually want to make a sale.

Promotions -When a position becomes available you can hold a sales incentive competition to award it to the highest seller. In this case, it’s best to run the competition for several months so you see who can sustain a high level of performance and deserves a position of more responsibility. Typically, these competitions are limited to a small group of employees.

It is important to understand how much incentives can affect your company – both positively and negatively. With this economy it might be tough to gain positive influence to your company by using incentives, so it is best to start mildly with an incentive to see how much influence it may gain. Keep reports of your progress.

When you want to attract new customers creating a mailing list is a nice option to promote your incentives. A newsletter is a wonderful incentive that allows your company to show off honesty, credibility and trust. These newsletters should mostly contain sales and coupons. Give people a reason to sign up – for some valuable information. Also, be sure to keep your content fresh, The biggest reason that people unsubscribe to newsletters is that they don’t feel the information is relevant to them any longer. A handy tip to get more exposure: keep your incentives personal. Keep track of your specific customers. If you have a large amount of customers who go in your store and only purchase outdoor items, offer an incentive that goes out to them only. Identify your target markets and keep them organized within your newsletter/email campaigns. Make them personal.

A free download is another great incentive to include on your web site, email marketing or newsletter. A free download means instant gratification and is perceived as a ‘must-have’ item. Make it valuable to your customers. Pay attention to your graphics as well. I personally like buttons that look ‘click-able’ or ‘touchable’ make sure you choose a nice graphic that has a nice ‘call to action’ mood to it. See don’t you just want to click it?

Kudos answers.com & rockstar affiliates

As long as your numbers prove your design works (with either purely images or live text, also), then there’s no problem. This example, sent by Urban Outfitters yesterday, shows the email marketing trend that many large brands are going with. Without the alt tags (which just say a quick message about what the image is, if not displayed), the email would just be one big white box. A company like U.O. can certainly use their audience to their own advantage when sending emails: they are generally young and probably tech savvy, or at least understand that if you want to see the pretty pictures, you have to take that extra step to ‘Display Images’. It’s a gamble, but it looks like U.O., along with so many other companies, are willing to take it.

So once you get past the ‘Display Images’ issue, what should your all-graphics email look like? It should be worth the extra click, and I feel that Urban Outfitters accomplished that with this email. Their marketing is usually edgy, integrating popular art trends, and with this email they’ve decided to show that using a beautiful color scheme with bold letters is all it takes. Of course the words ‘Free Shipping’ are always a good attraction, but the graphic was only as busy as it needed to be, and as a customer I appreciated that.

The moral of the story: don’t over-stimulate your audience with tons of pictures. The message should be clear, and the graphics should only be used to add to it, not distract.

But with so many options out there (size, color, shape, placement), how do you know what will work the best? First off, you need to give your audience some credit. Don’t make your button the size of Antarctica, because then it won’t even look like a button anymore. Feel the flow of your layout, and place your CTA in a reasonable spot. After they’ve read the copy, they’ll want to go to the next step, so give it to them.

Color
It’s best to make your button a complementary (opposite) color to the rest of your layout. If your site is yellow (hey, what an awesome color!), maybe you should choose purple or blue to bring attention to your CTA.

Shape
Conventions exist, because they work. The shape of your button should reflect what’s popular and known: this doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it, it just means you should acknowledge what’s functional. Generally, buttons have rounded corners and emulate 3-D. Try adding in gradients so it looks like it’s catching light. The more ‘real’ it looks, the more people will want to touch it.

Placement
White space is your friend! The more open air you have around your CTA, the more attention it will call to itself. Try using your site without the button, and see where you as a user would want it. Above all else, it should be functional.

See Some Examples of Good and Bad Button Practices

Smashing Magazine

Best Design Tuts

Create Your Own Button

This tutorial will help you make your own eye-catching button: Site Point

A typical Click-Through Rate for “Business-to-Customer” emails, according to Lyris HQ, is between 2% and 12%. Those numbers may sound small, but in fact 12% is practically unheard of! 4-7% is a happy medium, but even then it’s tough to get people to click.

So What’s A Girl To Do?
Segment, segment, segment! From personal experience, if you send a targeted email to a select group of people, your CTR will more than likely double. If you sell shirts and pants, and you send an email highlighting your Shirt Sale, those pant-buyers will either not open the email at all or they may even opt-out, because it’s not up their alley. But if you segment your list and keep track of what your customers buy, your Shirt Sale email that now only goes to shirt-buyers will be a huge success, because you’ve taken out the possibility of all those opt-outs. Simple as pie.

A great way to ‘call action’ to your website is to include clickable objects like buttons and coupons. I’m a huge fan of coupons, and when I get an email, especially one with a subject line mentioning a sale, I scan the email for a coupon before I read anything else. People understand that coupons are for printing, so they’ll click on it and hopefully will be taken to a beautiful landing page with a printable coupon and more information on your sale.

Try not to trick your email recipients by making buttons that look like coupons but don’t actually offer savings. Above all else, you need to keep your authority and honesty with your customers so that they feel comfortable clicking to your website. Nobody wants to be scammed, but plenty of people want to save money. Something as simple as free shipping or 10% discounts go a long way online.

The two examples I’ve shown here are for Naturalizer and Urban Outfitters. The blatant coupon is a surefire Call to Action, while the Urban Outfitters link isn’t as obvious. However, they use yellow instead of red to grab attention, and their younger audience will surely understand that it’s a clickable link.

I receive a wide variety of retail emails (part of my job, honest), and they can sometimes become daunting to sort through. Although I’m sure I’ve opted into more email campaigns than most consumers, the importance of frequency is blatant when I see 12 messages from Sender A, and only 2 from Sender B.

Sender A has already lost my interest by sending me too many messages – there’s no way every one of those emails is relevant to me so I just end up deleting them all with barely a second glance at the subject lines.

Sender B gains my trust, because they must have a good offer for me if they’re sending it (and not along with 10 other messages).

But What’s the Cut-Off?
There’s not a clear cut amount of emails to send, as each message has a different audience. Generally for my own campaigns, I send about two a month. It’s enough that your customers will probably open it when it comes their way, because they haven’t been bombarded by your offers for the past two weeks. Most companies send their email blasts on the first week of the month, so aim for the second and fourth week to stand out.

Certainly your analytics should also help guide you with this, and experiment to see when emails are opened (and if they still are when you send a lot). Soon you’ll see a trend, and that will help guide your important messages to the right in-boxes.

There are a few ways to go about gleaning customer’s digital addresses:

1) You can use various services to buy email addresses by the bulk, which can funnel to meet your preferred audience’s stats.
- The potential problem with this method is that you’ll be sending unsolicited (don’t worry, it’s legal) email, and your complaint rate could shoot up.

2) After a customer has purchased something from you, whether it be at your physical or digital location, you’ll more than likely need their email address to contact them.
- This method of gathering addresses takes time, and now that they’ve patronized you, they’ll undoubtedly take a spending break.

3 (and the best!) On your website, have a conspicuous link to sign up for your newsletter. You’ll immediately grow your list with interested buyers, as well as your lovely customers that have come back time and again. Have an example of your newsletter on the site, so they know what they’re signing up for, and give them some options (i.e. “What are you interested in?” check boxes). Don’t bog them down with pages of required information; just a simple form will do.

You don’t have to ask for or buy your email addresses if you let your customers take control and tell you what they want. Easy stuff!

*Radicati Group study in August of 2008

This week was the perfect time to reorganize my scheduling and actually manage how I received new work orders, because we’ve now expanded into larger offices (merrily nicknamed ‘the Dungeon’)! Although my new desk is a tempting clean slate for post-its, we here at Adcuda have streamlined our workflow.

A fancy gadget called a Customer Support Ticket System is how we are going to queue our projects, and a shoutout to Zendesk for being the free trial that won us over. This great website allows our clients (and us) to have a record of the services required, plus it saves the designer (me) the ‘oops’ factor of writing down something wrong, say the exact model number or color of a car that needs to be front and center of an email going out in two days! It will ease the stress of second-guessing, and everyone involved will see exactly when their projects will be done. Now I can free up my mind from worrying and focus on the important things, like designing killer emails.

When you’re creating your company’s email campaigns, it’s crucial that your branding stays consistent. Your customers will immediately recognize your company and what you stand for when you incorporate your logo, colors, and typefaces throughout your email campaigns, which will allow them to jump to the meat of the message.

As with anything that’s repetitive though, it’s easy to get boring. An example? Not to point fingers, but I signed up last month for the retail store Ann Taylor’s newsletters, and I’m already deleting them from my inbox without opening. I harbor no grudge; it’s just that I know what I’ll see when I open the email, and they give away everything in their subject line. Below are three emails where the company uses the exact same layout (one large picture with some text) – there’s no fire! My relationship with Taylor’s emails has fizzled like a bad marriage, and I’m looking elsewhere for my eye candy.

So how do you add the spunk back to your emails? Using multiple templates is a great way to spice up your campaigns, because it’ll switch things up. Try one large picture one week, and then add multiple columns the next. Use different fonts, and at least change the color or weight occasionally. It’s easy to have fun when you create your emails, and your newly-found energy for the campaigns will transfer to your customers. They will appreciate the effort, and your relationship will regain that old spark.