Enabler provide best practice advice around email optimisation within your email marketing templates and B2B and B2C email marketing communications.

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Top tips for an irresistible subject line

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Inboxes around the world are bombarded by around 205 billion emails every day, so a strong subject line will make or break your email’s chances of being noticed, let alone opened. Discover how an irresistible subject line can help command the attention of your recipient and maximise your chance for engagement.

Write for mobile – short and sweet

On average, over 54%* of emails are opened on a mobile device, and a smaller screen means less space to display your subject line, which puts it in danger of being cut short. To avoid this, always ensure your subject line is no longer than 50 characters. This gives you approximately eight words to play with, which should be plenty to get your key info across, and grab the attention of your recipient’s interest.

 

Let’s get personal… Use their name

Okay, so this isn’t strictly a subject line tip, but it will certainly help improve your open rates. People are more likely to open an email sent from another person than from a company, so put their name in your message and get people curious about what you’ve sent them.
See our previous blog post dedicated to personalisation to find out more.

 

Make the most of the preview text

Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) allow you to edit the preview text that displays next to your subject line, and many recipients use this text as a quick screening tool to decide whether or not they want to open your email. If you begin your email with some interesting facts or an intriguing premise, you could mirror this in the preview text to hook the reader into opening the email. Alternatively, you could do more exciting things with your preview text, such as:

  1. Ask a question in your subject line and answer it in the preview text, e.g. “How Will Your Customers Find Your Website?” or “We’ll let you in on our secret tips…”

  2. Elaborate on the subject line, e.g. “Holiday Deals from £99” or “Go to Spain, Italy or Greece for a Bargain Price.”

  3. Give an incentive to open the email, e.g. “Valentine’s Day Sale” or “Up to 80% off Candles and Scents”

 

Make the recipient feel special

If you haven’t the data, never fear – you don’t just have to rely on the recipient’ name to make your emails stand out with personalisation. Emphasising “you” within your subject lines is a proven way to attract the attention of the reader, with phrases like “Exclusively for You” and “Your Special Selection” to give your subject lines the feel of a personalised message rather than a generic sales email. Done right, your recipient should feel appreciated as a customer and should spark enough intrigue to make them more likely to open the email to find out what you’ve chosen for them.

 

Be like-minded… Help readers to identify with your emails

People like to self-identify and belong to a group – that’s why all of those Buzzfeed quizzes about your favourite Game of Thrones character, or questionnaires about which Hogwarts House you are most likely to get Sorted into are so popular and effective at driving engagement. By segmenting your audience data into relevant categories, you can start identifying different demographics and audience interests that will help you shape your email copy and subject lines. For example, you could target your 18 – 22 year olds at university with “The Broke Student Guide to a Luxury Holiday.”

 

Inject some humour

If you make someone chuckle with your subject line, they are much more inclined to open your email to see what other giggles are in store. A classic pun is often a good choice, or you could take your recipient totally by surprise like Groupon did: “Best of Groupon: The Deals That Make Us Proud (Unlike Our Nephew, Steve)” Cheeky old Groupon did break the 50-characters-maximum rule here, but hats off to them for the wit!

 

Drive action by creating a sense of urgency

People check their email while on the go, and often see a message they intend to come back to, yet promptly forget about it. Don’t let this happen to your emails. By using targeted verbs (action words) in your subject line, you can help drive the recipient to do what you want them to do.  By instilling a sense of urgency, they are more likely to open your email as soon as they see it. Good examples could be “Go On, Treat Yourself”, or “Blink And You Might Miss Out…”

 

Use reverse psychology

‘Trick’ people into opening your email by setting them a challenge, such as “Bet You Didn’t Know This About…” or simply by telling them not to, like Manicube did: “Don’t Open This Email.”  Human nature means that most people will see this and be curious enough to have a nose – just make sure your content is actually worth the trickery, and maintain consistency between the subject line message and your email content so readers don’t actually feel tricked. One of the simplest (but rather unimaginative ways) of linking the subject line and email copy is by saying “Now that we’ve got your attention…” We won’t judge if you want to use it!

 

Incentives drive opens

If all else fails, offer an incentive in your subject line to encourage people to open your email. This might be the promise of a product sample, discount offer, prize draw, mystery surprise or anything else you can offer to get people to open your email (short of blackmail. Don’t do that.) Just try and avoid features which can trigger the dreaded spam filters – words like “Free,” “Click,” “Sale,” writing in ALL CAPITALS, and excessive punctuation “!!! <3”
See our blog on avoiding spam filters for more useful tips on this.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas to run away with. If you fancy a few of them but aren’t sure which would suit your business, try several different subject lines and perform a split-test to find the one that performs best.

If you’ve got a subject line in mind but you’re worried about potentially triggering spam filters, there are some free testing tools online that will give your subject line a score basenabled on how many spam-like elements it has. Subjectline.com is a useful one we would recommend.

If your mind insists on going blank whenever you look at the box for your subject line, give an automatic subject line generator a go. This one is really handy – just pop in your keywords, and it will generate loads of potential subject lines for you to choose from or tweak.

However you decide to formulate your subject line, a key thing to remember is that the tone and language should suit both your audience and the organisation you work for. . If it sounds drastically different from your usual brand voice, the effect will be jarring and strange; you don’t want people to think you’ve been hacked or have started sending spam.  If you’d like to start reaching out to your customers differently, consider it as part of a broader branding shift.

*According to report by Litmus in their 2017 State of Email Report.
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Does one size really fit all?

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In 2016 email marketing has become greater than ever before, and with such high volumes being sent it means it is now more difficult for your emails to reach its final destination – top of your recipient’s inbox.  Although there are some businesses that still align their digital marketing strategy with a ‘one size fits all’ notion, luckily most of our clients at Enabler know that when it comes to successful delivery and making sure your emails stand out from the inbox crowd, their email campaigns need to be composed differently.

We’ll show you what to pay attention to when preparing your email campaigns to ensure that you connect with your audiences, composing optimised content that’s engaging, relevant and looks great.

 

Are you talking to me?

In email marketing, having the right tone of voice to suit your target audience is crucial to a successful campaign.  There are varying factors you need to take into account when it comes to what tone to use, which will depend on things like gender, industry, job-role, subject matter etc.  If the email campaign is designed to be sent to a decision maker within the engineering industry, for example, they would probably respond better to a factual, technically focused email that’s straight to the point.  However, it’s a totally different ball game if you’re in the food industry where your email communications can’t always be direct product promotions. You need to keep your audience regularly engaged with different content, so thinking-outside-the-box provides a welcome distraction to just pushing your product, otherwise your audience will just switch off.

You also need to carefully think about the vocabulary that you use.  You need to know your audience and understand the sort of words they are more likely to connect with and respond to.  Don’t get too clever – using big sophisticated words might look good on an essay, but in an email it can make some people stop reading, especially if your audience is unsure of what the word means.

Innocent Drinks illustrate perfectly how to keep customers intrigued with their Friday morning email newsletter. In addition to sneaking in product-related information, there are always plenty of interesting, entertaining articles and sometimes a humorous take on recent affairs that’ll make even the grumpiest person smile on a Friday morning. Plus, with plenty of freebies hidden within the campaign, Innocent Drinks have managed to promote their brand/product with an indirect, fun email that keeps their consumers engaged and generates great response rates.

Why?  It’s relatable to their target audience.
If the same style of email was sent to engineers within the aviation industry, the response rate would be much-lower as the tone is completely wrong for that audience, which would have meant the amount of ‘unsubscribe’ requests would have been greater, which inevitably affects future deliverability.
The best advice is to know your audience, get to understand how they respond and choose your content and vocabulary appropriately to suit them.

 

 

B2B or B2C?  That is the question

Although both consumers, the main difference between B2B and B2C customers is the buying cycle, and this difference means your emails need to be targeted differently also.

B2B customers tend to take more time to make purchasing decisions due to the fact that there are usually several decision-makers involved in the process. Thus, your email content needs to be informative and consist of enough facts and key details to help all those decision-makers make a decision, and providing them with extra information which they can pass on is a great way to do that; such as whitepapers, case studies or findings from company surveys which in turn enable your company to be seen as an industry leader.

B2C customers usually make quick, impulsive and emotion-based purchasing decisions and they usually do not have to consult anyone prior to making a purchase.
One of the key differences between B2B and B2C emails is Send Time, and if you get this wrong it can have a huge impact on your response rates and ROI.  B2B customers are working customers.  Despite the workaholics who check their work emails at the weekends, most B2B customers are more likely to respond to email marketing campaigns sent during working hours.  B2C customers on the other hand will be checking their emails outside of work hours, which means the best time for response rates are during their commute (before or after work), lunch breaks, evenings and weekends. All of this means your send days and times will vary widely depending on whether you are sending to a B2B or B2C consumer, so again, know your audience and change your content and send times accordingly to maximise your response rates.

 

 

Prospective, New or Existing?   No two customers are the same…

Defining what sort of customer you are communicating with is a crucial factor that many marketers can sometimes forget when composing their email campaigns.  Prospective, new and existing customers all behave very differently towards the email content they receive, and the way that you communicate with them should also be different.  Think of it like a journey you want your customers to take; your emails need to be targeted appropriately with the right tone, vocabulary and content that will connect with your audience, encouraging your prospects to turn into new customers, and in turn (hopefully) they will continue the journey to becoming loyal existing customers.  Your tone of voice will change as your customers progress through the email journey and you start to build a relationship of trust and familiarity between yourself and your customers.  What you don’t want to do is send them email communications that stop the journey in its tracks with content that is irrelevant or inappropriately depending on the type of customer they are and the kind of relationship you have with them.  Any relationship you build you should look to maintain and develop further with your email communications, so compose your messages carefully depending on what stage of the ‘journey’ your customer is at.

Another key thing to bear in mind is that prospective customers will need winning over, so you don’t want to send them content that’s going to make them want to unsubscribe straight away.  If a prospect has approached you by subscribing to your emails, most customers would expect to receive a welcome or brand introductory email, so if you offer some incentive as a ‘thank you for subscribing’ – such as a white-paper, voucher or event invitation that would be of interested to the new customer and make them feel appreciated and start to build that relationship.  As they say… you never get a second chance to make a first impression so make sure you get the right message aimed at the right person first time.

Existing customers already know your brand and are actively doing business with you, but that does not mean you can rest on your laurels when it comes to your emails.  It is extremely important not to spam your customers by resending emails with identical content (which is a sure-fire way to get yourself spammed). Most email software allows you to segment customers into groups or categories meaning you can organise your customers and ensure you are delivering the right content to the right people.

 

 

Let’s Get Optimised – sizing up your emails for mobile

So we’ve talked a lot about the importance of using varying tones of voice, vocabulary and content to connect with your different customer groups, but another factor that is also important to consider is mobile optimisation.  ‘One size fits all’ doesn’t work for your customers, and it doesn’t work for their devices either.  Sending an email that looks great on desktop but is misaligned or poorly engaging on mobile or tablets can sometimes be disastrous for your campaign depending on how your users interact with your email communications.  Just because you designed your email on a desktop PC doesn’t mean your customers are going to view the email on desktop.  More and more consumers (both B2B and B2C) are engaging with emails on their mobile devices, so you need to make sure your content layout and calls-to-action are clear, engaging and correctly placed when viewed on a mobile device.  Most email software providers will allow you to view and amend the mobile version of your email campaign, and more sophisticated email software will even allow you to add or omit content solely on the mobile version while still retaining the original content on the desktop version.  This is a great way to ensure your emails look uncluttered on mobile and stay concise.

Understanding how your customers interact with your emails is vital.  Most email software providers will allow you to gather analytics on what devices your customers are using to view your email campaigns.  By looking at this data and learning what device-preference your customers have is really helpful in building effective, engaging email campaigns targeted at your customer base.  If over 70% of your customers have a preference for mobile, make sure you include mobile-friendly features such as ‘click to call’ links, and vis versa if their preference is for desktop don’t add too many features that are mobile-only accessible. Don’t disengaging your customers with an email that doesn’t suit the way they interact with your comms.

The key to your email comms is understanding your customer, what words and content they will respond to, understanding what relationship you currently have with them (and what future relationship you hope to achieve), and learning how your customers interact with and view your emails.

We are a race of individuals, so make sure your email communications reflect that.  Stand out from the inbox crowd with original content that also treats the customer as an individual.  Don’t be generic, be personable and relevant to your audience.  Once you understand your audience, you are more likely to create amazing content that will grab their attention and generate a successful campaign ROI.

Track your campaigns and learn from how your customers behave and interact with your communications. Remember, your data is the key to building better campaigns and better relationships with your customers.

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Top five email tools

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As email marketers, we are always trying to find the best ways to make sure our emails are the very best they can be.  Gone are the days where you could send a test email to your inbox, sign it off and send it out.  Now more than ever, we have to be extra vigilant with our emails, making sure get into our customer’s inboxes, and that they look good when they arrive there. But with so many tools available and more cropping up all the time, how do we separate out the good from the… not so good. Luckily, the Enabler team are here to provide you with our expert opinions on the tools on the market now.

Our Top Five Email Tools to help you get the most out of your campaigns:

 

1). Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is design software that falls under the Adobe Creative Cloud – which means if you already have a creative cloud log in, you can access all of your assets and imagery from inside Photoshop. The programme itself is very intuitive and provides a host of different ways to achieve your goals. It enables email designers to produce beautiful creatives and maximise their potential.

Adobe are always updating the product (you can check out their update timeline here). Photoshop allows you to work across desktop and mobile devices to create the best looking emails you can, making it probably the best software out there for creating great email design.

Price-wise, you can get the full 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps in Adobe Creative Cloud for £45 per month or you can just go for Photoshop which is £17.15 a month.

View the full breakdown of pricing here.

Photoshop is a creative tool we highly recommend investing in if you want to create visually stunning, engaging emails that drive clicks.

 

2). Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a fast, flexible coding engine designed to give developers the freedom to code emails that look brilliant on any size screen.  Dreamweaver is extremely intuitive, and is a suitable choice for any email marketer, whether you are new to coding or have years of experience.  The coding engine offers code ‘hints’ for new users and works with the developer to keep code clean, reduce errors and improve readability.  It has three main view screens, code, design and side-by-side.  This is incredibly useful as it allows you o see how your code is affecting the design.

A new feature we love is ‘snippets‘.  Snippets are sections of code (e.e. headers, footers or images with text) which you code once, then save for use later.  When you next have a template that needs that snippet in it, you can easily drop it in, making development faster and more accurate.

Dreamweaver has the same pricing structure as the rest fo the Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can own it for just £17.15 a month.

 

 

 

​​3). Litmus ​​

Litmus is an email testing tool which allows you to check how your emails will look across a wide variety of email clients and apps.  The main thing we love about Litmus is that it saves you from having to create test email accounts across all email clients, allowing you to test everything in one central place.

You can test everything from link tracking to email load time.  They even have a section of the tool called ‘checklist’, which is essentially your pre-flight check before sending your email.  It will help you catch broken links, optimise loading speed and check how your email works with images on and off.  This section is fantastic – especially as it allows you to choose which browsers and clients you want to see.  It covers desktop, mobile and tablet – we couldn’t recommend it more.

Litmus also has its Community Area, where you can ask questions to hundreds of other developers and share in each other’s  experiences to make your emails even better.  They also produce emails themselves which keep you up-to-date with the latest email trends.

Litmus does offer a free 7 day trial, but after that prices range from $79 a month to $399 a month (for the Brits out there, that’s approx £63 – £320 a month).  They do have a pricing option where can tailor your package, so it only contains what you actually need; like an email pick’n’mix.

 

 

 

 4). Send Forensics

Send Forensics is an email deliverability tool that focuses specifically on making sure your emails hit your customer’s inboxes. It’s very advanced, and works to safeguard your email reputation and boost engagement.

You can run a free email deliverability test that will score your email and tell you the percentage will end up in spam, however to get the full features it costs $49 a month.

Once you sign up to the full features version, the software not only gives you a deliverability score, but what elements of your emails are trigger spam – whether its due to your content or the technical makeup of your email, for example if there is no SFP set up.

(Here’s some tips on avoiding spam filters)

It will mark your vocabulary and copywriting, judging words you’ve used and highlighting any negative one that are hindering your deliverability, and offers you alternative phrases to use instead.  It also highlights any positive keywords to demonstrate the phrases helping your email deliverability.  Send Forensics will even rate your copywriting tone of voice in determining whether you are being overly promotional or conversational in your tone.

 

One of the really standout aspects of Send Forensics are all the technical checks it undertakes when examining your email.  Not only will it check the image:text ratio, and inspect the quality of the links you provide, it will also dive under the skin of your email set-up, domain authority and IP address to check your sending reputation, noting any sites that have blacklisted your IP or technical problems that might be hindering you reaching the inbox.

All this might sound very technical, but Send Forensics is anything but.  The software is exceptionally user friendly, and offers advice on how to undertake any actions it suggests, making it an ideal solution for email newbies.

5). Email on Acid

Email on Acid is another email testing tool that will help you make sure your emails look great across devices and clients.  It provides coding tips and marketing guides via their blog, and also has a forum where you can post techniques and questions to other email developers – however if this is one of your main uses, we would probably recommend going with Litmus as they tend to provide answers faster.

It comes in cheaper than Litmus at $45 – $295 per month, however unlike Litmus they don’t provide a custom tailored option, meaning you have to take everything in each package.  Both LItmus and Email on Acid’s basic package come with one user, but Litmus’ most popular package comes with five users, whereas Email on Acid only has the one user account.  E

Email on Acid is a cheaper alternative if you are a small business with only one users, but if you’re a bigger business, definitely opt for Litmus.

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Top ten email coding tips

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Say the words “Build me an email” to a developer and watch the expression on their face drop. Yes, HTML emails are old school, but there’s no need to don a loin cloth and start chipping out code from a stone tablet.

Email has come on leaps and bounds within the last few years, and with open rates frequently increasing on mobile devices, there are a few tips and tricks you can use for responsive emails.

 

Here are a few favourites to keep you building successful, responsive emails:

 1). Keep inline

If you have tried building an email before, you have probably heard of this one. This is basically adding any style changes you make to the containing table of your content.

For example:

<td style=”font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:11px; color:#000000;”>Hello World</td>

The main benefit behind using this styling is that some email clients will strip out embedded CSS in the <head>, leaving your email with as much style as socks and sandals.

Email developers have already started trialing emails with no inline CSS, which are not 100% foolproof yet, but with a large percentage of global email clients supporting embedded CSS, there is hope for cleaner emails in the future.

 

2). Query your media

Let’s say you want that image smaller, or a different font for that block of text, or you need that column to stack on mobile… not a problem! Media query to the rescue.  Media queries are the CSS3 commands that allow you to change your viewpoint depending on your screen resolution,  meaning that your imagery and content will display differently on different devices… thus making your content fully responsive.

Within the <head> of any email there will be a minimum width set, for instance 480px which will control and sometimes constrain how your media is displayed.  But, if you add a media query to your style command, any styles that you set within that media query will take over when the screen resolution drops below the minimum width.

For example:

<style type=”text/css”>

    body {width: 680px;  background-color:#000000;}

    @media only screen and (max-width:480px) {
        body {width:100% !important;  background-color:#ffffff !important;}
    }

</style>

This means your image can be any size, the font family can styled differently for each resolution, and you can stack your columns all day long. Happy days!

 

3). Stacking

 We briefly mentioned stacking columns in the last tip.  As you’d expect, this coding command allows you to stack columns on top of one another by setting them as .stackonmobile {display:block;} for mobile. This coding tip helps with mobile optimisation by making sections of your email more visible and legible on smaller screen resolutions, instead of trying to squash them into one column.

The default for stacking was left to right for a long time, however more recently we can now reverse stack, by setting the containing tables text direction as right to left.

For example:

<table width=“600” dir=“rtl”>
    <tr>
        <th width=“300” dir=“ltr” class=“stackonmobile”>World</th>
        <th width=“300” dir=“ltr” class=“stackonmobile”>Hello</th>
    </tr>
</table>

Note that we need to redirect the sub-tables back to left to right for text alignment. Also the html layout will be reversed, right column first, which is why ‘World’ is before ‘Hello’ in the example above.
Also note that we have used <th> instead of <td> for Android compatibility, as they dropped the use of display:block on td’s.

 

4). Min vs Max

With screen resolutions getting bigger and bigger, is it a good idea to make our emails wider?
When I started in email builds (back in the dark ages of blackboards and chalk written HTML), the width was 585px. This slowly grew to a standard 600px, which seems to still be the acceptable size. Most of the emails we produce today are anywhere between 600px & 720px. Occasionally a 1000px email rears it’s oversized head, but these are usually for big occasions with large hero images for impact.

What we need to remember is that emails will still be framed by the email clients furniture i.e. the inbox list, the search and edit tools, sender details etc. So an oversized email might end up stretching beyond the width of the screen, which results in an ugly horizontal scroll bar at the bottom… and nobody wants that.

So remember, size does matter.  Always aim for the optimal image size depending on the platform or device being used to ensure your emails remain mobile responsive.

 

5). Bring it to the Table

With email development, it’s all about the tables. Below you’ll find an example of an email HTML table.

Example:
<table width=“100%”>
    <tr>
    <td align=”center”>
        <table width=“700”>
            <tr>
            <td align=”center”>
                <table width=“100%”>
                    <tr>
                    <td align=“center”>Hello</td>
                    </tr>
                </table>
            </td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </td>
    </tr>
</table>            

The first outer table is set at 100% width to ensure the table is centred within the main body of the email itself.  Then the body table is set at your desired email width (i.e. 700px as above) with a 100% media query class.  By setting the tables within the body to 100%, this helps to ensure the content flows responsively when scaled down to a smaller screen resolution.

 

Handy tip: When building emails using tables, make sure you repeat your inline styles.  A table within a table will lose styling in some email clients, especially background colour and font attributes.
And another handy tip: Try and make sure you nest your tables, and avoid using colspans in your email code. Outlook has a nasty habit of ignoring colspans and rowspans, so nesting your tables will give you more control over your code, making you a happier developer.

 

6). A font by any other name

Be on the lookout in Outlook, your font might not be the font you wanted! 
Having a backup or fallback font within your email code is exceptionally useful to ensure your emails always look the way you want them to, even if the email provider doesn’t have your first choice font.

However… Outlook 2007/10/13 has other ideas, and will automatically apply their own fallback font or Times New Roman. Even if you set fallback fonts in your code, Outlook ignores them. Cheers Outlook.

But wait, there is a fix.. phew!
<!–[if mso]>
<style type=”text/css”>
    body, table, td {font-family: Arial, sans-serif, Helvetica !important;}
</style>
<![endif]–>

Drop this code into the <head> of an email and Outlook will pick up the web safe fonts first, so you can safely steer clear of Times New Roman.
Font-astic!

 

7). Does my article look big in this?

A bit of extra padding never did anyone any harm, but adding Padding and Margins to your table styles could harm the way your email looks, as some email clients might ignore them.

Spacer images used to be the way to use padding in emails. Developers would use transparent 12px x 12px gifs and fit them into every nook and cranny of their emails… sounds tedious doesn’t it?

Luckily there is an alternative which is much more efficient to implement, and works across all email clients successfully… A non-breaking space (&nbsp;) – just add font size, line height and a width/height depending on the space you require:

 

<td style=”font-size:20px; line-height:20px;” height=”20″>&nbsp;</td>

So now your emails and tables will always be lean and evenly spaced…no padding required.

 

8). The (Alt)ernative

 When your emails load quickly, you get to display every image and aspect of you email in all its glory. But what happens when you’re a slow connection speed or your email client is blocking images by default?

You could end up with empty spaces where your images used to be, but hopefully you will see the Alt text – the alternative text that’s displayed when an image can’t display.

Some email clients won’t load images automatically, so without any Alt text you could get a blank looking email. 🙁

Example Alt text:
<img src=“images/hello-world-title.jpg” width=”200″ height=”40″ alt=“Hello World”/>

Another alternative is to actually style your Alt text so that it’s less bland if it gets displayed. Add a font-family, font-size, font-colour or text-decoration, so you try and match the image style, and get your email looking good if the images don’t load.

Example stylised Alt text:
<img src=“images/hello-world-title.jpg” width=”200″ height=”40″ alt=“Hello World” style=“font-size:16px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#ffffff;”/>

 

9). Hamburger to go please

Now that emails have further CSS3 support, it’s allowed many developers to start introducing some great responsive features to their email code.

The Hamburger Menu (so called because it looks like a little burger between a bun) is one example of this.

Those long menus on an email don’t need to be stacked half way down your mobile screen anymore, they can be tucked away neatly in a clickable, drop down menu, making your email more mobile-friendly and more visually appealing.  Just need the fries to go with it now!

 

 

 

10). Give yourself a fighting chance

Make sure you are putting yourself in the best possible position for email building. One of the ways you can do this is to get the right software. Lucky for you, we’ve put together a list of our favourite email development tools, from design right through to deployment.

Check them our Email Tools blog and start getting the best results out of your emails.

Whatever you do, keep experimenting with your HTML/CSS emails, even if you end up with Frankenstein’s monster there might be a small part that works really well, or another that will give you a further understanding of where to go next.

Happy coding!

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Spam filters: what are they and how to avoid them

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Spam filter problems are something you’ll probably come across during your time as an email marketer.  At present just 79%* of permission-based emails actually reach customer inboxes, as ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and spam filters constantly try to find better ways to reduce the amount of irrelevant content in users’ inboxes. So with almost a quarter of emails being earmarked as spam, how do you ensure you reach the inbox? It’s therefore never been more important to understand how spam filters work, which is why we’re here to help build your knowledgebase so you that can confidently create and send emails that should avoid being flagged as spam.

 

First things first…

To begin to understand how to avoid the spam-filters, we firstly need to tackle the question ‘What is spam?’. There are hundreds of different definitions of spam out there, but the most comprehensive one is that spam is unsolicited, irrelevant email, sent in bulk to a list of people. For example, if you bought a list of data and started to send emails to the people on that list, although you think you are sending these people content you believe to be relevant or beneficial to them, you are in fact contacting people who have not opted in to receive your emails. Because you have not been given explicit permission to market to these people, your emails would be considered ‘spam’ by these individuals. (Note to self – only ever email opted-in customers).

 

Being marked as ‘Spam’ – what does it mean for your emails?

Spam might seem like just an annoyance in the inbox, but when individuals actively start marking your emails as ‘spam’ or ‘junk’, Email Service Providers (ESPs) will start to take notice. Having your emails flagged as spam will negatively impact your reputation as a sender, and if poor sending practices continue Email Service Providers will start filtering your emails directly into the spam folder to ensure you never reach people’s inboxes. So to maintain good email deliverability and avoid being flagged as spam, it’s worth understanding the laws and regulations that ESPs abide by. Different countries have different regulations regarding spam, for example the UK uses the 2003 Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, USA has the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and Canada has its own Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), but every country / ESP has common regulations which all email marketers must abide by, including:

  • Always providing an unsubscribe link which work for at least 30 days post-send

  • Not using deceptive headers, from names and addresses or subject lines. 

(You can find a comprehensive list of laws by country at the end of this article).

Failure to comply with these regulations can result in costly penalties which differ per country. For example, violating the CAN-SPAM Act could see you fined $11,000 per offense… which translates to $11,000 for every email address you sent to. To ensure you don’t fall foul, it’s definitely worth having a read of the legislation before using any new data source.

 

Spam Filters – How do they work?  

It can be rather tricky when it comes to judging how spam filters determine how ‘spammy’ an email is. To put it simply, they’ll systematically weigh up each component of your email and assign each part a spam rating. For the purposes of this we’ll call the rating 1-10, 1 =‘not spammy’ and 10= ‘very spammy’. Once every email component has been rated the email will then be given a spam score which will decide whether an email can pass through the filter. If the score exceeds a threshold (let’s call it 5 for this example) then the email will get flagged as spam, will not pass go and heads straight to the spam folder or is completely blocked from being delivered.

 

 

Avoiding the filters

The tricky part is that each spam filter works differently, with some having stricter ‘pass’ thresholds determined by their server administrations. So while your email might receive a score of 4 for one spam filter, another one might mark it as an 8. The list of spammy criteria is forever evolving as email users continue to identify and mark new email content / senders as spam in their inbox. Spam filters often share this information with each other to help identify new emerging spam. Unfortunately for us marketers, this means there’s no easy or definitive checklist to ensure our emails don’t end up in the spam folder. We do, however, know that there are some key factors to keep an eye on when sending emails.

1. Coding in your campaign. Some spam filters will be triggered by sloppy code, tags which don’t need to be there or code that has been pulled in directly from MS Word. To avoid this being an issue in your campaigns, make sure you are using templates that have been reviewed by a developer, or have a developer build you one from scratch for you. Many ESP’s will provide tools such as HTML or drag and drop editors which will help you avoid these issues.

2. Campaign metadata. Spam filters want to see that you know the people you’re sending to. Personalising your emails is a great way to demonstrate this; it shows the spam filter that you hold information about the recipient other than their email address. You can also ask recipients to add you to their list of trusted mailers.

3. Your IP address. Some spam filters will block or mark an email as spam if it has come from an IP address that has been flagged as having sent spam in the past or been blacklisted, so you need to ensure the IP address you’re emailing from has a good sender reputation. Try to avoid IP pools with poor reputations, where you share sending IP addresses with other senders, as their poor sending behaviour can impact on your deliverability / sender reputation. This usually won’t cause problems if the ESP is taking correct precautions to make sure all emails have unsubscribe links etc, however if you see your deliverability rates drop, it might be worth contacting your ESP to make sure it’s definitely your emails that are causing the drop in deliverability. Sending reputation is incredibly important, so make sure yours is good by sticking to good sending practices.

 

 

Content is key

Why words are a big influencer in avoiding the spam filters

Although content and formatting can be a bit of a hazy subject because there’s no specific content that is always guaranteed to be flagged as spam in an email, I can recommend a few best-practices to make sure you’re doing everything you can to not trigger spam filters and get your email safely to the inbox.

1. Never stop testing.  It’s a great way to find out how different content in your email impacts your deliverability. If you don’t make it into the inbox, it could be something in your content i.e. a negative keyword, too many links or images, or overall tone that is trigger the spam filter. Test and retest the content.

2. Clear unsubscribe links are a must. Don’t try to hide your unsubscribe links within your email – it’s a sure-fire way to get marked as spam if people can’t find the link easily. Think about it from the perspective of the user, you receive an email and you think the content isn’t relevant to you. If you can’t find an unsubscribe link, what do you do? Some people might try and contact the company sending the emails, but most people won’t bother and will just mark the email as spam. Don’t let it happen to you!

3. Be consistent. If your customers are used to a particular type of content / branding from your emails, don’t make a sudden change without warning. Straying from the normal messaging of your brand could trigger people to mark it as spam if they don’t think it’s a genuine email from yourselves.

4. Avoid trigger words. Now although there is no definitive list of words and phrases to avoid, spam filters are already looking out for certain negative keywords which have been previously identified as spam and proven to trigger filters. Using any of these words/phrases in your subject line or email is almost certain to get you a higher spam score and trigger a filter. We can’t list them all, but some simple ones to avoid are:

  • the word Free

  • Exclamation marks (big no-no!), and other symbols such as $ £ %

  • ALL CAPS words

 

For a more comprehensive list of words to avoid, see HubSpot’s ‘Ultimate List of Email Spam Trigger Words’.  

So there you have it, some useful ways you can keep yourself out of spam. With any emails you send make sure you’re really thinking about your opt-in method, how you’re acquiring your data, setting customer’s expectations, where you put your unsubscribe link, and what keywords you use in your email content. By keeping on top of all these you should be able to maintain a good sender reputation and prevent your spam score from triggering any filters.

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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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The key to successful summer email campaigns

Ah summertime, that wonderful period of the year where people flee to sunnier climes to get their tan on. Unfortunately, for us marketeers this makes it harder to reach customers as the number of out of office notifications increases. Since we know this happens every summer, how can we adjust our email marketing tactics to ensure we’re being as effective as possible?

 

Don’t run for the sun

Most importantly, do not stop marketing just because the sun comes out. The months may be deathly slow but there are still opportunities to connect with your customers. Your emails may also be more likely to hit the target, as customers potentially have more leisure time over the summer and could be more receptive to your messages.

 

Embrace the challenge

The summer months are a great opportunity to do some testing, especially with content (here are some ideas). It might be time to employ user generated content and experiment to discover what your customers really want. Here’s one example of a brand who took advantage of the summer season and kept their customers interacting:

 

Feel at Home #holidayspam

Three were very clever with this campaign. Travellers are often wary of expensive roaming charges and so avoid using their phone for calls and data while abroad. Three also knew that people love to share their holiday snaps and brag about their experiences abroad. So they decided to tap into this behaviour and counter the fear by emailing customers to confirm there was no extra cost for using their phone in many popular holiday locations. This was a great tactic as it offered added value, solved a problem for customers and made them feel grateful to Three for keeping them connected while away. It’s exactly what any customer would want. Noone wants to pay extra to use their phone when on holiday.

Secondly, Three further encouraged sharing by using #holidayspam and designating 18 vacation destinations around the world where customers could upload and share holiday

pics – at no extra cost. The pictures could be uploaded to both Twitter and Instagram, essentially creating free advertising for Three. To further incentivise sharing, if the customers uploaded a holiday snap at one of these locations using #holidayspam, they were entered into a competition to win an amazing holiday!

In summary, they provided customers with a tangible benefit, made it fun and incentivised it with the chance to win a holiday… which they knew they’d want, as they’re already on holiday! They specifically designed the campaign around the idea of holidays and engaged customers at a time where they were less likely to interact with the brand. The video below shows just how well it worked.

 

 

The key element that I took from the success of this campaign was the mobile aspect of it. Gone are the days where people go to a foreign country and are no longer reachable. People take their phones everywhere and with an increasing amount of places offering free WiFi, emails are always accessible. With this in mind, it’s more important than ever that your emails are fully mobile responsive. Make it easy for people to interact with you. Ensure that your emails are mobile optimised and that any landing pages are too. Read more about making your emails mobile responsive.

 

 

Plan ahead

Over the summer, you need to innovate and work harder with your email marketing to keep your customers engaged. Luckily, much of this can be set up in advance if you use marketing automation. Whilst you might want to send your usual newsletters and one-off campaigns, you can also set up emails to run automatically when a customer meets a certain condition or a combination of conditions. This works particularly well during summer when you’re short staffed. For example, if you’ve set up a summer email campaign that includes a competition, why not include the competition into your welcome programme. This means that every time a new customer signs up to your list, they automatically receive an email telling them about the summer competition. Just remember to take it out of your welcome programme when the competition ends!

 

What about timing?

It’s also important to consider the timing of your campaigns. If people are on holiday, the location data you hold about them might not be so relevant anymore. With this in mind, it’s often better during summer months to do a campaign that could be applicable no matter where you are in the world and not worry so much about the time you send your campaigns. (Although, there’s nothing like doing a bit of send time testing over the summer months to work out what works best for your database). That’s why competitions are so effective, since you can enter no matter where you are. Campaigns that tend to work less well during the summer period (depending on your business that is) are in-store offers. Asking a customer to come into their local branch over the summer isn’t necessarily a great move as there is a reasonable chance they won’t be around to take advantage of it.

 

Let’s play a game

A clever content idea is to use games. There’s nothing worse than being stuck at an airport with nothing to do and brands should take advantage of this opportunity. Create a highly addictive, brand related game that you can push out through email to your customers. Just last summer, I noticed the game ‘Heads Up’ from Ellen DeGeneres being played at an airport by at least five separate groups of people. Games are a great source of data capture too; use a form at the start or end of a game asking your customers to enter their details so their score can be saved. This means you can build your email lists during a time where you thought your email marketing wasn’t going to be as effective.

 

In summer-y

It’s never too early to start preparing your summer campaigns. All the best ones I’ve seen have taken lengthy planning but it’s worth it! You also might want to take holiday yourself, so make sure you have your automation sorted before you go. Summer isn’t the time to abandon your campaigns, it’s an opportunity to get even more creative. Embrace the challenge and have a happy summer emailing!

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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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How to avoid email marketing mistakes

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Email is a huge part of most companies’ marketing mix but many brands are still swinging and missing when it comes to delivering great campaigns. Email is an integral part of many marketing campaigns. We use it every single day. The first thing I do when I sit down at my desk in the morning is check my email and it’s also the last thing I do before I leave. It’s the one thing that stays up on my screen for the whole day.

When we’re dealing with something that impacts so many people day to day, we can’t afford to be getting it wrong. So, what are the challenges of email and how do we overcome them?

1. Getting noticed in peoples inboxes

  • Subject line testing
    Every data list is different, so there’s no magic solution to email subject lines. The best way to achieve results is to test subject lines through A/B testing and then roll out to the rest of your list. For example, send 20% of your emails to one subject line and 20% to another. Leave it 24 hours, assess the results and send the winning subject line to the rest of your list. Over time you’ll get a sense of what engages your audience and what bores them to tears.

  • Do something a little different
    Emojis in email subject lines can work really well when used cleverly and sparingly.

  • Know when to send
    Different databases respond to different send times. At Enabler, we find that 9am, 11am and 2pm work really well as send times for B2B. This enables you to catch people as they start work, on their morning coffee break and during the post-lunch slump. Again, the way to find out what works best for you is testing. Split-send to your list at different times of day and compare the results.

  • Know how often to send
    No-one wants to be spammed with emails after they’ve signed up for a newsletter. With the introduction of Gmail’s inbox tab system, which separates everything into primary, promotions, social and updates you don’t want to be stuck in the junk section! A way to deal with this is to ask your users what they want; find out what they’re interested in and send them that.

 

2. Ensure your emails are rendering correctly

There is nothing worse in the world of email than opening up your inbox to find an email that hasn’t rendered correctly. Maybe you’re missing half an image, maybe you can’t see images at all. Maybe you’re missing half a call to action button on your Outlook client because a lazy developer didn’t run the email through an email testing client before sending it to your inbox. The key to making sure you get it right is to test on each email client before hitting the send button. I prefer Litmus because it allows you to email your HTML directly to the program and shows you how your email will render on both mobile clients and desktop clients. It also shows you all the versions of the clients rather than just the latest ones. Top tip: Outlook 2007 and 2010 basically support nothing.

 

3. Keeping up with trends

  • Mobile vs desktop
    Know what percentage of your list are opening your emails on mobile. I generally work to the rule that if it’s more than 10% you should definitely be using responsive design and if it’s anything over 2% you should definitely be at least considering using it. We’re a society of mobile users, and that’s only going to grow. With that in mind, email marketers can’t afford to delay making their content accessible to mobile users.

  • Dynamic content
    Gone are the days of building 30 emails, one for every category you have in your database. It’s all about building one email, and using conditional content conditions to ensure each user sees what you want them to see upon opening your email. All decent ESPs will have this functionality built in, so what are you waiting for?

  • Rich media
    Knowing how to make your emails stand out is more important than ever. Emails can drive sales and brand awareness as well as provide platforms for event attendance. Explore GIFS, Video, Twitter feeds, Social sharing and more to support your email campaigns. With technology developing so rapidly, it’s important to be creative to ensure you stay on top of your game.

  • Be practical
    This is a big one, there’s no point sending great content to your database if they won’t be able to see it, and the email therefore loses all meaning to them. It’s imperative to know, for example, that Outlook won’t support your animated GIF and will freeze it on the first frame. Or that Gmail won’t display emojis in your subject line and show them as little boxes instead. Make sure you do your research and find out what will and won’t work, before you get creative.

 

4. Managing your data correctly

  • You can’t have good email without good data
    Understanding what you can do with your data is every bit as important as keeping up with the latest front end coding trends. You can segment your data by age, region, gender or anything you know about them – all you need is the right tools to collect that data and the right tools to use it to code a great email. Never miss an opportunity for data capture and always employ the Pokémon tag line ‘Gotta catch ‘em all’. (‘em all being the bits of data).

  • Know what to do with that data within an email.
    Personalisation is key but get it right – no one wants to see ‘Hi First Name’ at the start of an email. There’s no point personalising if your data isn’t correct. I’ve seen brands put the wrong merge code into an email so the policy renewal ID was swapped with the recipient first name. This gave the effect that the company was referring to one of its customers as a number, not a name.

  • Be creative
    You’d be surprised how many people actually miss this out of campaigns. It seems like common sense, until you sit down in front of a computer and start trying to plan, at which point your brain might give you… nothing. So how do we get around those creative email mind blocks? First work out what you are trying to achieve. Do you want people to buy from your site?Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to encourage people to enter a competition or play a game or simply visit your site?

 

Once you’ve worked this out you can start working out how you’re going to achieve it. Don’t be scared of doing some competitor research to get you started. Most importantly, have fun – email is great, you should be enjoying yourself!

Is email a dying channel?

In short, no! Email has been around since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent the first one on the ARPANET system. It was the first system that was able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPANET. Since then we have seen the evolution of email as a channel to the point where many of the functionalities mirror what you can do with websites – which is remarkable when you think about it. Considering everything you code into email has to sit within tables… within tables – the amount it has and continues to achieve is outstanding.

Think about how many other internet based fads email has remained a constant throughout. Email saw the birth of MSN, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Mobile apps… and it’s still going, still developing, still adapting. There are conferences all around the world dedicated purely to email and how we can keep developing email.

Online sales have skyrocketed in the last few years and now remain at a consistent high. A huge part of what drives these online sales is email. Email drives people to websites. Email makes sales. Email is awesome.

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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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