Enabler provide best practice advice and guidance on email top tips for B2B and B2C email marketing. Check out Enabler’s email campaign advice.

Email marketing: back to basics

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Email marketing traditionally has the highest ROI of any digital channel and is one of the most effective tactics to use within an integrated marketing mix.

In an era when existing and potential customers are accessible 24/7 via a smartphone, not optimising your email campaigns for mobile devices could mean you might be missing out on some great opportunities.

You might be surprised to hear that the average adult spends over 20 hours online per week – more than doubling in a decade.  As well as having on average three social media profiles to maintain, your potential customers are browsing online for almost everything. From grocery shopping to booking flights, streaming their favourite programmes or making bank transfers – your customers are doing anything and everything online – so having a strong digital presence is vital.  Although I’d suggest using an integrated marketing mix to target your customers using at least three channels, I’d like to focus on the benefits of one of those core channels: Email Marketing.

Email campaigns are not only designed to generate sales but also to inform, increase brand awareness, advocacy and trust. The most common forms of email marketing are newsletters, lead nurturing, paid email and so called ‘triggered’ email to mention just a few. All of these campaign formats come down to creating content that is of interest to your target audience.
Simple!  Or is it?  It all depends how well you know your target audience.

 

Before you press send: Set your goals

I can’t stress strongly enough the importance of setting campaign specific goals. This helps you to keep your campaign on track, gain meaningful analytics and gauge return on investment.
Before you start planning your email campaign, ask yourself: what do you want to achieve? You may want to drive traffic to your website or social media channels, or promote a product or service. Whatever your goal, setting targets helps you to measure engagement and ROI, draw conclusions, and implement any necessary changes to help improve future campaign performance.
Once you have set clear goals for the campaign, you can start planning content. Although it seems that content is king, there are still many companies out there who do not target their content effectively. There’s nothing more off-putting than wasting a customer’s time by offering them content of no interest to them. It’s also the quickest and most effective way of losing some great prospects by prompting them to press the ‘unsubscribe’ button.

 

Content: Be relevant and be informative

‘What’s relevant content?’  I hear you ask… Well, it depends on factors such as industry, data available, creativity or the abilities of your agency. There are many ways of creating great content.
For the fashion industry it could be all about seasonal trends, latest collaborations or ‘dress to impress’ tips. A company that operates within the steel industry could send their customers a useful guide to different steel grades, examining steel’s strength, parameters and the heat resistance of steel components for relevant industries.  Other ideas for relevant content could be recent changes in legislation that could affect your customers or advising customers about your new products and services.

The simple rule is to do some research on your target audience, via customer satisfaction surveys, seminars, social media monitoring and so on, so they can tell you what content they are likely to engage with.

 

Testing, testing…

Once the email content is finished and the campaign is ready to be sent, it’s time for testing. There are two ways of testing and I suggest you use both methods. The first one is to enter preview mode from the menu to get an overall idea of what the campaign will look like. The second and most accurate method is to send a test email to yourself and your colleagues. You should ask them to proofread it and give feedback on:

•    Subject line
•    Images/ design/ font
•    Links and call to action

When testing, inbox rendering should also be taken into account and that doesn’t mean just sending a test to your smartphone and email. Most customers don’t use the same device as you and as so the HTML will display differently on their device. It is a good idea to send a test to an email rendering service website that enables you to preview how it will display with different email providers such as Outlook, Android, iPhone etc.

Other aspects of email testing are dynamic and personalised content. It’s a good idea to do test sends to ensure all the merge fields like firstname display correctly when sent, and even better to preview test the different data your dynamic content is centred on, i.e. gender, industry etc, to see how the template responds and if it requires adjustment. Once you are satisfied everything looks great, all the links and CTA work, and everything renders correctly, you’re good to go and send your campaign!

 

Time to send

Timing is everything they say and your email campaign is no exception. Depending on your customer base, industry and the time of year, there will be certain times when your email campaign should be sent out in order to be most effective in terms of open rates and responsiveness. There’s numerous blogs out there, each giving you different days and times of when you ‘should’ send your campaign, but the best practice is to track your own campaign data.  Send customers your emails on different days of the week and different times of day, track when the open and click through rates are at their highest – your own data will tell you when’s the best time to send your campaign.

 

Bounce Backs or Unsubscribes?  What to do next…

So you’ve created the right content, chosen the right software and sent the email campaign. But you received an ‘undelivered’ message and your email bounces back. If this happens, common practice is to investigate why the email address is not valid and update it.  The ‘unsubscribed’ list should also be updated after each email campaign. Although it is a shame to see a customer opting out of email communications, it’s essential to update our customers’ preferences after each campaign in line with their request.

 

Tracking is vital

Your email marketing software will have a tracking tool built into it so you can work out what happened once you hit the send button.  As with any other marketing activity, tracking is crucial for measuring campaign success. The most relevant data to capture is delivery rate, open rate and click-through rate.  If you’ve got trackable links, then you should also be recording the traffic and leads your email campaigns have generated to really gauge their ROI effectiveness. Consequently, the more attention you pay to tracking your current campaigns and implementing changes, the greater the chance of future campaign success.

 

Don’t leave it with an email – Follow up

Follow up activities are crucial, especially for product-related, sales-orientated campaigns. Some organisations will gather the list of customers who opened and engaged with the email and follow it up with an additional piece of comms via email, a phone call, snail mail etc to discuss if the customer would like some more information or place an order.

 By contacting those customers who engaged with your initial campaign content, you can start to build relationships with your potential customers and generate new leads.

Moreover, following up enables you to put a voice to your brand that reinforces your campaign message, which should give you more trust with your customers, making them more likely to respond to any future emails you send them and therefore less likely to unsubscribe.

Using these simple tools, you’re sure to build targeted campaigns with content that’s engaging.

Email is just one string in the digital marketer’s bow, but it is probably one of the most vital in helping you build and maintain relationships with your customers and generate revenue.

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Optimising your email campaigns for mobile

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Email opens and click-through rates on mobile and tablets have been increasing consistently in recent years. We’re a generation of smart device users, as shown by the recent statistics of mobile users: 51.7% of all marketing emails are opened on mobile, with a click thru rate of 43.9%. With these statistics it’s imperative, now more than ever, to optimise email for mobile and tablet.

It’s also important to remember that results will be different based on the audience. For example, many B2B emails have lower open rates on mobile and tablet because their end users will be sitting at their desks during the work days and are more likely to open emails on desktop. This will, understandably, change the importance of responsive emails per company.

 

Responsive design email example

Research also shows that email is the best way to reach millennials  and that 80% of millennials sleep with their smartphones by their bedside – so if you’re not optimising email for mobile, you could be alienating key audiences. The main benefit of designing your emails responsively is improving the user journey for your customers. So how do you go about preparing for this?

 

Mobile-first design

This concept was first developed in 2009, to adapt for the increasing amount of users who were interacting with content on smaller devices than their desktop computer. It’s an approach focused around designing for smaller screens first and optimising that experience, then adding more features and content for bigger screens. There are pros and cons to this approach:

Pro #1: The disappointment factor – imagine you’ve spent your time designing a stunning email that does all sorts of fancy things… only to try scaling down for mobile and realising that all the tricks that worked so wonderfully on desktop, don’t translate into mobile. Disappointing. Mobile-first design eliminates this and ensures that your email is cohesive across all devices.

Con #1: Crushing creativity – the problem with mobile-first is that you immediately discard some of your great ideas, just because they won’t work on mobile. Isn’t it better to be as creative as possible for the people who will experience it, rather than limiting yourself?

Pro #2: Selective content – When designing for mobile-first, you have to whittle your content down to its most vital elements. Now you’ve selected the content you most want your users to see, when it comes to the desktop version, you get to figure out how to make it more exciting instead of facing the ‘what to cut’ dilemma.

Con #2: Demoralising – It can be really difficult to get into your design if you are completely restricted from the get-go. It can also be a different design experience, even for little things, like the difference between targeting your email for people to click on, or tap on.

 

As you can see, there are different positives and drawbacks to using mobile-first design, however even if you choose not to go down that route, you can still prepare in other ways:

Font considerations

Think about your font style and size. A key thing to remember when designing for mobile is that the minimum font size displayed on devices such as iPhones is 13 pixels. If you have any font sizes smaller than this in your desktop version, many mobile devices will upscale this and it could make your design look very strange. There is a way around this, which involves adding a small bit of CSS to your code which will override this occurring on the iPhone and keep your text at the font size you want.

 

To scroll or not to scroll?

Think about how far your users have to scroll. Scrolling on a touch-screen is much harder than with a mouse wheel. The best way to avoid unnecessary scrolling is to make sure you’re placing the information you most want users to see at the top of the email.

The other way you can keep your email shorter is to use the ‘hideonmobile’ CSS class, which can be used to hide extra spacing and even images. This will help you display the information your users need to see nearer the top of the email and keep the email relevant, without them losing interest before they’ve got to the good bit.

Where possible, use the tag ‘display:none;’ to hide extraneous elements in your mobile design. For example, social sharing links. These can often be really tricky for users to interact with on mobile (as clicking is easier than specific pixel tapping) even if they are a must- have on desktop.

Keep your single column layouts no wider than 600 pixels. It works the best for mobile devices as your copy is easier to read.
If you’re going to include things like social sharing links, or any buttons in general, try giving them a minimum area of 44 x 44 pixels. These are part of the guidelines Apple sets, and definitely worth adhering to. Fingers were not meant for tiny buttons on mobile.

 

Get creative with your images

Think about how you slice up your images. Is your entire image really something your mobile viewers need to see? You can get creative with how different parts of your images will display on mobile. For example, you may have a header which has text on the left and image on the right. You could slice the header in half and hide the right hand side on mobile. This would reduce the length of your email on mobile. Alternatively you may have a large image on desktop that you only need a part of in order to still get the same effect on mobile.

 

Consider every element

Make sure everything about your campaign works well on mobile. There’s no point sending a beautifully designed, mobile friendly email if the form/survey/landing page users are clicking through to isn’t also responsive. There’s nothing more frustrating as a user than clicking through to a teeny tiny form and having to do the awkward two finger zoom, and select the exact part of the form that you want to fill in, only to miss and end up with your name in the email field and your address as your first name.

A huge percentage of your audience now open their emails on mobile every day, so responsive email isn’t a ‘nice to have’ any more, it’s a must-have. Make sure you’re not missing out on one of the biggest trends email has seen in the last decade and make your emails responsive!

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Top tips for using rich media in your email marketing

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Email marketing must be engaging. While you can achieve this through great copywriting, you can also enhance your email campaigns with attention-grabbing and interactive visuals. This is worth doing – as long as you get it right.

Often, companies make the mistake of putting rich media content into their emails with very little idea about how it will display on different email clients. Each email client has its own quirks and it’s important to understand these before sending out emails that only half your list will be able to appreciate.

 

Luckily, we’re here to help! Here’s the low down on when and when not to use rich media content in your emails…

GIFS: What are they?

Otherwise known as ‘Graphics Interchange Format’, they’ve been around since the 80’s, but weren’t widely used in email until much later. GIF supports both animated and static images and have been used extensively in email campaigns due to their wide support across browsers and email clients.

Why would you use them?

For starters, animated GIFs add an instant element of delight to any campaign, which typically is not possible with static email designs. They give the user a sense of excitement and can be useful to inject humour and showcase products. One brand who does this really well is Buzzfeed. They have embraced the use of GIF in their emails, especially in recent years. I receive a weekly email about cats from them which always features a funny cat GIF – I open it every single week and usually end up clicking through to the site as a result.

Another example is Sprout Social, who used an animated GIF to show off their latest functionality and interaction with their redesigned iPhone app. West Elm also used a clever GIF to display a selection of lamps; they used each frame to display a lamp turning on and off, it was really eyecatching.

How do they work?

GIFs operate on a frame-by-frame basis. To make one, you need to provide all the frames of your animation. Each frame is its own bitmap image, this means that the file size can get very large, very quickly which will cause loading problems in many email clients. With GIFs, the best thing to do is to use as few frames as possible to convey your message.

How do you create one?

There are many online gif creators, but if you want a slightly more technical approach, you can edit your images further in a programme like Adobe Photoshop and then create your frames through their timeline option.

Are there any limitations?

With anything technical, there are going to be limitations. Some email clients do not support GIF – for example, Outlook will freeze a GIF on its first frame upon arrivals in your inbox. The way to get around this is to make sure the first frame of your GIF is one you’re happy for your clients to see, or you could use dynamic content and segment your data into what clients they are using. This way, you could send your fancy GIFs to everyone using an email client that supports them and send a different static GIF/JPG/PNG to everyone else who wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate your GIF.

Here’s a handy infographic to show you which email clients support which functionality.

Video
Hosting video in email is a tricky business because two of the main email clients (Gmail and Outlook) don’t support video playback. This isn’t a reason to avoid using it altogether, as long as you are prepared to segment your data accordingly. There are also a number of ways to get around this and still give your customer an interactive experience… without your emails breaking.

1. You can include an image from your video and put a play button over the top so it looks like a video player. When your users click on the image they will be taken to a landing page where the video will play for them. This creates the illusion of video within an email without actually facing the potential breaks. It will save you time as you don’t have to segment your data by email client and you can rest easy that all your users will enjoy your email. It could look something like this (below).

2. Use a GIF. This is my favourite work around for video. It involves taking multiple screenshots of the video you are going to link to, and setting them up frame by frame with a play button over the top. The GIF will then scroll through the different screen shots giving the effect of a video playing. Ideally you would set it to loop so the effect was continuous while your customer viewed the email. Ralph Lauren have done some excellent work with these which you can view here.

Is your content responsive friendly?

Another thing to keep in mind when creating emails with rich media is how it will respond on mobile as well as desktop. With the rise in people opening emails on their mobiles, mobile design is more important than ever. There are a number of things you can do to content to make sure your users get the best experience.

Some brands choose to hide some content on mobile and keep the message as short as possible to avoid users having to scroll down the email. This can allow users to get to the call to action faster and avoid wandering attention spans. Other brands choose to stack images so content and images that were next to each other appear one after the other, as if in a list. Others use shrinking down which can work really well with images containing large text that could not be stacked but resolution will suffer with smaller images on mobile and in many cases it is better to hide these. You can use a combination of all of these things within one email, determined by your CSS (cascading style sheet).

So, for your next campaign why not try some of these methods? It can vastly improve user experience and make your emails the emails your customers look forward to receiving.

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Email marketing: the integration cheat sheet

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Imagine the situation: you’re trying to come up with a campaign to send birthday emails to customers on your database. Rather than just sending an email that says ‘Happy Birthday!’ you want to give them something more – something to remember your brand by. This experience is common to email marketers and it doesn’t just apply to birthday campaigns. Essentially, we’re all asking the same question, ‘what will engage my audience’. Sometimes just writing a message in an email isn’t enough; you need something more to keep them keen. So, what are your options?

1. Games and competitions

The appetite for games is huge at the moment. Using this sort of viral content in your emails can really help increase everything from open rates, click thru rates and email interaction, to brand awareness and overall engagement. It’s also an excellent opportunity to enrich your data. I’ve seen a few companies really nail this concept recently.

The first was Watergate Bay Hotel who ran a winter-themed Christmas campaign over 24 days in December. It was a competition to win prizes by ‘shaking’ a snow globe. The email communication was clean and engaging – you knew exactly what it was when you opened, the call to action was clear and it emphasised the benefits to the customer. Additionally, they were very clever about using the correct social links to promote the game. Often I’ve seen brands throw a load of social media links at the bottom of an email, with no actual consideration of why people would share their email on Tumblr. But Watergate Bay have deliberately picked the social media icons their subscribers are most likely to use; Facebook and Twitter. They’ve also attempted to make the game viral by including a ‘forward to a friend’ option – which incidentally is exactly how I came across this game!

Once you clicked through the email to their website, the engagement continued. Firstly, they used the game as a data capture opportunity. With any form of integration, make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity for enriching your data. The Watergate Bay campaign is a great example of this because they set their data capture form to open before you can play the game. This means that not only will they get returning business, they’ll also have a really strong 24 days for data acquisition.

Another great aspect of their data capture was its simplicity. The fields required were the basic first name, last name, postcode and email, plus they asked you to create a password so you could log in in the future. It took under a minute to fill out and there was no way I was exiting the page before playing the game. One mistake I’ve seen a lot of brands make is trying to capture too much data at once. Two pages of mandatory fields might seem like a great idea – for you, because you get all the data. For your users, having to complete so many fields is unappealing and increases the drop off rate on the page.

The actual game was great for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s interactive – you’re shaking a digital snow globe, the snow actually moves and it makes a jingly noise. Very pleasing. Secondly, they only gave you three attempts a day to win. Part of my concern with this game was that people would play it once, find it time consuming and not come back to play again. But the limit on shakes prevented this and I went back every day, shaking that snow globe. The altering daily prizes also ensured ongoing interest, with something different to win every day. The prizes were relevant to both their target audience and the local area, so they were likely to appeal to their customers – another good way to maintain attention.

Lastly, even if you didn’t win, you were given a discount code for their online store at the end of the game. This is great value-add from the game as the customer feels they’ve won something even if they haven’t actually won the main prize, and hey… there’s always tomorrow to shake again! It’s also a great device to drive people from the game and into the online store in a seamless transition: ‘ok people you’ve seen the show, now into the gift shop…’

Since customers were interested enough in the prizes to give their data, the discount code will almost certainly make them feel like Watergate Bay values their time and is rewarding them for their attentions. This is a great two-way interaction.

2. Survey and re-group

With any email marketing campaign, it’s important to find out what your customers want and what they thought of your engagement with them. One type of integration you can use to do this is a survey tool. Sainsbury’s do this really well. Every few months I get an email which encourages me to fill out a survey and receive Nectar points. It’s heavily personalised; it tells me how many Nectar points I have left and what that equates to in real money. The email tells me how long the survey takes to fill out and that I’m guaranteed the Nectar points on completion. This works well for Sainsbury’s, who are offering something tangible in exchange for your time. But what if you’re a brand who doesn’t have the mystical wonder that is Nectar points?

Alternative methods are to encourage people to complete a survey using competitions, games or by phrasing the content incentive in such a way that makes your customers realise the value of providing you with feedback. I’ve seen a few brands use surveys as a tool to further capture data from subscribers. They do this by initially presenting a first page of a survey which asks for first name, last name and email address (which they probably already have) and then after this warm-up, they slyly ask for a few more bits of information, for example gender, age, or postcode. Clever brands.

3. Polls

One brand I’ve seen sends out weekly funny polls for their users to complete and then uses the information to create a blog post encouraging users onto their website. This is a win-win for them, as they have found a way to produce user generated content, plus keep their customers engaged with their brand. They could then go on to use this content in future campaigns and articles.

When to integrate

Now you have the tools to integrate, you need to consider when and why you would use them in a campaign. One of the main mistakes brands make is trying to put too many of these things into an email. Your campaign needs to have a focused call to action, or it won’t be clear how you want users to interact with your emails. Here’s a handy check list to take a look at before you integrate:

  • Make sure you’re clear about what you’re trying to achieve – once you know this, picking your methods and tools will be easy.

  • Have a focal point to your campaign. If it’s a survey you want completed, make sure the call to action points to it.

  • Don’t overcrowd the email – keep your message clean, clear and clever. Putting too much information in the email can put users off.

  • Make sure your integrated content is interesting – seems simple, but often gets forgotten.

  • Always capture more data where you can, but put a limit on so you don’t turn your customers off.

  • Use the data once you’ve collected it. Don’t let it sit in your system twiddling its thumbs.

  • Make sure the user experience is a good one – try the journey out yourself, from receiving the email, right the way through to the follow up email.

Happy integrating!

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Email marketing in the age of perpetual promotions

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Since email began, the retail industry has been constantly changing. Gone are the days when one had to physically enter a shop and interact with another human in order to receive a discount. Now all you need is internet access and a bank card. With this change, online shopping has become huge. According to the Financial Times, consumers in the UK are spending five times more online than offline. This makes ecommerce more of an opportunity than ever.

Along with this has come a change in the frequency of online promotional sales, making the way in which we communicate them to consumers especially important. When online sales made their first appearances, it was easy to make your email stand out among others because your brand was doing something that others weren’t, and the chances you’d both be running an email sale offer at the same time as a competitor was slim. Now, every brand is taking advantage of promoting their sales online, and this makes email marketing an even greater challenge for marketers.

The January sales are an especially important time to be promoting sales – everyone is broke from spending huge amounts around Christmas, so encouraging them to buy your products is a harder sell. Add to this the culture change (the fact that sales happen all year round) and you’ve got a marketing challenge on your hands. As a colleague of mine said: ‘DFS have had a sale on since I was born’.

So how can you adapt your emails to have maximum impact during the January sales period?

 

Keep to the point

Don’t throw everything you have on offer into the email. Focus on one thing you know will interest your customers. If you have data rich enough, segment your email, and make use of dynamic content to ensure you’re sending customers content that is relevant to them. If your data isn’t up to scratch, here are some work-arounds you can capitalise on.

The New Year has just arrived, which means resolutions, resolutions, resolutions. Focus on your products which will interest people who might have made resolutions to get healthy, do something new, save money, travel, be less stressed. TIME magazine made a useful list of the top 10 most commonly broken new year’s resolutions – a great insight into areas your customers may be focusing their attentions on in January.

One company that used this tactic really well was Pen Heaven (below), who capitalised on

the start of a new year by promoting diaries and planners. Who doesn’t need a new diary at the start of the year?! Their subject line, ‘25% off 2016 Diaries + Limited Stock Left on Seasonal Offers’ was clever for several reasons:

1. They clearly pushed the discount.
2. They made reference to the relevance of the New Year.
3. They mentioned what the product was to get customers interested.
4. They instilled a sense of urgency; suggesting the diaries were in short supply.
5. The email was clean, clear, aesthetically pleasing and offered a discount code.

 

 

Have a strategy

Don’t just send one email and then tick the ‘January Sales’ box on your ‘things-to-accomplish-in-January’ list. According to the Office for National Statistics, online sales in January 2015 increased by 12% compared with January 2014. January Sales are a whole month of opportunity, and not a month to miss out on.

Sainsburys

One company who had a brilliant strategy this year were Sainsbury’s. Their subject line was ‘Anna, up to £58 off to kick-start your New Year’. They also had a great pre-header; ‘Healthy savings for a happier New Year’. By doing this, they specified the discount available, made reference to the event and also triggered the ‘new year-new me’ health response in their customers. A powerful trio, carefully constructed to gain their target’s attention. Within the email, they also had a clever double offer: ‘£18 off your first shop’ and ‘£10 off your next four orders’. This is really smart of them – not only are they capitalising on the January Sales period but they’re also improving customer retention while they do it.

Sainsbury’s went a step further by making the process easier for their customers (right). The email contained a section which actually looked like the sort of voucher you’d print off and use in store. They clearly outlined the steps for voucher redemption and gave a clear deadline. Another gem from this email was the part just under the voucher which encouraged people to sign up to more Sainsbury’s communications using the incentive of helpful voucher reminder emails.

This is a great strategy; people have busy lives and don’t always remember they have a voucher sitting in an old email somewhere in their inbox. Sainsbury’s are making sure that those customers are continuing to shop with them and not another provider. This is exceptionally smart, as internet shoppers tend to be more loyal than in-store buyers – take Tesco as an example, where online shoppers spend 46% of their total grocery budget with the retailer while the average offline Tesco shopper spends only 29%.

 

 

Have an attention grabbing subject line

With the amount of emails flooding into people’s inboxes it’s imperative that yours stands out. A few things you can focus on are:

How much is the discount you’re offering?
There is a science behind the wording used to communicate the discount in your subject line. If you’re offering anything over a £100 discount, use a pound sign – if you’re offering anything below, use a percentage. For example, if you’ve got a pair of trousers and you’re offering 30% off, it sounds a lot better to say 30% off than it does to say £4 off. Equally, if you’re selling a high price item, saying £1,000 off sounds a lot better than 10% off.

Have you made what’s on sale obvious?
Getting people to open your email can be tricky, make sure whatever you’re putting in your subject line is going to interest them enough to open the email. A great way to do this is to use your data – putting a piece of dynamic content into your subject line is every bit as useful as in the email itself. If Joe likes suits and Sunil likes t-shirts, there’s no point putting an offer for t-shirts into both their subject lines. Dynamic fields can help you with this problem. Send Joe a subject line with suits, Sunil one with t-shirts and everyone is happy.

Be a little quirky
There’s nothing wrong with doing something different. One really fun subject line I’ve seen this January was from Very; ‘It’s SALE time… Ready, Set, SHOP!’ This grabbed my eye and I even opened the email. Why not try something of your own?

Make it fun
This should go for any email you send but applies to a greater extent during busy sales periods. Whether it’s an eye-catching gif, a game or a super quirky way to present your content within the email, make sure it’s engaging and entertaining. One brand that did something slightly different with their campaign was Lowbrow Customs (right) who used the following subject line:

Save up to 80% with our year end 🔥 Sale!! Bring it on 2016! 🎉

While those emoticons will not show up on all email clients (we can just hope they segmented their data based on email client before sending) they did get my attention and it added something different to their email that not many other companies used. I particularly enjoyed that they used the fire emoticon to replace the word fire. It’s the little things in life!

Good luck with the rest of your January Sales emails campaigns – we’ll see you soon!

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The power of dynamic content in email marketing

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Email is constantly evolving. As email marketers, part of the fun of what we do is exploring new ways to engage audiences with email. It can also be a struggle at times. Email inboxes are increasingly crowded with promotional emails as more and more companies use email to communicate.

To help the end user, organisations like Google have customised their inbox layouts to include the segregation of promotional emails from the primary inbox, social media emails and general updates. These updates make it trickier for your emails to get noticed in subscriber’s inboxes, so it’s important to make your campaign attention-grabbing. One of the best methods we’ve seen over the years is by introducing dynamic content into email campaigns.

Dynamic content is essentially using what you know about your customers to provide them with content that is relevant to them. This can be anything from knowing the gender of your users and using the information to show them female/male specific products, to using birthday information to create a personalised birthday message for them each year. This technique allows you to send highly targeted information to your subscribers, and the best part is you can do it all through one email.

What are the benefits?

Higher levels of engagement
It might seem simple, but it also makes a lot of sense. Why would subscribers be interested in your campaign if it’s not relevant to them? To engage people, you need to provide content they find useful or enjoyable (or hopefully both!).

Saves time
Before dynamic content existed, companies would spend unbelievable amounts of time creating separate emails for the same campaign. It was the only way to do it if you wanted to try and personalise. Now, the only bit which takes any time is the creation of the main email and then positioning your content in a dynamic setting.

Shorter emails
This might seem like an odd one but many users don’t actually scroll all the way down to the end of an email; they scan for a couple of seconds and if they don’t find what they want they close the email. Goodbye to your click thru rates. Dynamic content enables emails to be shorter as you’re not trying to squeeze everything into one email in the hope that everyone on your database will find something interesting.

It’s technically interesting!
One for the front-end nerds out there. Dynamic coding is pretty fun (this is system dependent, of course). We’re very lucky with Enabler because it makes coding really easy to do. Enabler, like some other systems, will allow you to view the email in situ as anyone in your database would. This means no messy test emails, and no time wasting!

How can you get started?

The number one thing you need for dynamic content to work is information about your subscribers. There are lots of types of data you can use to make it work and you can even be inspired by your data:

Behavioural data – what have your users done before? What have they bought or read? When they were last on your website, what caught their eye? This data is incredibly useful when planning your campaigns. It can allow you to distinguish marketing to your leads and to your existing customers. It can influence what call to actions you use, where you use them, and other content placement decisions. It can also be used to influence pre-emptive emails based on previously purchased content.Groupon

Transactional data – what did your customers spend their money on? How often do they do this? Are they abandoning their baskets at checkout? Transactional data gives you incredible insight into the buying potential of your customers. Using this information, you could send reminder emails to customers who have left products in their baskets, remind customers of special offers based on content they’ve viewed, and provide buying recommendation emails based on previous purchases.

Demographic data – what gender or age are your subscribers? Where are they based? Knowing a customer’s gender can be really useful for something like fashion based emails, knowing their location can help with events promotions or deals in shops local to them. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is Groupon:

They send out daily emails which are targeted by region. All the offers in their emails actually contain deals which are near to the post code I provided them with, and the copy reflects this. Check out this ‘Afternoon tea for two’ offer (right). It tells me how far from me it is, what the discount is, mentions the word Londoners and it really pushes the personalisation of the email in the top banner.

If you want to take all of this a step further, once you have completed your dynamic campaign you can also do some reporting on the campaign to find out what worked, then tailor your next campaign based on this information. Remember, with all of these options, testing is key.

The final checklist for dynamic content success

1. Accurate data – there’s no point trying without this. Why use information about your database if it’s not correct?

2. An Email Service Provider that supports dynamic content (if you want more information about Enabler, get in touch)

3. Knowledge of your customer database – what sort of targeting do you think will work on your list? For fashion brands, the key one is gender, for insurance we’re looking at regions and preference based sending, but what will work for your brand?

4. Testing – keep trying new things, A/B test to your hearts content. Never stop testing your email campaigns!

In today’s market, there is no better way to improve results of your campaigns than through dynamic content. Dynamic content is to the email marketing world what Dumbledore is to the wizarding world. Pure brilliance.

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Black Friday: email marketing round-up

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Special occasions are a fantastic opportunity for keeping your customers engaged. They’re one of the most important times to ensure you have a strong online presence and, although I might be biased, what better way to do that than with email?

The latest opportunity to tap into a theme is Black Friday. Somewhat controversial since Black Friday is traditionally an American concept, tied in to Thanksgiving in the same way we have Boxing Day.

Black Friday has been embraced by UK retailers in recent years and merges with Cyber Monday to offer brands a chance to entice customers with special deals and discounts – read more about this here.

This year, it looks like every brand under the sun has taken the initiative and come up with their own way to engage customers on what is now one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. As Enabler’s in-house email expert, I’ve collated some of the top tips to take away from this year’s Black Friday email marketing.

 

Key to email marketing on this busy day, is of course how to stand out from the competition. Customer’s inboxes are flooded all weekend with deals, so how do you make yours effective?

1.    Try something different

Some companies have realised that it’s not enough to just send an email with an offer in the subject line. VoucherCodes decided to go down the route of emoticons in their emails.

‘★ Dom’s Black Friday Special ★ John Lewis | Argos | Amazon | Selfridges | Debenhams’

While this looked fantastic on my Hotmail account, sadly these pretty stars did not grab my attention in a positive way on Gmail as they were blocked. They did make a clever move by naming some big brands, in the hope of encouraging users to open the email to find out what the offers are.

Tastecard also tried something different – their subject line was:

‘BLACK FRIDAY is here’. 

The risk with this is that your email might be flagged as shady and end up trapped in your customers’ spam filters.

 

2.    Target your emails

This should be something you’re doing anyway but it’s especially important on Black Friday. Why would a customer open an email if it doesn’t contain offers for products they’re interested in? Make sure the offers in your email are customer specific. If they’ve bought tech products before, you know they might be interested in more tech products so don’t send them gardening supplies.

 

3.    Personalise your subject line

eBay had a great personalised subject line on Black Friday.

‘Gregory, stop everything! Black Friday deals you can’t resist.’

Who wouldn’t open that?! It’s incredibly eye catching, and really convinces you to open the email. eBay had also combined tactic two and three of this list, as the content in their email was targeted based on what Gregory had left in his basket recently and previous purchases. Great job eBay!

 

4.    Cross sell

Use a time you know your customers are likely to interact with your emails to cross sell a product. Amazon did this brilliantly this year with this subject line:

‘Black Friday is here: Up to 50% off, plus £10 off for new Prime Now customers’. 

This is very clever wording as it makes you interested in the Black Friday offer as well as curious about what Prime Now is. They have left enough ambiguity about the product, while enticing customers with money off their purchase.

 

5.    Remember the loyal folk

It’s not all about trying to get first time buyers to buy. Showing a bit of love for your existing frequent-buyers can also help to boost your Black Friday sales. Debenhams nailed it this year. Their subject line was:

‘EXTRA 10% OFF for Cardholders this Black Friday’

As an existing card holder, I’d have been all over that. Giving existing customers a boost during the busy times can remind them that you care and help develop the relationship between your customer and your brand. It might even encourage them to buy more out of the busy periods.

 

6.    Get clever with your language

Everyone wants to feel like they’re receiving something tailored to them. This goes beyond sending specific content and instead focuses on how you make your customer feel from the minute your email appears in their inbox. A way to achieve this, even if you don’t have the greatest data in the world, is through the language you use. One example of a brand that did this beautifully this year was LoveLula, with the subject line:

Let’s get this Black Friday week started | See inside for your code!

As someone who received this email, my initial thoughts were ‘MY CODE!’ Sure, the code inside might be a generic code generated for anyone to use within the time frame – but that doesn’t actually matter. What does matter is your customer’s reaction to that wording. It makes it sound like a personally generated offer just for them… thus making them more likely to interact with your email and – more importantly – your discount code!

 

7.    Give it some urgency

For times where your offer is only on for a short period of time, your aim is to convert the highest amount of your click throughs to purchases. One way to do this is by instilling a sense of urgency in your customers. Reminding them how little time they have left to secure items at a cheaper price is a fantastic way of doing this. Several brands picked up on this idea on Black Friday. The first was Photobox, whose subject line was:

‘Black Friday Deals – 1 day only!’

This subject line is to the point, and instils a sense of urgency to the customer.

Second was Great Little Trading Co, who used the subject line:

‘Flash Sale TODAY: up to 30% off‏’. 

This subject line definitely promotes urgency. What’s interesting about this one is that there’s no mention of Black Friday at all. This could be a tactical move on the company’s part. Are they acknowledging that the UK doesn’t actually have a Black Friday and sticking to their guns, yet tapping in to the publicity by having a sale too? Or are they attempting to differentiate themselves from all the other brands emailing by using different wording, and purposefully omitting the name of the sale? Either way, it creates standout.

Overall, brands certainly seemed to have put some thought into their Black Friday emails. Much of the content seemed relevant, on point and useful to their customers. With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, make sure you apply the same rules to your campaigns, and keep your customers engaged with fun, relevant, targeted content. Be clever with your data and Santa will put you on his nice list!

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