After having spent several weeks using Google Wave, and after all the hype surrounding it has ceased, I think I’m in the mood of writing my own opinion on this product.

Just in case you have living under a rock for the last few months, Wave is an instant messaging and distributed editing in real time application that uses only your browser for working. If you want to learn how to use it, check this interesting on-line book.

When I first saw the Google Wave preview video for developers in May I was totally stunned. It really seemed like a true revolution, and an e-mail killer on his own right. I longed for weeks for a chance to grab my hands on it, but no luck. Finally I get an invitation approved by Google a couple of months ago or so. Several friends and colleagues have Wave access to, so I can test it well with them all through these weeks.

My first advice to you would be: Just don't believe all the hype around Wave.

Sure, it’s a great product for collaborating, an impressive piece of programming, and a good mix between email, chat and so on. But in my opinion it’s not definitely a “killer application” neither the “e-mail killer” nor “e-mail if it was invented today”, as you may probably have heard. It is also no related at all to social Web, and has nothing to do with Facebook, twitter and the like.

Almost everyone I know that had the chance to test-drive it has the same opinion as me.

I find Wave as a good tool for collaborating in real time and keep track of everything that was written and even reproduce it whenever you want. But you can get almost the same today with a lot of other tools. Sure, you have Wave agents and bots that can check your spelling, translate your text on the fly, and so on, which are pretty interesting to have, but everything with added value in Wave is related to real time collaboration or interaction.

Real time typing is interesting, but is also dangerous, and I think that a “draft mode” or something like this will be very useful too. Probably it will have this feature in the near future, and in fact it lacks several important ones that are still to be incorporated

For me the real issue with Wave is that it is chaotic. This leads to difficulties when working with several people at once writing in a wave. And is difficult too to find the new snippets as long as anyone can write and add information in any place she wants. In a long wave this leads to confusion and, in my opinion, makes wave very unproductive at this scale.

Another limitation is that you can’t control what people makes in a wave although you have initiated it, so if you pretend to use it with lots of people (like customers, for example) prepare to have a real chaos. Upon this anyone can start a wave with you, although you don’t know her or have authorized her to do it.

From the e-mail marketer perspective I think that Wave in its current state is not suitable for the kind of communication we expect with customers and stakeholders. Maybe it’s suitable for product support or specific "few to one" communications, but definitely not for massive ones. In that case traditional e-mail marketing and social tools like Twitter or Facebook are much better.

What do you think?

Recently I received in my inbox an invitation to draw for a cruise "only" registering on a website. Like many users, I clicked thinking "a second to lose and maybe win" . The fact is that when I open the link I received the following form:

23 fields to participate!? I am not going to waste my time...

I think many users stop in this moment their check in.

In short, my advice is that if you want to do some kind of e-mail marketing action like this (highly recommended, to increase your recipients), be sure to provide facilities to your target. E-mail, name and surname are enough. Another actions will come to know something about them.

Knowing all the information about your recipients is great, but this is not the way. You can not ask for"blood". You take the risk that the e-marketing action don not get results.

These days I receive a lot of electronic Christmas cards greeting me and wishing me happy New Year.

I must confess that the vast majority of them are not very good from the e-mail marketing point of view, and not a lot of them caught my attention. However recently I received one from one of our providers that really was interesting to watch.

It is a viral campaign from the bank ING Direct and UNICEF, in the form of Christmas e-Card that uses a cool flash website and geo-positioning  to help a good cause and was called "The Solidarity Bus".

Sorry, the contents are in Spanish

ING will donate 1 euro cent to UNICEF for each 10 kilometers that this virtual bus run through the world, which is a strange claim to do in an email, isn't it?

How is this done: when you click in the call to action link and get to the landing page at http://www.elautobus.org they get your geographic position from your IP address. The compare it with the position of the original sender of the email (tracked in the link) so that they can calculate approximately the distance between the two points and add the quantity corresponding to this distance.

Cool, isn't it? Technically and socially cool, I must say :-)

Please, use this e-Card and send it to your friends in the other part of the world so that a lot of children can go to school.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Continuing with the analysis series in this blog, I’m going to comment on an email I received recently.

In this case the email almost has no images so the major concerns are about textual contents and deliverability. It showed up in this way when received:

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It didn’t look more interesting after activating the images either:

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Apart from the poor appearance of the contents and the lack of an unsubscribe link or a short legal text, let’s talk about text itself.

Although the subject line is quite well crafted (it reads “Beat your competence” in Spanish) because is short and to the point, the contents make use a lot of well known inappropriate words and content techniques.

They have personalized the email using my name in the second sentence which is good, but the first sentence in the email includes the word “Free” (gratis) and is formatted in bold big fonts and with exclamation marks in it. This is not a good idea as long as this weights a lot in spam filters. This by itself is not enough to trigger spam filters, but the “free” and “success” words appearing several times in the text should probably be. The use of uppercase words in several parts of the text counts too.

Going into more technical details, the return path declared email is in the domain acambiode.es wich has two email servers registered as valid ones for handling that domain:

• relay.grupointercom.com
• mail.grupointercom.com

But the email was sent using a different email called push4.grupointercom.com so a lot of server filters that check for a valid originating address will flag this email as using a faked sender and prevent it to go to the users inbox.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau can help us making  a sucessful e-mail marketing campaigns. You can find at www.iab.net a lot of resources about the best practises in e-mail marketing.

Glossaries, legal terms, metrics, audiences measurement, case studies... All kind of data that can update your knowledge. You will refresh your information and be more creative in your communications.

We propose you to visit the website and get some ideas for your e-mail marketing campaigns.

Enjoy!

With this post I'm going to start a new series called "e-mail analysis case studies". As the name suggests, from time to time I will analyze several aspects of real marketing emails or newsletters I receive that have interesting points or lessons to learn, in the right or in the wrong way. That means that we are going to see several good samples of good email pieces and several samples that reveal bad practices and things to avoid when sending email. I hope that you will find it interesting and hopefully all of us can learn something.

In this first post I'm going to talk about an email I received a few days ago in my GMail account. It was a marketing e-mail from HTC, the mobile device maker, which invited me to take a free test of their new online mail push service called HTCmail.

In the following picture you can see the contents of this email rendered in GMail with images enabled (sorry, the text is in Spanish, but that's not the point here):

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Not too bad. But, what happens when you not allow images to be displayed (which is the default case). Let's take a look:

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This reveals a good design done by the HTC marketing team. As you can appreciate, you still can read the whole contents perfectly, and the whole original message gets delivered to the recipient even though images are not displayed. Even the text in the header image is correctly displayed here. The "trick" in this particular case is that they have included the same text that is in the image inside the ALT tag of the <img> HTML label. In this way, when the image is not displayed this alternative text gests displayed instead in some e-mail clients like GMail (take a look at this article from Campaign Monitor for a list of email client behavior regarding the ALT tag).

However they have included the height of the header graphic in the <img> label too, which is not a good idea because it's a quite tall one. If the email client doesn't display the ALT tag, this leads to a 250 pixel-height blank area in the vast majority of the email clients in the market, and moves the main message almost below the fold, so a lot of people will not see it and maybe delete it immediately. In GMail that doesn't happen because it strips out totally the images when they are not allowed, and upon that it supports the ALT tag, that is the best of the situations for this particular content (not so good in other circumstances as we are going to see in the future).

The rest of the email is well distributed and with clean HTML (using tables not divs, a good practice in HTML email design) so that the message is displayed even in the less capable of the email clients. The only small thing to notice is that they forgot to translate the ALT tag for the sidebar image that reads "Aspectos destacados" in the Spanish graphic but is displayed as "Key features" (in English) in the no-images version. This is very usual in companies that make international marketing, and it's something that you must be careful about.

The rest of the email is apparently well displayed: it shows a few graphics and a shadowed border in the features sidebar with rounded corners too. However the small "arrows" you can see in the corners of the main content area reveal that something is not totally good here. And the dark gray "powered by" rectangle and the strange discontinued green bar in the left of the features are clues about something not working there.

Let's take a look to the original HTML contents displayed in a fully fledged Internet browser:

Click image to enlarge

As we expected there were problems with the correct displaying of the e-mail in GMail. First there is the lack of a grey background when displayed. The problem here is that they have used the "background" tag in the <body> HTML label:

<body bgcolor="#6a6a6a"...

This affects the lower part of the content and is the reason that the "powered by" graphic is quite like hanging there, with an ugly effect. In fact they were lucky here because they used a slightly lighter grey for the text that is even visible with the default white background. If they had used a white text in order to contrast more with the dark background the effect will have been that no text will be shown.

What they should have done is to have set the background in a external 1x1 table that contained the rest of the content. Generally the <body> tag and everything outside it is stripped by the email client before displaying the contents, so the background color is lost. In this case they included several embedded CSS styles in the header of the HTML page which were stripped out too and are not generally accepted or displayed by many of the email clients.
Analyzing the raw contents of the e-mail they included the whole HTML code between the <html> and </html> tags, which is not generally a good idea. They also included a text version of the email in order to render it on mobile devices (this is a good practice).

Summing up: the email structure and HTML are well designed and fairly well implemented, although they have failed in a couple of basic points that led to a not optimal behavior of the contents.

My score for this e-mail will be 7 out of 10 :-)