In this weekend's newsletter browsing, I scanned through a few headlines from Retail Dive and found that our local Powell's Books announced they were discontinuing use of Amazon.com for distribution of books. If you're a small business, Fulfillment by Amazon is probably not the way you want to go. The fees will eat up any profit you're hoping to gain for each item you list and advertise on the Amazon platform. But, this post isn't about FBA or supporting local retailers.
As part of the ad interstitials on Retail Dive, Validity offered a guide titled "Email Marketing for Retailers: The Complete Guide to Maximizing Your Email ROI". Looks intriguing, so I clicked. Got the guide and two autoresponder messages. The first had a subject line of "Your requested content: Email Marketing for Retailers". This is fine and expected. The email does everything right. It acknowledges that a request was made, includes a link for the PDF guide, and has other helpful information about the company's publicly available digital resources.
However, what immediately followed was a second auto-responder with the subject line of "Your Sender Score is step one." with content about welcoming and thanking me for checking my sender score.. which I did not do at all. Let this be a reminder to you about copying existing campaigns to repurpose for future campaigns, whether you use Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget), HubSpot, or other marketing automation tool. I can tell by the subdomain of the email content that Validity uses Pardot. Anyhow. Just a note of caution.
The execution looked flawless ... until I received that second irrelevant email.
I can also imagine that the second email was part of an engagement drip campaign, intended to start as soon as any content was downloaded by a prospect. So that is entirely possible as well.
If you want your own retail emails to keep their momentum and mindshare, don't make simple mistakes like this. Don't just assume that someone wants to hear of your other offerings right after they downloaded unrelated content from your website or marketing campaigns.
It's kind of rude. Heck, I haven't even finished reading the guide.
