Don’t Let Your Science Email Marketing Campaign End Up in the Trash

Science Email Marketing Success

The December holidays were always fun for me in the lab, because it was a time when life science vendors showed off their more creative side via events and marketing materials (free stuff).

The holidays this past year were no exception – for example, this past December a scientist friend forwarded me this email marketing piece containing an e-card from a life science vendor.

Though the content in DNA 2.0’s e-card may have been interesting, the card itself wasn’t exciting enough for me to want to click on it. Admittedly, I have a severe case of ADDO (ADDOnline), meaning effective marketing must grab my attention, tell me where to click and why in about half a second, or I’m off to the next shiny web page, and this email is in my Trash before you can blink an eye.

Fortunately for DNA 2.0, my friend took the time to say I (and 10 other scientists on her forward list) would enjoy the “holiday geekiness” of the card. She wrote “click on the new research results below” – so I did!

Good thing I clicked, otherwise I would have missed out on the very cool “publication” – a paper titled “Carolome: Functional Imprints of Culture Memes in the Global Genome.” It flows entirely the same way a regular journal publication would, including references and abstract. Super cute and so very clever! This team obviously put a ton of time and effort into it.

But I finished looking at the paper and thought two things -

1. Scientists can be your evangelists
2. You shouldn’t rely on that

Do you have scientist evangelists for your brand? Try connecting with your scientists with great content like this paper!

But one thing about your scientist-evangelist– this may be a one-time thing for her. She may never forward anything. She may forward everything. You just don’t know. Her promotion of your ecard was the only thing that made me click this time – that guarantees nothing for the next round.

Make your science email marketing self-sufficient: clickable in its own right and really friendly to forwarding.

Attention-grabbing headlines or images will help to ensure an increase in clicks from your email and a solidly placed “forward” button will increase odds that you’ll see who’s clicking where, what other pages they visit, popularity of  your content, and all the other goodies that come with fully tracking your email marketing campaigns.

You just can’t rely on that puny little forward link at the very bottom of your email. People (scientists too) will instinctively click their usual Forward button within Outlook, Gmail, etc – unless you subtly prod them to do otherwise.

Ok, I’ve crudely re-made this science email marketing piece, just to make a point.This gem of a Santa image is straight from the Carolome publication itself – perfect!

In addition to the awesome content, a little caption change plus a larger forward suggestion and you’ve made even more progress toward creating a trackable science email marketing campaign that will stand apart in a scientist’s inbox.

So next time you have a science email marketing piece to send to your scientists, remember your’s will be stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder with other vendor emails.

Try jazzing up your email campaign a bit plus give scientist’s an easy way to share with friends (other scientists)- then have fun tracking all those clicks you’ll be racking up! That’s the science email marketing tip of the week!

A Company Apology that Works

We all mess up, especially during times of a lot of change. It’s may be one thing that everyone can agree on.  I recall when Invitrogen was seemingly buying companies every month, the integration of  systems and people caused all kinds of problems.  Even though there was every attempt to shield customers, many slipped through.  

Since we had to deal face-to-face with the customers, the sales force caught a lot of grief from those customers having to learn new account numbers and changing billing procedures. Even changes in product look and feel caused researchers to be concerned about the performance and reliability of their favorite items.  You never want to make it harder to do business with your company but it happened.

You can never prevent all problems. The key to how it impacts a customer long-term is how you respond to the issue.  If your response is satisfactory and resolves the issue, the initial incident is largely forgotten (or only brought up during contract negotiations). If the issue is not resolved, then the customer is left with an open wound–sometimes it heals, but many times it gets worse. 

The Apology

I got an email apology from Boingo Wireless this week and I liked it (see the email at the bottom of the post). I signed up for their service once in an airport to access the internet and haven’t used it since so Im not an important customer. Apparently, they sent an inadvertent notice to all their customers that their accounts were no longer valid. Can you imagine if that happened in your company? What a hassle.

The outage didn’t affect me, but the apology did. I liked it. It had me at “hello”.

“Let me start this off with a big, fat apology.” 

Doesn’t that sound like someone just picked up the phone and called you?  It’s real and it gets right to the point. It’s from the CEO, Dave Hagan. Whether he wrote it or not, the tone is human, you can empathize, and it’s not so serious that you can’t smile a bit when it mentions the “system deciding” to send the erroneous message. Check out their blog, The HotSpot, for more of the same tone. It’s a fun read with good travel information.

Small Details 

I only have a couple of recommendations that would make this better.

Faster is better… but correct is best.

The apology was sent 4 days after the erroneous email. For an issue that touches on a large part of your customer base, I think that is pushing the edge of timeliness.  As a company, you need to determine what happened so you can reassure recipients that it won’t happen again.

Put contact information next to your offer to have people contact you.

It’s nice to remind people to contact them if there is anything they can do to help but there is no easy email address or phone number for customer service. Create an email address to handle these questions, put it right in the email so people don’t have to hunt. Small but important details.

Mistakes R Us (all of us)

Mistakes are just a part of being an organization made up of imperfect people. Being online, your customers and prospects may get to see them more as you participate in the online community. There are real benefits to having your customer base see your company as more human.  The risks are there, too.

In my mind, this is a great example of making lemonade from lemons. Do you have a plan to deal with the inevitable? For me, I’ll remember Boingo and be a happy, prospective customer.

Do you have a recent experience with great or poor online customer communication?  Share it with us in the comments section below.