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.
A couple of weeks ago, before I flew to the States and entered into a turkey-induced coma, I shared with you some thoughts on five ways email marketing is thriving in a “mocial” world. Well, as we all well know “thriving” doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges or effort. So, in that vein, here’s a look at five key challenges email marketing faces to stay relevant in a world intertwined with mobile, social and local marketing.
1. Focus on Deepening Relationships. The most savvy email marketers are adopting the long-held belief that email marketing is best suited as a relationship medium. Email programmes today are about adding more depth to customer relationships and expanding connections that already exist with the brand. Use social media to create buzz and expand brand awareness. Use email to carry that first interest through the customer life cycle.
2. Design and Test for Multiple Devices. Email marketers face a design and testing conundrum with a myriad of new devices on the market. In fact, by the close of 2011, more than forty new tablet devices will have been introduced to the global market. Email marketers need to make sure their messages are not only readable across of these different platforms and devices, but optimised for that experience.
3. Trigger Messages Based on Behaviour. Focusing on triggered and transactional communications allows email marketing to deliver an experience that can never be replicated in social media. Real-time, behaviour-based communications triggered by a purchase, product shipment, event registration, etc. allow email marketers to connect with consumers with relevant information times precisely to the consumers interests.
4. Integrate Well with Mobile and Social. In order for email to thrive in this new world, it cannot live in isolation. Integration with social media for opt-ins is a must. And, design and optimisation for mobile devices is also critical.
5. Concise Messages and Focused Design is Key. Each month it becomes less likely that your email message is being read on a PC with a large, bright 19” display. Not only because Apple’s market share is growing along with monitor sizes – but because consumers and prospects are increasingly using mobile devices to triage and manage their inbox on the move. The content, layout, and design of email messages needs to adapt to be more scannable, actionable, and designed for a touch experience.
The beauty of email marketing is that it never stagnates. Ever. The technology, practices and content strategy behind winning email marketing programmes is continuously evolving, and so long as it does, I believe email marketing has a bright and productive place in the marketing mix. For now, we have a lot of work ahead of us to adapt our programmes to thrive in this new, Mocial world. Let’s get started.
If we open an email it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re engaging with the message or the brand. That’s why it takes more than open and click rates to measure subscriber engagement, as Dr David Chaffey points out.
As the year draws to a close, James Bunting does a spot of crystal ball gazing for us email marketers, and it seems the future’s bright.
Email is still the core communication for ASOS. Back in January, I found its email designs lacking, with key messages hidden when images were blocked. ASOS has since totally revamped its designs and is now making the most of all that email has to offer. That’s why it’s this issue’s ‘Campaigns we like’.
But before we say goodbye to 2011, come join David Chaffey and myself at Fusion Marketing Experience where we will be sharing insights and giving master classes on how to improve your marketing efficiency and the all-important ROI.
Kath Pay, editor, Infobox
Co-Founder, Plan to Engage
Like to receive Infobox in your inbox? Then subscribe here
In 2011 a study on how consumers interact with brands via email and social media was commissioned, which reminded me of the importance of digital marketers integrating their marketing channels effectively.
Some key statistics were uncovered by the study, which marketers across Europe can capitalise on to interact and engage with their consumers within their preferred method of communication. Interestingly, of the European countries sampled, (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK), it was the UK that had the highest number of respondents ‘liking’ brands’ Facebook pages with 33%. In total a third of Facebook and Twitter users in the UK ‘like’ brands – more than double the number in the other European countries. In other countries less than 16% of users were signed up as ‘fans’. This highlighted the different levels of engagement with social media across Europe.
Email marketing was found to be the most popular digital channel with an average of 83% of respondents being subscribed to receive newsletters. Respondents from Germany, France and The Netherlands were the most likely to be reachable only via email, whereas in Spain, Italy and the UK, integrated communications, including social media, were the preferred method of communicating with brands. Across all respondents 95% said they check their emails at least once a day and 75% said they use email to receive social network notifications.
For me, the most important issue that marketers need to understand is why people are behaving a certain way via social networks and email, and effectively integrate the two channels to maximise ROI, rather than treating them as separate entities. Only 18% of all consumers said they only use email with the majority preferring to use a combination of channels. The study uncovered that there is currently a large gap between what consumers want and what marketers are delivering.
Due to the extensive amount of information gathered, this infographic has been produced to display all of the information and summarise the key takeaways.
In light of these statistics, are you tailoring your strategy to ensure you are occupying the right channels or driving your consumers to your desired location from the networks they favour?
The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub has been reviewing the current email marketing best practices document over the past few months, and the publication of a revised version is imminent.
One of the things that the review process has identified is a need for more detailed guidance in certain key areas of the email marketing customer life cycle. For this reason, a number of supporting white papers have been produced, which can be found in the “Toolkit” section of the DMA’s website (www.dma.org.uk/toolkit), where they are available for download free to Members.
Here’s a quick summary of what has been produced to date:
Deliverability: Aimed at email program owners who have realised that their broadcasts are experiencing delivery problems, and are trying to identify why this may be the case. Looking at key factors such as sender reputation, spam filtering, blacklist operators, the document provides common-sense guidance on how to deal with them, including 10 easy-to-follow steps to improve your email deliverability.
Creative: Good creative is still an important determinant of a successful email campaign, and is sometimes the only connection a subscriber has with your brand. This document demonstrates that email creative is not a dark art requiring witchcraft and technical know-how! Rather, in non-technical language, it provides some easy-to-implement recommendations that will quickly optimise the performance of your email campaigns.
Data Analysis & Segmentation: Sets out a simple process to help email marketers start segmenting their data, and analysing their results. It defines five key areas to focus on, including: setting objectives; finding the right data; choosing the right segments; different segmentation models, and; effective use of segmentation. It also examines the best methods and approaches to implementing segmentation, as well as how best to interpret the results.
Split Testing: Provides email marketers with the basic capabilities that they will need to run split-testing activity. It looks firstly at the fundamentals that need to be in place to run a split testing program, and then examines ten prime opportunities where split testing can be introduced into any email marketing program to identify the optimal approach to maximise campaign response rates.
Triggered Campaigns: Delivering timely and relevant email messages, using trigger-based email marketing, plays an important part of email best practice. By analysing subscriber behaviour and identifying meaningful changes and/or events, organisations can communicate with their customers at a point when they are most likely to be receptive. This strengthens customer relationships by making them feel valued, and it is not unusual for trigger-based emails to attract high open rates as a result.
In addition to the documents that have been described above, there are also three new white papers whose publication is imminent:
- Using 3rd Party Data For List Rental & Lead Generation
- A Layman’s Guide to Email Marketing Law
- Email Lifecycle Marketing
And there are a further two which are scheduled for arrival during Q1 of the New Year:
- Organic List Growth
- Measurement & Reporting
The production of these documents is a collaborative process and the Email Marketing Council, as the representative body of the much larger interest group, is constantly feeding in new ideas about key issues which email marketers would like to have expert guidelines for. Hopefully, the documents described in this article are servicing this need, but it would be great to have direct feedback on whether they are useful, and what the email marketing community would like to see produced next. If you have any feedback for us, then drop a line to email@dma.org.uk , or online via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
Guy Hanson Chairs the The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub. He is Director, Response Consulting for Return Path.
If you have read or listened to any commentary on email marketing in the past two years, you have most certainly witnessed some version of the now-popular script I call, “In Defence of Email Marketing”. The decrees from on high have repetitively predicted the imminent decline, or worse yet, the eventual death of email marketing in the growing presence of social media, mobile marketing, and other emergent channels. But, despite that commentary, month on month, year on year, our experiences defy those decrees and largely prove that email marketing is not only alive and well – but thriving!
In fact, I would argue that social media in particular has done more good for email marketing than any other technological advancement in the past decade. And the proliferation of smartphones is creating another positive change for our beloved medium. We have labelled this new world “Mocial” marketing (a bit silly but also a bit catchy, right?!?). It represents the intersection of Email with Mobile, Social and Local marketing channels—all working together to increase the impact of the other.
So the key for email marketers lies not in preparing a proper funeral for our channel, but instead, in learning how make our programmes thrive in this new environment.
5 Ways Email Marketing is Thriving in a “Mocial” World:
- Email is More Viral than Ever. With new integrations between email vendors and social media platforms, email marketing is now more viral than ever with offers and content that can easily be shared across any number of social networks. And better yet, in many email systems sharing and downstream viral activity can be measured and attributed back to the original recipient – helping marketers identify what social networks are most impactful and who in their database is their most ardent brand evangelist.
- Mobile is Creating an Always-On Connection. Smarthphones and tablets provide an always-on connection to consumers and prospects. Email is consumed at a faster pace than ever with consumers and business decision makers reading email on the go, connected and not, at all hours of the day, from all corners of the globe. Gyro HSR calls this the At Work State of Mind, and I think we will all agree that email and our work lives are with us for more hours each day than ever before in our lives.
- Triggered Email Creates Deeper Relevance and Real-Time Connections. Triggered emails and real-time alerts can be delivered with local offers triggered from check-ins and other location-based services – tying email marketing seamlessly into the world of location-based and on-premise marketing. The timeliness and the relevance of these triggered communications is higher than that of outbound programmes, and their triggered nature takes the guesswork out of when an email message should be sent and what content would be most valuable – the consumers behaviour is often telling you exactly what to send and when.
- Social and Mobile are Fuelling List Growth. Quicker email list growth can be achieved by using opt-in forms on Facebook company pages and by promoting newsletter options across various social channels. Email has always been a relatively poor (and often invasive) acquisition channel. By leverage social media and fan pages, marketers can now create cross-channel connections that allow social media fans and followers to more deeply connect with the brand through email opt-in.
- The Online and Offline Worlds are Colliding. On-the-go opt-ins are now possible with mobile apps, QR codes and text-to-opt-in campaigns. These new technologies allow consumers to opt-in to programmes and email communications from a variety of locations: from mobile applications on the handset to opt-in campaigns on billboards and bus stops. With Internet-connected mobile devices, consumers are now only a text or scan away from opting-in to email communications and connecting with your brand – turning historically brief advertising impressions into long-lasting online relationships.
I’ve been hearing the phrase email cadence a lot lately and its sometimes been confused with frequency. So let’s look at how frequency and cadence differ and how to set them.
Ring-ring
If you’ve not heard a traditional UK phone ring it sounds like this
That’s a rhythmic pattern of 0.4s ring, 0.2s silence, 0.4s ring, 2s silence, which then repeats.
The cadence is the rhythmic repeating pattern and the frequency is how often it repeats. In this case the frequency is once every 3 seconds.
What does this mean in terms of email marketing?
Often there are several independent streams of email activity running concurrently and these different streams beat together to form the cadence.
Take a scenario of an offers email being sent every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a newsletter email on the second Thursday in the month and a tips email every Tuesday, then the individual frequencies are monthly for the newsletter and weekly for the tips. The timeline for all activity is shown below (offers in blue, tips in red and newsletter green bars).
The same pattern of emails or cadence is repeated every four weeks, so the overall frequency is every four weeks.
If you have automated sequences of triggered emails for welcome, post purchase, abandoned basket and so on then these are overlaid too.
Setting a contact policy
When setting your contact policy for cadence and frequency think about:
- Setting a minimum time between emails.
- Setting a maximum time between emails.
- Prioritisation or suppressing scheduled sends during triggered sequences.
- Set many emails on average per month are received per customer.
Having a contact policy like this also means that you can set a clear expectation at time of signup, which will reduce spam complaints and improve deliverability. Daily emails need not be an issue, if that is the expectation.
Make it a user preference?
Should you offer individualised contact policies as a user preference? I don’t believe it always makes sense and this will be the topic of my next post.
Acknowledgements: My thanks to @jvanrijn as it was my recent conversation with Jordie that persuaded me there was value in writing this article.
Deliverability remains one of the most discussed challenges in the field of email marketing, so I think it rightly deserves its place as the most written about and talked about area of the business for beginners and experts alike. As inboxes evolve and their sophistication continues to increase, new approaches to email marketing programmes are needed to ensure that legitimate opt-in email is not only received – but anticipated.
The Evolution of Email Deliverability:
1. The Dark Ages of Email Marketing. In the early days of email deliverability was a free-for-all. Email messages from personal contacts, brands and spammers flowed freely to inboxes.
2. The Vigilante Years. Soon thereafter blacklists were formed to keep a record of notoriously bad senders, and those lists which are still in use today are often a form of self-policing by the Internet community.
3. Reputation 1.0. The next evolution in deliverability was based on reputation – more specifically IP address reputation. ISPs maintain a list of abuse complaints, hard bounces and other unsavoury characteristics of sloppy senders to penalise those individuals and companies whose practices prompt cries of help from recipients.
4. The Intelligent Inbox. With a few hops, skips and jumps in between we currently find ourselves in a world where meeting those previous bare minimum requirements may get your message into the inbox, but it will likely not get your message viewed, read, or acted upon. In this world:
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a. Inboxes are being prioritised intelligently to separate bulk email from more personal, bi-directional interactions. (See Gmail Priority Inbox)
b. Recipient behaviour and interaction with messages are helping inbox providers determine message placement and overall delivery.
c. New tools in today’s inbox make purging messages and banishing non-relevant senders and brands to the Junk box one-click easy. (See Hotmail Sweep)
3 tips can help improve your deliverability in the world of the intelligent inbox:
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1. Acknowledge that engagement is the key to the kingdom. ISPs and inbox providers often vary in the approach they take to determine message delivery, but nearly all are beginning to focus on one consistent measure of whether a sender is reputable or not – and that is ENGAGEMENT. In the world of the intelligent inbox, consumer engagement with your email marketing messages is critical to continued email deliverability. Recipient opens, clicks and forwards are becoming as much a predictor of relevance and authenticity as unsubscribes and complaints are to abuse.
Focus on creating messages that drive engagement and activity and you’ll be well on your way to improved deliverability.
2. Meticulously monitor your online reputation. Spammers burn through IP addresses as they plague consumers. And whilst that practice of provisioning a new IP address and opening the floodgates used to fool the system – it can no longer. Reputation is a hard-earned and constantly-monitored reflection of your email marketing habits. And, increasingly, it is being tied not just to IP address but to your domain and the infrastructure through which you send your messages. Monitor your reputation relentlessly; Have your email provider prepare regular reports for you to help you monitor the reputation of your IPs and sending domains; Or, use third-party services to assist. Most importantly, respond quickly to any fluctuations in your online reputation.
Your online reputation is as important as your credit score. Monitor it continuously and respond to any fluctuations promptly.
3. Authentication must be at the core of your efforts. Sounds geeky, but it is a foundational element of deliverability. Either your company or your email service provider should have your sending domains properly configured for a range of authentication services currently in use, including: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID, DomainKeys and DKIM.
Authentication technologies are similar to your passport or biometric scans – they help prove to ISPs that your company and your email messages are who they say they are. Do yourself a favour today and ask your technical team or your email service provider to verify which authentication schemes you are currently provisioned for. And, if any of the four boxes above are left unchecked, take quick action to get that authentication in place.
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