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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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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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