Email Marketing Rule: Don’t be boring, Amnesty

A while back Amnesty International emailed me (for the first time in weeks) to let me know about changes they’re making to their website; specifically to their “account area”, which is a space for setting contact preferences. For some reason, this necessitated that I reset my password.

Yawn

No doubt you’re bored by this blog already. Imagine my experience reading the email.

How would you go about introducing an email with as dry a subject as this? Here’s what Amnesty opted for:

We have recently launched a new account area of amnesty.org.uk and protectthehuman.com, and we would like to invite you to reset your password.

There followed three whole paragraphs of technical information about my new password, all of which plainly belonged on the landing page, and not in the email. Needless to say, I didn’t have time to read those three paragraphs as I was already rushing to accept Amnesty’s invitation with great delight and steadying my feverishly trembling fingers to reset my password.

You’re never going to make exciting an email asking someone to reset their password (despite not having lost or forgotten it) to gain access to a preference centre, but just a tickle of imagination and a touch of self-awareness could transform an email like this from a drab technological nuisance to a mildly pleasant piece of communication.

Here’s what I might have written:

Dear Al

How excited are you to receive this email?

In case you’re not that excited, we’ve just made it a little easier to opt out of – or indeed in to – our messages, by email and SMS, and to get involved in our campaign networks. In our new account area you can change your preferences in no time.

To visit the account area, just reset your password. You can start choosing how you want to get involved right away.

Now you’re excited, right?

Risky, perhaps, but effective.

What do you think? How would you have approached an email like Amnesty’s?

Back to blogging

In October 2002 I published a website all about me. At its centre was my blog. I was 16 and knew everything knowable about religion, politics, art and morality. Moreover all the opinions I held about those subjects were almost certainly correct.

Happily, some years later I realised how arrogant that attitude was, and took the blog down (though I retain a copy – as, no doubt, does the internet, somewhere in its vast, unforgetting archives). Now, hopefully somewhat more mature, gracious and self-aware, I return to the medium. Here’s what I plan to blog about:

Films

I’m an uncommonly ruthless film critic. Most films attract my ire, by being bad in numerous and, more importantly, needless ways. More easily pleased film-lovers struggle to empathise with my dissatisfaction, and I’m not good at explaining my opinions – at least not on the way out of the cinema. I need time to digest a film before I can fairly and eloquently verbalise my reaction. I hope this blog will be a space in which, having taken that time, I can review films clearly, frankly and educationally, and compare my responses to others’.

Books

In 2011 I read one book¹. My challenge for 2012 is to read 26. As an Open University student of English Literature I imagine this will be good practice, as will discussing my reactions to them online. The 26 books have been chosen by my friends and family, and I hope that making this challenge a social experience will help me relish – rather than dread – it.

The web

I’m a digital copy-editor, so my work revolves around social media, blogging, email marketing, online writing and so on. Luckily for me and my employers, these are subjects in which I have a strong interest. It will be fun to discuss them.

News

I spend far too much time keeping up with current affairs and commentary. It’s the pleasure that will probably be most curtailed in my attempt to read a book every fortnight, but I suspect I’ll still find time to find out what’s going on outside my paperbacks, and what the world thinks about it. And when I wish to respond, I’ll do so here.

Me

From time to time may happen something so personally significant that I feel it’s worth writing about at length. I hope you’ll help me celebrate, or commiserate, those time to times.

Is there anything else about which you’d like me to write? Let me know in the comments.

Al

¹ Maus, by Art Spiegelman