For about a year and a half I’ve been using a contact manager to manage subscriptions to three of my sites. It was cumbersome: because of the three lists, three subscription forms, three autoresponse series, it was confusing, and the user interface was quite poor. No matter how many times I checked the list, I kept getting notifications from one email address about a second website signup. And the email notifications didn’t tell me what they’d entered, so I had to login to get details. And it was a monthly fee.

So I started looking at alternative autoresponders/contact managers.

I dallied very briefly with getresponse.com. They had a nice free option for less than 100 subscribers, and it generated a simple one-line of text to add to the site. But I really wanted a comment box on the form, but the custom fields didn’t group nicely.

So I tried campaign monitor. We use it at work for lovely html email newsletters, but I was more interested in the autoresponder at first. But most important was customisation of the confirmation and thank you pages, and getting a comment box on the signup form.

I was too lazy to use the API. I just wanted a simple block of code to plonk onto the contact page of my Drupal-managed sites.

My first little regret was that the dropdown box for custom fields didn’t include one for textareas – just plain text fields.
And then the generated code didn’t perform any validation.

This page was absolutely necessary: http://help.campaignmonitor.com/topic.aspx?t=194 . I had to modify my Drupal page template to call the jQuery files, and then modify the generated code to turn the custom text field into a textarea, and refine the styling.

One of my goals had been to find a simple, cheap contact manager that I could show others how to use. As long as they don’t care about comment boxes and validation, it’s pretty simple.

Of course after I’d finished it, I found there was a Drupal module for the API – http://drupal.org/project/campaignmonitor.
But as each of the members on my site may want their own campaignmonitor form, just pasting the slightly modified code, was the best solution for me.

Interesting. In the last 10 minutes I’ve read two emails about “desire”.

One from Frank Kern, about “desire” being the way to get money whenver you want money.  That by tapping into people’s desire, they will buy things. Even when they probably shouldn’t. And the two types of desire – up-front desire versus seedling desire.

The next email was from Andy Jenkins, of Stompernet, about the need to stop selling, and create desire for your product.  About making your visitors “lust” after a fantasy result. Obviously there should be a real result from your product, but the desire comes from how the visitor fantasizes their life will change after buying your product.

Writing this post as I read my emails, I then find that Andy’s email was an affiliate link to Franks new video. No wonder they’re both about the same thing.

But that’s ok, because Andy’s email was personalised, and added value with a story of his own, about how a high traffic site failed at conversion, until he realised he had forgotten to tap into his visitors “desire”.

I opened Frank’s email because of curiosity. It was brief, and had a video link. And today (rarely) I was in the mood for videos.  Frank is a gifted and relaxed communicator, and I enjoyed his video.

Andy (sorry) is usually too verbose. But he eventually gets to a good point.

So creating desire is how to get people to buy. Even in a recession.

Yes we can.

Got an email from FootballAustralia today, to my hotmail account (I’m a soccer mum).

Opening the email, all I got was black and grey.

The email only had images above the fold, and as Hotmail blocks images by default, all I saw was a couple of blocks of colour. No image text alternatives, no text content at all.
Could they have done any worse?

In the first few seconds, they lost my attention.
The likelihood of paging down below the fold to find the text, disappeared.
Especially as this email means the end of Saturday morning sleep-ins, replaced by rushing around to ferry two boys to different early soccer matches.

But because I know them, and I was curious from a marketing point of view to see what they had to say, I unblocked the images and showed content. And yes then it was a very handsome email, with lovely images.

But with images blocked, and all the spam filters these days, the most effective email is a text-based email, with images as the garnish, rather than the main message carrier.

C.