Helping Klout improve its email marketing score

Yes, Klout is having a bit of a low email marketing score, probably about 10 or 20 if we use their rating system but in this case, for overall email marketing quality of an email message. After some discussion yesterday, I’ve decided to write a post about it. There are a few things wrong with the email they sent yesterday.
Here’s a quick roundup of points that I noticed, and the email from Klout upon which it is based:
1. Sender address: do-not-reply > why? You send me a message via email, I want to respond via email. Simple. Talking about alternative channels really doesn’t do that much good, even when it works: it’s just unfriendly! Even ‘notify@klout.com’ would be better.
2. No pre-header text: online version? Unsubscribe? Tagline? Content summary? Snippet text? It would help in getting people to read on, or even open the email in case of the snippet.
3.  Personalization: Hi Lan, > apparently the name of the marketer sending this email campaign at Klout was hardcoded in the email sent to the list – See Twitter convo here.
4. No text links, only images clickable. That means fewer clicks, especially from people who cannot or do not want to download images.
5. Email Prefs goes to a Twitter/Facebook signin page, not an email prefs page. It should work immediately: the email knows who I am, therefor the link will know, therefor the landing page should know. Don’t make it a hassle for me to adjust prefs by letting me log in to Twitter or Facebook and -then- sign in to my Email Prefs.
6. No social share love ? That from a company who tracks social klout? D’oh.
7. Segmentation: offering me Gilt, I never shop there. Option to segment based on Klout score, geographic location et al? That could result in -not- sending me an email, but that’s better than sending me an email with irrelevant content. Content that is not relevant is the reason for 25% of unsubscribers to unsub from an email program, after all.
8. Email ends with just basic footer stuff. No link to Klout, their blogposts or anything else.
9. No alt tags for most of the images. This means with images off, you have no idea of the content.
Here’s the full email, images off with the above points in green (click for larger version):

With images on (again, click for larger version):

Sure, everyone can have a bad day. Luckily, we are all human after all. However, even on a good day there would be about 6 to 8 points mentioned before to attend to. Let’s help Klout (and any company that can recognize itself in 1 or more of the above points!) improve their email marketing score (and email marketing skills, maybe?). Most of the points only take minutes to attend to, forever. A small price to pay for improvement of an email marketing campaign, imho.
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