You see, ordering tickets should be a straightforward process. You place your order, you receive confirmation of that order, and then you receive delivery confirmations or redemption instructions. But in the case of certain events such as the Jackson Memorial and the World Cup, there is one small difference in that ticketing lotteries are used to determine who receives tickets.

In theory, email is the perfect medium to execute a ticketing lottery. Once the drawing is complete, winning contestants can be reached instantly and privately with news of their purchase. Compared to past World Cups which have relied on postal mail and phone systems, email has provided a much more cost-effective and immediate medium for communicating with customers.

Unfortunately, FIFA really dropped the ball on their first attempt at online ticketing using email.

Let’s start with the subject line of my order confirmation: 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ – Ticketing Update. It’s worth noting that nothing about that subject line indicates whether or not the recipient won or lost the ticketing lottery. To make matters worse, FIFA used this same exact subject line seven times when messaging me over the course of the ticketing process. So it’s a realistic concern that many customers may have overlooked this email in the shuffle of all the other Ticketing Update emails they received over time.

Then there’s the simple matter of the email itself, which is a bit confusing. For a very important confirmation email, this message treats the actual confirmation portion of the message as an afterthought. For some reason, the vital information — namely, that the user has won the lottery — is buried beneath five lines of text. Next, there’s the issue of the awkward phrasing that FIFA is “delighted to inform you that the Tickets shown below… have now been reserved by the FWCTC for your exclusive benefit.”

In my experience, simpler is better. A quick “Congratulations” or “You’ve Won” would have certainly conveyed all of this information in a much more concise manner. Perhaps to deal with issues of internationalization (a major concern for a global event of this magnitude), FIFA could have added a photo of a celebrating soccer fan somewhere in there so that even someone who speaks little or no English could understand what had taken place. Alas, none of these simple tricks were used in the confirmation process.

The first example comes courtesy of Toktumi, a company offering VOIP calling via an iPhone application and service. Like many subscription-based services, Toktumi offers a free trial period of their product followed by an enrollment deadline. Toktumi’s lifecycle campaign, while very rudimentary from a creative perspective, is outstanding in several other key areas including time of delivery, relevant content and especially clear subject lines.

• Subject: Congratulations! Your Line2 account has been created
  Deployed: Immediately after trial registration (triggered)
  Content: How to get started, trial period information and discount code.
• Subject: Getting the most out of Line2
  Deployed: 14 days after registration
  Content: Links to tutorial videos, list of features, call to action
• Subject: Time Flies! Only 5 days left in your Line2 free trial
  Deployed: 25 days after registration
  Content: Link to special rate, reminder to register
• Subject: Is this goodbye?
  Deployed: 30 days after registration
  Content: Reminder of what you will miss out on, reminder about special discounted rate
• Subject: Toktumi account registration
  Deployed: Immediately after sign-up (triggered)
  Content: Congratulations on activating your phone service, account information

I simply love this lifecycle campaign. The cadence of messaging is spot-on, as is the content included in each message. The subject lines are so clear, you can easily tell what you’re going to get by opening the message. Toktumi is clearly a company that knows when to deliver that next crucial piece of information that will motivate the customer to make a purchase. For a relatively small operation, they are running a super sophisticated email lifecycle program.

I’m not sure if I can discern a pattern or explain why each brand chooses to align itself with a particular event, but I can certainly say that I enjoy being surprised by each brand’s choices. You just never know what you’re going to get, which is sort of refreshing given how predictable and cyclical the email business is.

Let’s have a look at some emails that hit my inbox in just the past few days:

Last week marked the beginning of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, which has become an unofficial holiday of sorts for many sports fans in the U.S.. I was intrigued to see GNC, a nutritional supplement retailer, give “March Madness” the full-on holiday treatment in its email campaigns. But there they were, talking hoops with their customers like they were selling basketball sneakers rather than, say, protein shakes and iron pills.

Meanwhile at Hautelook, the high-fashion eCommerce site, the event they were looking forward to was “Prom Week.” Even though it’s only March, I suppose it’s never too early for high school seniors to start thinking about their upcoming dates and wardrobe choices! Now if only there was an online retailer who could help them out with corsages…

Elsewhere, our friends at CVS were determined to capture “the luck of the Irish” by tying their 20% off promotion to every Irishman’s favorite holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. But CVS wasn’t done yet –  they still had another important event to talk about: Tax Season! CVS has a great little online member area where you can download your prescription information from the past year and use it to help file your taxes. Their email campaigns do a great job of promoting this super-helpful, online-only feature to CVS ExtraCare members. It’s a great example of how opting-in to an email program can add value to the customer relationship.

Just a few days earlier, Borders sent out an email tying their 30% off promotion to the recent shift in Daylight Savings Time. After all, it makes sense for a business to make time-sensitive promotions around an event that is entirely about the time.

Not to be outdone, Oriental Trading Co. is already looking towards the next big holiday: Easter. OTC broke out all of their pastel colors and bunny-themed copy for this email, which focuses on getting orders delivered before Easter Sunday.

Looking at these examples across the board, it’s clear there’s no clearly established path for navigating the last few weeks of Winter. As an email subscriber I must say I kind of enjoy the unpredictability that March offers. So go ahead, email marketers…get creative! March might be a good time for you to find your brand’s voice and find something different that makes you stand out from the competition.

For the loyal readers of Email Responsibly, I thought I’d add some of my thoughts on the report and explain what these data points mean for the email industry at-large and the state of email marketing.

Let’s jump right in and have a look at what the report tells us:

Time Magazine was right
Way back in December 2006, a number of people (myself included) had a good laugh at the expense of Time Magazine, who named “You” as Person of the Year. At the time, the decision seemed like something of a cop-out and also bit out-of-touch with technology.

But looking at the data from our 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report, I couldn’t help but think about Time Magazine and say to myself that they were right — maybe prematurely, but still correct nonetheless. Email marketing today, much like the rest of the Internet, is about you, sometimes even literally. Consider these points from our report:

• Four out of five industries (business products and services, consumer products and services, multichannel retail, travel and entertainment) used the word “you/your” more than any other word in their email subject lines. The fifth industry (catalogers) actually uses the terms “you/your” more than the other four industries (24% of the time), but they also happen to use the terms “free” and “ship” slightly more than that.
• The words “you/your” appear in 19.94% of all email marketing subject lines.
• According to the report, “The increase in usage of the term ‘you/your’ illustrates increased emphasis on businesses building more personal relationships with customers by addressing them directly.”
• According to the report, ”The top term — ‘you/your’ — indicates a clear connection between consumer product and service businesses and their individual customers. The percentages of any ‘top’ word are lower given the wide mix of businesses and product types in this vertical.”

Viral/WOM marketing is now a reality
Beyond these literal connections with “you, the customer,” the report also touches on the significant power shift in media today. The ability to empower consumers to act as marketers on your behalf — the phenomenon more commonly known as viral or word-of-mouth marketing — is no longer just a marketing pipe dream.

• The report illustrates that consumers themselves are embracing the concept of viral marketing and actually enjoy acting on behalf of the companies that they know and love; “consumers are increasingly likely to pass those deals on. The share of online adults who say that they are either likely or very likely to forward emails containing promotions or discounts on to others rose to 30 percent in 2009 from 28 percent in 2008.”

Email is key to driving website traffic
For all of the Internet proclamations pronouncing email to be a dead technology, the numbers say that on the contrary email is alive and well. In addition to providing direct, measurable revenue streams, email is also driving business website traffic in general. In the coming weeks we’ll look at how these numbers compare to traffic generated via social networking sites, but in the meantime we can see some impressive numbers from the report.

• “For most retailers, email messages are an important driver for return visits to their Websites. For example, in November 2009, 11 percent of the traffic to Overstock.com was referred from email, and 62 percent were returning visitors who had not visited the Website in the past 30 days.”

For more insights like these, as well as extensive coverage on related topics such as consumer insight, digital advertising, mobile marketing, and multichannel marketing, download a copy of the 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report from Experian.com. And remember, it’s all about “you,” folks!

A few months ago, I had an eye-opening experience when a friend of mine decided to order a late-night pizza from Domino’s well after most local eateries had closed their doors. I was blown away with what I saw — the Domino’s website features a real-time “pizza tracker” that shows the progress of your pizza being prepared, cooked, and delivered to your doorstep in 30 minutes or less. Sure enough, a hot pizza arrived at our door merely 25 minutes later, nevermind the fact that it was very late at night and snowing outside.

Comparing this with my previous Domino’s transactions from back in the day, it almost seems crazy to think about the typical Domino’s experience of yesteryear. The last time I had ordered Domino’s, the following were all true:

• Their commercials featured a claymation “Noid” who supposedly plagued other pizza delivery companies with quality control issues.
• The telephone I used to call Domino’s was a dormitory pay-phone.
• To ensure there were no problems with delivery, I waited patiently by this pay-phone until the delivery man either showed up at my door or called me back asking for directions.

It’s amazing what technology and innovation has done to improve the pizza ordering and delivery process since then.

After filling out a few simple forms and checking off a few boxes —including submitting a telephone number and email address (with the option to opt-in) — the order is placed and the customer data is captured. The customer can see exactly what is happening with their order and has multiple ways to be contacted by Domino’s should any issues arise. I certainly don’t miss the days of shouting “Extra cheese!” over the phone and crossing my fingers when the order arrived.

Of course, great service is only part of the equation here – what about the food? Much has been made of Domino’s recent “Pizza Turnaround” multichannel ad campaign that aims to address criticism of their actual food head-on. Bob Garfield at Ad Age believes that Domino’s does itself “a disservice by coming clean about its pizza,” while Gawker Media’s headline jokingly states that “Domino’s Strikes Gold With ‘Our Pizza Sucks’ Campaign.”

While previous customers may be turned-off to learn that Domino’s has knowingly been serving sub-par pizza for years, I feel like this campaign strategy is not a huge risk as some have stated. My guess is that most people ordered Domino’s in the past mostly because they could count on it being there quickly and prepared in a consistent manner. Taco Bell certainly followed this formula to great success in the 1990′s. With a new set of flavors and recipes added to their track record of punctual and professional delivery, Domino’s could do well with this new strategy.

As someone who has not been a loyal customer in the past but does recognize how good Domino’s is at delivering pizzas, I must say that this latest campaign makes me want to take them up on their offer. If their “new pizza” is half as good as their online ordering system, Domino’s should be cooking up a storm in 2010.