Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Chad White of the Email Experience Council:

Add “share with your network” links to your emails. We’re all very familiar now with forward to a friend, which allows your subscribers to share your emails with others via email. That’s the Email 1.0 way of sharing email content. In the Email 2.0 world, you also give your subscribers the option of sharing your email content via social networks, social content sites and social bookmarking sites. Let’s call it “Share with your network”—or SWYN.

Ralph Lauren is the only major retailer that I’ve seen make a full court press on social sharing of email content. They started testing their “Share This Email!” banner back in June and have used it in their content-heavy emails ever since, including their emails about the Olympics.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

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Are you happy with the structure and performance of your email program? If you wish you could just blow it up and start over, we dare you—no, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop:

Start your email program over from scratch. Shut the door, turn off your phone, IM and Twitter, and get out a plain, old-fashioned sheet of paper or clean off the office whiteboard. Ask yourself these questions: What would I do differently if I could start our email program over? What am I doing purely out of habit or because everybody else is doing it? What do I wish I could do but I can't because I don't have the budget or backing from management?

As you stare at the blank page or whiteboard, ask yourself these questions:

● List growth: Are we focused on quantity rather than quality? Are we using questionable acquisition methods just to hit some arbitrary list-size targets? Are we still using pre-checked boxes and single opt-in because my boss couldn't care less about spam complaints, list hygiene and delivery rates?
● List churn and inactivity: Do we understand how active our database is? From one-third to three-quarters of our list is likely inactive; so, what are we doing to reactivate those subscribers that have tuned us out? What programs do we have to deliver greater value to our loyal customers? What can we do to minimize unsubscribes, spam complaints and bounces?
● Design and format: Are our image-heavy emails with lots of administrative information located above the fold still the right approach? Is it time to start from scratch and have an email-design professional create a template that renders well on mobile devices and in preview panes with blocked images? Should we redesign our masthead and navigation links to better correspond with the actions our subscribers want to take?
● Welcome program: Is it time to chuck the text-only confirmation email for a well-designed, multi-message welcome email program?
● Message types: We've been sending the same basic emails for the last two years—our "Weekly Specials" email and monthly "Close Outs." Should we blow this up and let subscribers select different categories and frequencies? Can we add a slew of new email types—birthday specials, reminders, surveys, refer-a-friend promotions, geographic-targeted messages, educational or tip-oriented emails, etc.? Can we wrestle the transactional emails away from IT and design them to cross-sell and up-sell?
● Batch-and-blast: Is it time to stop whining, "How can I move to a lifecycle-, behavior- or trigger-based approach when it's all I can do to get the weekly batch-and-blast emails out the door?" Could I swap one or two batch-and-blast emails a month so I can start testing some more targeted approaches?
● Metrics: Are we tracking the right performance metrics? Our open and click-through rates are doing well, but my boss doesn't seem to care and wonders why we spend so much time on email marketing. Is it time for me to tackle proving the contribution of email to lifetime customer value, cost savings and direct ROI?
● Incentives: Have we gotten hooked on incentives —free shipping and 10% off? Should we test some targeted emails sent only to people that clicked on specific links and use no or reduced incentives to see if we can improve our margins?
● Preference centers: Our unsubscribe page is so ugly and doesn't offer any alternatives. Can I get some design and Web resources to create a worldclass unsubscribe/preference page? Speaking of preference centers, can we continue without one?

If you take up this dare: Let us know by commenting below. Did you overhaul your email completely or just tweak it here and there? What's the first thing you would change about your program if you could? Finally: Which of these changes, if any, could you actually make in your present program? And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that, too.

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Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Lisa Harmon and Alex Madison of Smith-Harmon, who got the idea from the gals at Holland America. (Thanks, ladies—this one’s for you!)

Entice subscribers to enable images by alt-tagging suppressed images with funny teasers. Let’s take it up a notch in persuading our subscribers to enable images. Try putting your alt tags to work, using tempting prompts—like “Enable images—it’s worth it,” or “Enable images to get a great deal”—to tempt subscribers to see the light of your email magic.

This might work especially well for brands that already have a little edge or humor in their voices. Urban Outfitters and Land of Nod come right to mind as perfect candidates for having some alt-tag fun.

Urban Outfitters’ Aug. 29 email shows “Susie from the fashion blog” modeling UO tights with her own eclectic outfits, but the image-suppressed version just labels her images “Susie 1,” “Susie 2,” and “Susie 3.” What if the alt-tags said, “You don’t know how to wear tights until you see Susie. Enable images now!” or “Enable images to find out how tights should really be worn.” NOW I feel like I’m missing out on something....

A Land of Nod email from a few weeks ago (subject line: “Bye Bye Blankie”) features bedding for bigger kids, with the headline “Where do you go when your kid outgrows a blankie?” So cute. In the images-suppressed view, we only see the CTAs—not as adorable. What if they alt-tagged their hero image something like “What comes after the blankie? Enable images to find out!”?

Our emails make a bigger impact when our images show up, and attention-grabbing CTAs (like our beautiful, bulletproof buttons) increase clicks. Let’s get more people seeing them.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

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Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Aaron Smith of Smith-Harmon:

Ask your subscribers to rate your emails. One of the more interesting email features I’ve seen recently is a poll in the footer asking recipients to rate the usefulness of the message or comment on the contents. General Mills, for example, includes a “rate this message” module at the bottom of their Betty Crocker messages using a 1 to 5 star rating system. Taking that concept one step further, I double dog dare you to include an email rating module not just at the bottom of your message, where few people will ever see it, but at the top, above the fold!

In theory, the rating module serves two purposes: (1) to gather feedback on the usefulness of your email program, and (2) to provide folks who are thinking about hitting the “this is spam” button a different opportunity to let their feelings be heard. So go ahead and add a rating module to your email programs…and don’t be shy about the placement! Let your subscribers know you’re truly interested in their opinion.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. Do you see reduced spam reporting? Do you use the ratings information to make incremental improvements to your program? Or have you found you’ve given up valuable real estate for a feature that doesn’t provide any meaningful insight or lift? And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

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Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from DJ Waldow of Bronto Software:

Add an unsubscribe link to the top of your emails where it’s more easily seen. Why is it that the vast, vast majority of unsubscribe links reside (hide?) at the bottom of the email message? Is it because as consumers, we've been trained to scroll to the bottom of the email to unsubscribe? Or is it that as marketers we don’t want to do anything to suggest that subscribers should opt-out? Consider the likely positive benefits of adding another unsubscribe option to the top of your emails: Would this give more people faith that the unsubscribe link would work and therefore reduce the number of spam complaints? While it would surely increase the number of unsubscribes, would you lose active subscribers? Your inactive subscriber are most likely to act on the new, more visible opt-out link, which would give you a more engaged subscriber base that’s cheaper to mail and administer.

You may have a more specific business reason to make the unsubscribe link more prominent as well. For example, you may want to add the additional unsubscribe link if your spam complaints are too high, particularly if you have lots of younger subscribers (which tend use the “report spam” button to opt-out). Also, if you see your spam complaints rise after sweepstakes acquisition campaigns or during the holidays when you increase frequency, adding a more prominent opt-out link will likely reduce those complaints. I dare you to test this on a small portion of your list (and share your results).

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

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Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Stephanie Miller of Return Path:

If you include your website navigation bar in your emails, test to see if it’s truly worth the real estate. I find it fascinating that many marketers have intense loyalty to including their website nav bar in their email templates, even if they have never actually done any analysis on the nav bar to see if it’s (a) relevant and interesting or (b) ever clicked on. This is definitely worth testing, especially as so many of them take up a lot of key real estate in the preview pane. If the nav bar in your emails isn’t driving significant clickthroughs, then I dare you to cut it.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

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Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new and edgy. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Chad White of the Email Experience Council:

Design an email that scrolls horizontally rather than vertically. Used with the right content, it’s a design format that can really stand out in the inbox, and might even generate a surge in forwards. Dylan Boyd of eROI over at The Email Wars blog has discussed this before, most recently in regards to a Dell email about wide-screen displays. For examples of horizontal scrolling websites, check out Urban Outfitters’ blog and the product pages on the Abercrombie & Fitch site.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

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