Early this year the DMA’s Legal and Best Practice hub and I published a whitepaper on Email Creative. It was never meant as a definitive guide to creating great email campaigns but more a collection of ideas to consider during the design process. The world of email is constantly changing both from the sender and the recipient’s perspective and as such we always need to be adapting how we design our emails for the best results. A template that worked well last Christmas may not achieve the same results this year, although that may not all be down to the creative.

The way in which people read their emails has evolved. New browsers, desktop clients and mobile devices are always being released along with upgrades to existing readers. Subtle changes can make a big difference in way your email is received by your audience. Since Apple launched the iPad the tablet market has rocketed and more people than ever are reading their email on a tablet. Why carry your laptop when you are travelling when a lightweight tablet will do the trick ?

We are seeing more evidence that the first open for many emails is on a mobile device. This may not be the only device they view the email on but could be the most important. Whether they can delete your email from their mobile device and never see it again or whether it will still be in their inbox on their desktop really depends on their email setup. In the B2C marketplace many users will only ever read their email on a mobile device and might never access their email from a desktop.

It’s also worth remembering that the timing of your emails can greatly affect the device used to read it as well as the length of time you have to grab the recipients attention. An email sent early in the morning might catch people on the way to work. They could be on a bus/tram/train and reading their emails on a mobile device. The chances are they have more time to read emails that might normally just get deleted if it were to arrive in their inbox on their desktop.

You can use historical data to get a good overview of how your recipients are reading your emails and what tools they are using. This will give you a better idea on which areas to focus your attention when designing your email.

In the past ISP’s have been keen to limit what you can do within the content of an email in an attempt to give the user increased confidence about their inbox security. Now users are demanding more functionality in their emails and ISP’s such as Hotmail and Yahoo are expanding what you can do. Hotmail has Active Views and dynamic content is the next step. Embedded video in email is now also a real possibility. This new functionality can really enhance your email but to use it you need to have a clear understand of who your audience are.

Having said all this, some of the principle of good email creative will always be the same.

1.  Test ! Test ! and Test again

Decide on what you want to achieve from the campaign and using these metrics to create a testing plan to get the best from your campaign. Use split testing to compare different options.

2.  Design and Content

Think about the images you use and keep your calls to action clear even when images aren’t displayed. Validate your html to make sure there are no mistakes.

3.  Rendering

Preview your email in as many different clients as possible focusing on the clients you expect your clients to be using.  You want to give the recipient the best possible experience whether on desktop or mobile.

4.  Personalisation

The aim of personalising a message is to demonstrate you know and understand enough about the recipient and their interests to have deduced that your email is relevant to them.

5.  Relevance

Segment your data to make the content more relevant to the indiviual. Take a look at the DMA whitepaper The Guide to Segmenting your Emails.

The four key eCommerce marketing trigger emails are; welcome, transaction confirmation, basket abandoned and ratings/review request. Of course there are other opportunities for trigger emails such as Birthday, back in stock emails, win-back and more, however those first four emails are the key emails to put in place before any others.

Here I’m looking at the ratings and review request email. Social proof ratings and reviews have become essential in eCommerce, Reevoo benchmark the average sales uplift due to reviews at 18%. The natural human instinct is to value the opinion of others. My six year old daughter demonstrated this to me. I’d pulled up a page of Nintendo games for her to look at. A few seconds later she exclaimed how one had four stars and another 284 comments. I hadn’t explained social proof or reviews to her and I’m sure its not something taught at school. She seemed to naturally ‘get it’.

A very effective way to build the necessary ratings and reviews is to send a post purchase request email. When Argos implemented such a practice they found 10% of their customers provided a review. If you consider how many purchases you have then 10% is quickly going to add up to a lot of reviews.

The following charts show two ratings examples are from Reevoo:

Which review would you find more persuasive? If you are like most people it will be the one on the right.

The most interesting point about these two bar charts is that they are for the same product. The only difference was reviews for the chart on the right were proactively requested by means of a post purchase email. By asking there is a difference in not only quantity of reviews but the number of positive reviews.

This difference is easily explained. If not asked for feedback, only the less satisfied customers are likely to make the effort to find out how to make a rating and provide it.

Here are some tips for a good review request email.

• The reivew request email should be sent a few days after the customer has experienced the product or service. This should be enough time that they have developed their opinion and not so long that the enjoyment of the new purchase has passed.

• The email subject line and body should reference the item purchased.

• The copy should be short and clear with a well positioned call to action button.

• The process to provide review should be quick and easy. A simple star rating could be collected right from within the email using images for each of one to five stars. That’s easy.

• Avoid clutter that could distract from the review request.

• Remind the customer of your normal support and service channels. If they are not happy, you will want to know directly rather than have a poor review.

ClickZ recently posted this model for ROI calculation of reviews and user generated content and in the last dotMailer ‘Hitting the Mark’ report only 48% of companies studied sent any sort of post purchase email. There is clearly opportunity for many to improve their bottom line.

Oh, and yes I did end up buying the Nintendo games for my daugther that she picked out from the ratings.

Google recently announced it is to close the long running Google Friends newsletter. Launching in 1998, whilst Google was still on Stanford’s servers it has been delivered monthly. That is until now. From next month, the newsletter will cease to exist because subscriber numbers had stalled. But a wider look at Google suggests it doesn’t pay much attention to using email as a channel to communicate with its users.

First, lets take a quick look at the Google Friends newsletter.

Google outgrew this newsletter a long time ago. Each month, the newsletter provided a mix of tips and news across Google’s vast array of products. One month it was Google Toolbar, a Daily puzzle, Google Docs, Earth Day and a power tip for Google Map Maker. Another month it was a power tip on Google Voice and news on Google Places, Youtube, Google Translate and a Doodle for Google contest.

Unless you were interested in everything Google, this newsletter was not for you.

There are perhaps a small niche of people that might like the vast array of news updates across the whole of Google. Given the size of Google, and Larry Page’s new more autonomous business unit approach. Collating and combining these centrally may just have become too expensive versus the benefits. Of course these are their most ardent fans, so ignoring them is an interesting approach.

Overall though, Google’s approach to email is scattered and unorganised at best.

Google pushes out a huge amount of information, highly targeted not just by product but also by country. You can find the full list here, it is truly impressive in scale. You can subscribe to receive this information via Twitter, Facebook, RSS and (of course) Google Buzz! Surprisingly there is no mention of email at all. Given the scale of email (3.1 billion email accounts – click for more stats), its ability to remind users of your products/features and persistently store your message so you can come back to it, not promoting email subscriptions seems like a lost opportunity. Sure, it can be misused but so can all channels.

Relying on Twitter or Facebook for Google updates can easily lead to missed updates as unless I spend all day watching for their updates (not likely!) or proactively remember to visit their profiles on these network, Google is merely hoping I catch their updates in my newsfeeds.  Further you cannot search the Facebook newsfeed at all and searching  Twitter only results in tweets going back a few days.

Subscribing via RSS is an option for me as I am a heavy RSS user, but the usage numbers are low generally especially with a mainstream audience. So low in fact, that the last metric I can find on RSS numbers is from 2005. A rather tiny 275m wordwide.

Finally there is Google Buzz! Is anyone still using Google Buzz?

So where is email? It is there, but to find it you have to click through on some of the blog links where you will sometimes bring up the option of subscribing via email. There is obviously no standardised approach to this. The Blogger buzz blog had it in the right sidebar, the Google Analytics blog doesn’t have it anywhere. It is hit and miss based on the template used.

Email is different.
Different channels offer different benefits. Twitter and Facebook are great for offering casual connections to brands. Brands you really want to hear from? Not so good. For those situations, email is the right tool for the job.

If you are spending all that time creating content, getting in front of as many people who want to read it would seem to be a good thing. People can always unsubscribe. Google even provides that service inside Gmail.

Email marketers talk *a lot* about relevance and engagement. And rightly so. Email marketing, when done well, can deliver a personalised marketing message not achievable in any other medium. (No pressure, right?!?)

But, as we all banter about personalisation, segmentation and targeting, we are too often failing to send the right signal to recipients. Take a moment to think about your last three email campaigns. Was it clear to the recipient that you actually care about them? About their interests? Even a bit.

We aspire to connect with our recipients. We aspire to be more engaging. And, we aspire to drive more revenue by doing so. So, let’s do it already.

Here are four personalisation tips to help you show your recipients that you really do give a damn.

Tip #1: Dear %%FirstName%% is NOT personalisation. It’s the beginning of a form letter.

In 2001, “savvy” email marketers could address each email recipient by name. In the subject line. In the content. Oh Wow, frank m, that is truly awesome! Please. Stop. Doing. This. It is not personalisation any more than that advert you received in the post last week addressed to MR R J SMITH. It’s a cop-out. You can find better ways to deliver tailored content to recipients.

Tip #2: Relevance cannot be achieved solely with an opt-in form

While getting opt-in forms right is critical, the data you gather through them is just the starting point. It should be enough to drive a fairly relevant first email, but it is not meant to be the basis of all campaigns to follow. Not by any means. It’s like meeting someone at a networking event and discovering they have an interest in cricket. And then, for the next three years, only talking to them about cricket each time you see them. It’s a quick way to become incredibly boring and irrelevant. And in the end, it will leave you and your email marketing programme standing alone.

From that very first message, you should be using each recipient interaction or lack of interaction to tailor future communications. And, you should be driving the recipient to take further action on your website to gather more data points that you can then use to continue the dialogue in a meaningful way.

Tip #3: Behaviour is the best predictor of preference and interest

When is the best time to send an email? What content should I send to this segment this week? Don’t try to guess what to send to recipients or when to send it. If you can do this successfully (and repeatedly) please leave a comment below — I need your help with my stock portfolio. The truth is, behaviour is the best predictor of a recipient’s preference, interest and appetite to engage with your brand. Use past open and click behaviour to predict when you should send a communication to a particular recipient. Use click-through data from email and website analytics to understand what product categories or content is of most interest based on the recipient’s prior interactions. By listening to recipient behaviour and responding to it you will create dialogue and you will have a far higher likelihood of delivering relevant and anticipated communications.

Tip #4: Don’t fake it. (Applicable to multiple areas of life)

Much like Tip #1, if you aren’t going to put in the effort to truly personalise the content in your email marketing campaigns, don’t fake it. Seriously. Don’t even bother. Please go into your template and cut the salutation. Do your brand some good and either commit to being relevant or stick to batch-and-blast methods and execute them exceedingly well. I can promise that your boss, your customers and your shareholders will greatly appreciate your spending the time to be more tuned in to your recipients — using their behaviour to guide the dialogue instead of guessing or, worse yet, not %%caring%%.

Frameworks have been used to structure thinking, people and process effectively in many different industries. I created the email hierarchy of needs framework to help breakdown email marketing into distinct key elements and have found it helpful when working with clients on their email marketing programmes.

Its inspired in part by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The concept is simple. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid each layer builds on the previous one. Each layer must be in place to advance to the next layer. For example, until you have email permission nothing else matters, then when you have permission you need to actually reach the inbox and so on through each layer.

I’ll summarise each of the layers, starting from the bottom and working up before going into how to apply it to deliver a coherent and well executed email programme.

Permission and profile management

Getting permission is an obvious first need in email marketing. This gives rise to questions. Where is permission being requested? Is it being requested effectively? How is the list being grown? Even once you’ve got it you need to keep it and manage it. Are the right people being emailed? Are you legal? What other customer profile data are you collecting and how is that managed? How are different sources of data integrated, what is the approach to CRM? Unfortunately you will sometimes lose permission, so have you got a rescue process in place? How are you learning about the reasons why permission is lost?

Deliverability

Reaching the inbox is always on the email marketers mind. How are you monitoring and checking your deliverability? Using a good ESP will ensure criteria such as whitelisting, DNS, authentication protocols and feedback loops are in place. What pre-send and spam checks are used? Beyond this a good reputation is needed. This is increasingly based on what your customers think of your emails. In short, low spam complaints, high opens and clicks build a good reputation. So doing a good job of the rest of the layers in the pyramid will do most of the work needed for deliverability.

Accessibility

Once the inbox has been reached the email has to display correctly. A message that can’t be read won’t get you very far. Does your email display as you intended in email clients, web browsers and on mobile devices? How will it look with images on and images off? Do images have ALT tags?

Functionality

Email is much more than a printed flyer. Are functional elements of the email working? Its sadly too often that emails are sent with links that go to the wrong place or personalisation that is not working. How about ensuring images are of small byte size so they load quickly? Especially with the trend to read emails on smartphones, where data connection speeds are lower. Processes such as recommend a friend, share to social or unsubscribe need to not only be present in the email but work when you click through. Have the processes changed or stopped working, when was the last time they were tested? Often they are added to a template and assumed they can never go wrong.

Presentation

This is more than just how it looks, but is everything about how the email connects and carries your message to the customer. Its much more than just creative design. What is says and how it says it, the copy and tone. The subject line and the consistency of message from subject through the body. Choice of from name and calls to action copy. How the images fit and carry the emotion of the messaging. How is split testing being used to optimisation this layer? Testing can really tune the presentation and improve bottom line results.

Relevance

Is the email appropriate to the customer? What is the customer expecting and wanting from your emails? Do they match those desires? How about the impact of timing and frequency? When and how frequently should the customer be contacted and about what? Sending too little or too much email? What of the balance between frequency and accuracy of targeting. A higher frequency of emails will be more acceptable if they are well targeted. This layer is all about using customer insight to drive content.

Value

Answering the what’s in it for me question. You may have negotiated your way through all the layers and messaged about a fabulous pair of shoes to the ideal shoe fanatic. However, if the shoes are poor value then it was all in vain. Value doesn’t have to mean a low price or one of free, win and save. Value can also be about providing a better service level, a more generous guarantee, providing valuable information, offering exclusivity or simply being entertaining.

Using the email hierarchy of needs

First be clear about your business goals and marketing objectives. Then review each layer of the email hierarchy of needs and consider these questions.

• Who owns and manages this layer?
• How is strategy mapped into this layer?
• What people skills are required?
• What processes are needed?
• What resources, tools and solutions are needed?
• What testing and refinement is used for continuous improvement?
• What metrics and KPIs should be used? How will overall ROI be measured?

Please do leave a comment if you’ve ideas adding to this or if you’d like me to expand on any particular aspect.

Sat working in the sun with two five year olds, playing in the shade under the table I was sat on. I was intrigued about the conversation that happened.

Link; “why are these Army men red and Yellow?”

Sunny; “They are funny and would get killed very quickly, everyone knows Army men should be Green.”

The Army men were Yellow and Red because that was the only colour the shop had. The amount of time spent playing with them was slightly more than the green ones, the play was also more imaginative as they moved away from battles in woods to ones on the beach (quite handy if you are Yellow) and Jessica despite hating Army men was persuaded to play for a while (on the condition she was allowed to be the Yellow Army).

On first glance Yellow and Red Army men have very little to do with emails. However it does highlight the fact that you don’t have to always follow convention to get responses. A couple of weeks ago whilst trying to do several things at once I quickly put together an email to send to business people in the land of PR. I wanted to see if the idea had any potential before investing any real time or money into it. The email broke more than one of the best practice guideline (nothing illegal or against the code) but the creative was not that pretty, there was an attachment, the branding or design was poor and the subject line was very long however the response was fantastic with nearly 60% of the people it was sent to responding to it.

The point is that for the majority of the time I believe it is best to follow well tried techniques and learning’s. Follow the DMA guidelines, read and implement ideas from the white papers and guidelines from within your company. However every so often try something a little bit different, brake from convention and see what it does to your response. If it drops through the floor you know to go back to following the more conventional advice. But just as the Yellow and Red Army men got Link and Sunny to engage in a different way with them and gained a new user in Jessica you might strike lucky and gain a positive reaction.

Sara Watts – Data Media and Research

It’s not often that anything to do with car road tax excites me but I quite like the fact that 2 weeks before your road tax expires a letter plops through the door with a nice little reminder about how much you need to pay for 6 or 12 months and a unique number for you to type into the website to renew on line and an option for doing it by the post.

A few days later if you have still not purchased your car tax you get the first of two emails reminding you again with a simple click through which takes you to a site which follows the golden rules of

1. Keeping to the point.

2. Clear instructions of what to do.

3. Only asks for the information they actually need.

4. Doesn’t take very long.

The system then goes through a series of checks regarding insurance and ownership and a few days later a lovely new tax disc is sent out in the post.

Nothing ground breaking; no fancy creative’s just a simple example of email being used in an effective useful manner.

Sara Watts Data Media and Research

With addicted like behaviour millions of people are every day feverishly checking their inbox to get their fix of the latest offers.

There is clearly a huge appetite for daily deals and the question is how to take advantage of this opportunity. Let’s look at what makes the Groupon daily ‘fix‘ work.

Groupon, the world’s fastest-growing company ever, has in under two years grown to sending over 50 million emails per day. Its proving lucurative with Groupon taking a big slice of revenue it drives.

Any venture generating such huge growth attracts plenty of others wanting to get in on the action. In the case of daily deals some big names too. Such as Amazon backed LivingSocial, Google Offers, Facebook Places Deals and other smaller brands such as kgbdeals, discountvouchers.co.uk, SecretSales.

They all have in common a proposition of limited time daily discount deals. Consumers have shown they are very happy to get those deals through daily emails. Should brands now be thinking about cutting out the middle man and launching their own daily deals programmes?

So what makes daily deal programmes work?

• The consumer desire to feel they have got a steal.
• A different deal every day.
• A deep discount.
• Urgency created by very limited time availability.
• Fear of regret at not taking a deal, “if only I’d said yes”.
• Relevance of deal to the customer.
• Payment or reward for recommending deals to friends.

First step is to build the list of addicts. Permission and expectation of receiving a daily email is crucial. Place a quick and easy to use sign-up form in a prominent position on your home page. A simple box for the email address and a reason to subscribe. Be clear on the benefit offered. Set the expectation of receiving a daily email and as always, provide transparency about email addresses sharing and privacy policies. Consumers are much more comfortable and likely to subscribe when they know their email address will not be shared.

Then create your deals creative. Let’s breakdown the elements of the Groupon email design from the example below.

The email’s subject line, “Four One-Hour Pony Riding Lessons for £25″ clearly explains the offer. As readers filter emails by subject line, clarity of the main deal is vital here. A generic subject line like, “Your daily deals upto 65% off”, will not ensure the right people read the email. The email body copy above the fold has consistency with the subject line, re-enforcing and expanding on the deal details, in big bold letters.

The cost is clearly stated as well as the saving in percentage and pound terms. Customers know 65% is impressive so the percent value carries weight but as few people can work out how much 65% of £72 is, the pound discount is also needed to explain what a great deal it is. The urgency is clearly stated with the expiry date of the deal. The message is simple; act now.

The large ‘View now’ call to action button makes it obvious what you do next. The objective is just to get you to the landing page where there is further deal information. The email call to action is not ‘Buy Now!’ as the reader may not yet be at the point of having decided. The place for ‘Buy Now!’ is the landing page.

The Pony image messages what the offer is about. The images off email version needs some improvement as the ‘View now’ call to action is not visible because the button is purely image based.

Groupon CityDeals make deals relevant to you based on your location, they ask for city at time of sign up in one simple drop down box. This is not onerous during sign up and there is a clear reason why the consumer should provide the information.

Whilst location is a good criteria for relevance on many Groupon deals, it is also still quite crude. I’ve had these three deals offered in the last three days:

• Pony riding lessons
• Nine Holes of PGA professional golf tuition
• Medi-lipo weight management treatment

None of these are remotely relevant to me. With growing competition of daily deal providers, the customer experience needs improvement to avoid customer churn.

Deals clicked on or bought are the most obvious behaviour based relevance criteria to use for personalised deals. This is also limited. What if I’ve not yet purchased and can anyone predict that as I love Thai food I could be tempted to a skiing session, though golf is not my thing?

Asking customers for their interests through a preference centre is a must to improve relevance in most email programmes. In addition to preference centre a more pervasive experience could be achieved by using a ‘do not like‘ button. I’ve illustrated the concept by adding this into some unused whitespace on a Groupon email, creating the mockup below.

Just above the button in the mockup is the text ‘Tell us if you don’t want more deals like this in future’.

The idea is simple, next time I get a Medi-lipo offer I hit the ‘do not like’ button to say not more lipo deals please, it’s not relevant to me.

Expect to see more innovation in the daily deals space. Groupon aren’t standing still. They are launching a mobile app which focuses on two buttons, “I’m Hungry” and “I’m Bored”. It wants to answer those questions with time and location relevance at the point when you ask the question.

There are also social opportunities to improve customer experience by adding social aspects to the deal pages.

Now is the time to consider your own daily email programmes. The daily fix email is not yet a done deal.

In the spirit of Red Nose Day—fast approaching on Friday, 18^th March—I’ve been thinking about what makes email funny. Other than two great cartoons (see below), which I have tacked to my office wall, I couldn’t really come up with much.

Instead, I’d like to use this post to expound on a few ways to make email fun. Yes, that’s right— fun. As a marketer, this is likely not your primary goal for the email channel. Or even one at the very bottom of your list. Or actually on your list at all. However, I can’t help but think of a famous Groucho Marx quote: “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.”

While I’m sure Marx never thought this could be applied to email marketing, there’s something to be said for creating fun, entertaining and witty email campaigns. Standing out in the inbox is getting increasingly harder to do as the email channel becomes more and more saturated, both with legitimate permission-based messages, as well as spam. As a result, it’s not only important to provide your subscribers with value and send relevant content and offers, but to grab your subscribers’ attention, however you can. Sometimes, that means being funny, or at least showing that you’re having fun and you want them to as well.

How to achieve this?

• Start by injecting your brand with some personality. Social media is a great place to start. When email marketing is done well, it can create opportunities for having a dialogue with your customers and prospects. Social media takes that one step further and provides the opportunity for your brand to have a voice and a personality. Yet, many marketers ignore this by creating dry, static and product-driven social media pages and content. This won’t keep your audience’s attention. They are looking for fun, entertaining and exclusive information, as well as the chance to interact with your brand in a completely unique way. It’s important to treat interactions in this channel differently from what you’re doing via print, broadcast and other more traditional channels. So loosen up—and don’t forget that your content needs to be more about your audience and less about you. Of course, the goal is still to sell, but instead of communicating new product specs, explain how your product can help your audience be smarter, more organised, have fun and ultimately live better lives. If you’re already doing this with your email marketing content, it shouldn’t be too difficult to apply this approach to your social media efforts.
• Video in email is another great option. Interactivity is always fun and can get subscribers clicking and engaging with your content. The great news is that many studies point to the fact that consumers who watch videos are twice as likely to convert as those who don’t. In addition, ISPs like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail are now allowing YouTube videos to be played directly in the email inbox, so the hurdle for response is significantly lowered from when Flash and Javascript were the only options, which often caused ISP blocks. Marketers can now leverage the visual draw of video in their email templates by inserting an animated GIF or image of the featured video. Simulating video with images can create more visual interest and therefore boost response rates. A variety of companies offer some great options for implementing this. One is Liveclicker, which detects each subscriber’s email client in real time—as the email is opened by the recipient—and only then delivers a compatible video asset directly in the email.

So this Red Nose Day, consider the entertainment factor of the email messages you are sending. Not only will this help you to stand out in the inbox, but you’ll find that it’s the humorous and entertaining messages that go viral. To capitalise on this, be sure to include links for the traditional “forward-to-a friend” option or the newer “share-to-social” option in your email templates, which makes expanding your reach—and potentially growing your email file and your fan/follower base—simple and easy.

When Elizabeth Browning penned the immortal lines “How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways” in the mid-1800s, she had some fairly traditional answers in mind : “freely”, “purely”, and “with the breath, smiles and tears of all my life” provides you with the gist of what she was thinking. However, she would have arched her eyebrows if she had lived to see the advent of email marketing ! Post Valentine’s Day, I had a quick run through my inbox to see which brands had jumped onto the love wagon and attempted to shoe-horn their products and services into a Valentine’s message to greatest effect ? The results were intriguing !

For starters, there were the usual suspects. M&S was offering flowers, lingerie and the opportunity to dine in for £20 – a fine example of cross selling, if I ever saw one ! Interestingly, one of my colleagues received a version of this email where the gift card in the image had been personalised with his name – a really nice touch. Thorntons also tapped into the Valentine’s zeitgeist with last minute chocolate offers, which is always a God send for the average bloke who has left things too late ! And Kettners champagne bar came up with an intriguing proposition ( excuse the pun ) for a “Romantic Rendezvous . . . perfect for wooing, seducing, and even proposing !”

Then there were some slightly more left field examples. Chelsea Megastore got in on the act, offering their “New Torres Collection” – an interesting Valentine’s pitch given the heartbreak that is currently being experienced at The Bridge ! Dixon’s was encouraging us to “Treat someone this Valentine’s Day” by buying them a camera, a camcorder, or a satnav – presumably so that one’s wife could plot the quickest route to the dog box when she received it ! And Silverstone race track also got in on the act, encouraging those looking for Valentine’s inspiration to “Treat your someone special to a Nissan GT-R Thrill, plus two Silverstone Supercar race day tickets”. I reckon that you might expect a turbo-charged response to that one – wonder if a few relationships saw the chequered flag as a result !

But my personal favourite came from a small company called Cruga. Those of you who know me will also know that I have a South African background. Every now and then, I have a particular craving for a traditional South African treat – most often biltong, which is basically raw meat that has been spiced and dried until it’s really chewy ( admittedly not everyone’s cup of tea ). Cruga is a Milton Keynes-based outlet for SA goods, and as a regular customer I am on their mailing list.

Their pre-Valentine’s email dropped into my inbox with the truly memorable subject line of “Save 30% on Biltong this Valentine’s Day” ! Having whetted my appetite, it then proceeded to really give me something to chew on with the following unforgettable copy :

“Valentine’s is traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards. At Cruga Biltong we don’t sell any of these typical Valentine Day gifts, but we do offer you the choice to be unique and buy one of our South African food gift packs or make-up your own from our vast range of beef and game biltong packs and other much loved South African food items.”

It then sealed the deal with a voucher that I could bring in to redeem against my “Valentine’s Day Offer” !

Job done – I was 100% engaged. In fact, engagement on Valentine’s Day seems to be a recurring theme in my life, but that was 15 years ago and another story altogether ! But there was a potential kink in the boerewors ( Afrikaans for “farmers sausage” ) – would my wife be as enthused as I was ? There was only one way to find out – I canvassed her, as well as my youngster, and remarkably my focus group of sample size 2 returned a unanimously positive verdict !

So this year there were no flowers, no jewellery, and no perfume. Instead, there was a gift pack comprising biltong, boerewors, plus a few other items from Cruga’s menu of SA-sourced treats. And they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach !

So – more proof, if any were needed, that the love affair with email marketing is going strong !