I can appreciate talking with your audience and not down to them, but I thought this was a bit ridiculous.
Comedian Bob Marley - a fixture in many a Maine resident's memory as well as those fans of the cult movie classic Boondock Saints - sent out an email last week (seen left) in preparation for the Thanksgiving holiday with a few jokes. What I read was email marketing as its worst: a mix of all caps 'yelling', lack of clickable links and a lack of understanding for how powerful this medium is. Do I blame Bob? No, because he's a talent and even though he's a hustler in the best sense of the word, there is a reason people like Marley have assistants and agents.
Three suggestions:
1) Complete template overhaul: Make three sellable/clickable graphics at the base of the template and leave the middle for text, like this material. And really, how big does that header need to be? I feel like I'm looking at the email equivalent of the bangs of female rock stars (or Poison) in the 1980s or something. In other words, BIG.
2) Text cleanup: If Bob wants to go a bit unfiltered, that's fine and part of why this one-to-one communication is so effective. However, there's no excuse for random punctuation problems, misspellings and broken English.
3) Leave the subject lines alone: Honestly, that was the best part. 'Let's Talk Turkey!' wasn't great, but at least it wasn't 'November 2008 Newsletter' or 'From Bob Marley'.
Even though part of the shtick is a traditional Mainer, communication with your audience needs to be as crisp and tight as possible. They'll appreciate and so will critics like myself.
Josh Nason is the principal of NasonMedia, a network of blogs that cover sports, email marketing and personal growth. Connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking apps.