The Email Wars

I subscribe to so many emails for the reason not that I am going to buy from most of them (sorry for taking your metrics down) but to see what different industries are doing and how I might leverage some ideas in campaigns we are building. It is a knowledge management approach. Since it is hard to get real time data in the email marketing world that you might get in other industries from books, you have to set up honeypots to track industry leaders in order to learn. 

But I was excited to see the change this week in the creative from The Body Shop. It was not a dramatic overhaul, but it did pop more to me. 

They moved and changed quite a few elements. The forward to a friend in the top right is now a My Account button. So does this tell us that people are not using the Forward to a Friend ability as much anymore as an email asset and they see that this change is better for their users? I would wager from what I have seen that the forward to a friend is not as important anymore as it used to be. Not a metric or conversion driver. 

(more…)

As an email marketing agency we love the use of good fonts, clear copy, buttons and design. Now this Subway email is not a bad design. They have a BIG button and it is nicely laid out. But what did go wrong is the amount fonts, font colors, and copy they used. 

There is just so much going on I was not really sure what action to take. They could have stopped at the first box and if they needed to include the lower boxes, they might have used them in another campaign. The real call to action was the top box and the lower info just felt as if they had this layout so just used it. I wonder how many people even took action on the call out boxes below.

Another reason why this failed was that they have so much copy. It is too much to digest and read quickly and made me just want to hit the Trash button in my email client. Make is easy. Make it clear. Make it actionable. 

I added the FAIL stamp to it for this final reason. They had text, but they decided to make the TEXT images not fonts. IF this email was to arrive in an inbox where images were suppressed it would have just been one big blank image with a ton of footer legal copy. What is the value of that? As a basic principal you need to be using real fonts in your emails so that you do not give your campaign any reason to fail.

This is a constant question from email marketers and worthy of monthly studies and opinions from all over the Web. DJ at Bronto covered it this week from a conversation some of of were having VIA Twitter. Yes we are all on Twitter having conversations daily… are you?

But what we talked about was: Does it work? We have seen so many clients and brands use it effectively and they have seen a lift. But then, like this Marriott email we see it done bad. This example shows (I had to circle it to show you where it was) how it can be useless. The use of fonts was so over done that I did not even know it was there until I looked at it for a third time. And did it make me feel different or want to take an action? Nope. It was a poor execution IMHO. 

But if you use it clearly and it stands out I have seen where it does work. It is not about the fact of doing it… but doing it right. Make it POP. 

(more…)

In order to protect the innocent we had to spring to action this past week. We were presented an email that was designed by another agency for an event that we were working on. They had volunteered to do the creative work for the event and we were happy to let them take a stab at it. Now I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, but I can never understand how some agencies do not get the finer points (wait the basic points) of good email design. 

Since there was not time to make it not an ALL image email we had to look at what we could fix in a short amount of time. We took a quick look at it and had these questions. 

Before:

1. What was the event

2. Who did I want to see

3. What did I need to do

Now these should be some questions that you always ask yourself with a little change to the who, what, where and why. But eROI stepped into email triage and put some minds against it. In no more than 30 minutes we were able to drive home the message, I think. We clearly communicated what was going on, why you would be interested, who was going to be there that you would want to see, and what to do. Simple enough huh? 

After:

But in the end I want to focus on how we can help our agency partners get a better idea of how to approach design for the inbox. Email design is not print design. Is that clear enough? We are here to explain, help and even give you feedback. Use us as a friend and partner whenever you want. 

Now let’s execute some great campaigns.

I thought that using ALL images in your email was a common fact that we all know is not in any of our best interests. The fact that so many email clients have image suppression set up and that filters look for emails with all images bodes poorly for all the home and fashion brands that MUST think that they are too good or too big to have it matter to them. 

Maybe I am wrong here. IF so someone let me know. But it kills me when I see emails like this. I can commend them on the creation of a new idea of a “Falliday” but with all image email I feel more like it is ripe for a “Fail-A-Day”. I will not fault the design or the concept, just the execution. 

Does anyone have any recent studies that show the number of email clients or of subscribers that suppress images? I would wager that quite a few of their subscribers get emails that are just ALT tags at best. My advice, and yes it is free advice so take it with a grain of salt, but you are setting your campaigns up for failure if you take the design road of “Well we have this catalogue and these images, can we just use those images since we already have them and this copy we took from the print has already been approved.” 

Email is not print. 

So many people want to write about the death of one medium for the rise of another. TV is dead, email is dead, twitter is dead, RSS is growing, print is dead… blah blah blah. What is not dead is media as a whole. Media and media use is growing and growing in every way. We may not watch as much TV, but we watch it smarter using things like TIVO, SlingBox, DVRs, Mobile, etc. So why don’t we see more shows and brands using email to drive and grow smart viewership? 

I would think that even in this example they might think about not just saying TUNE IN TONIGHT, but use some alternate calls to action. Don’t miss it, set your TIVO. Going to be busy? You can watch it online later, but you can’t miss it regardless. 

The problem that many people in the entertainment industry are missing is that time and place are not the same thing anymore. We consume media how and when we want it, on the place and device of our choice. So why not start thinking about that type of inclusive and smart messaging in their email campaigns? 

Now not that I am jumping on to check out the next Diddy Band, but the use of video in this email makes or GIVES me some instant access to the event that might make me either want to watch it OR even better tell someone about it. I would have actually placed more emphasis on the video being higher up in the email and even making the TIME and DATE a larger font that stands out in the email. Heck we all know by know that MTV will rerun any show 500 times and we can catch it between other shows, if anyone even watches MTV anymore.

Email can be a powerful medium IF you stop to think about the audience and TRY to use alternate approaches to your messaging. But you already know this… don’t you?

Just how do you drive a move to mobile email campaign? I was forwarded this example of eTrade making a move to get people to use their mobile version by giving away a free blackberry. That is one way. But what did they miss with this campaign? 

1. Where is the VIEW AS Mobile version for those getting this on a mobile device? FAIL

2. Why is the header of the email so massive? Anyone with a mobile device is not forced to scroll (or thumb) down to the content If they have HTML enabled. 

3. The email itself is over (I cut off the 2 pages of legal) 1200 pixels long. Not a very good practice in my book if you are targeting mobile OR even the typical inbox. 

So what would have worked better? 

First nailing the top three above. But on top of that thinking about the value prop of not just giving an incentive of a blackberry but a mobile device of their choice. Not everyone wants a blackberry so why pigeon hole yourself into a gift that might not appeal to your audience. I know that this is a deal with Blackberry as the content says “exclusive” but they need to be building mobile apps to be cross platform complaint. They might have missed some promotional opportunities to just touch an existing audience and move them to use their services from a value standpoint. 

What would you have done?

Typically I would have seen this email and glanced over it. I would have noted that it was pretty but not well designed from an optimization standpoint of inbox rendering if images were blocked. But for some reason I decided to click through. Now it has been some years since I have last bought a wet suit (moving to Oregon 18 years ago has slowed my love of surfing growing up in CA), but I thought I would check out what has changed.

So in clicking through I found a very cool landing page with a flash feature that highlights the suit and it’s features. I found myself wanting to learn more about it. So I tried to access the rest of the site. No go. I was not an option. An AJAX window came up and asked for my Cypher code. Cypher code? What was that? I thought about it for a minute and my mind flashed back to an element in the email I remembered seeing. I went back to the email and noticed that the cypher code they were referring to was in the email creative. The blow was that I was not able to copy and paste it due to the fact that it was an image. Drats. 

(more…)

We came up with the idea of trying out the horizontal email technique with one of our clients, Zinio. We thought that as a company that is showing how digital magazines are different, that we wanted them to challenge how emails were read, just like how magazines are read. We have seen 4 examples of this in the past and heard great things from folks that did it for Coors, FHM, Diesel and a luggage company, so why not give it a try. 

So far it has performed well and as the list grows we will watch to see how it works out. Now this being said, we did make a standard back up email layout just in case it went the other way. Well luck was on our side. 

My thoughts are why not challenge the medium. Why not make something stand out that not only grabs the readers attention, makes them pause to look at it, and if it works see if the media picks it up. Well all three things happened. 

So what is next? We will see as the months go on. We are always up to try something different. Are you?

(more…)

I am sharing this campaign with you a little prematurely. Now I am not saying that this campaign has not gone out and did blow away the long running subscription control by a double digit factor, but it is getting a full campaign case study written up now. It will be out soon with all the details, but want I wanted to focus on was the slight factor that changed the response rate. 

When this creative was first passed by my desk I had to stop and think about it a little bit. How was it different from what was sent out prior? What would tell people what to do and would that effort beat that of ones prior? The whole idea of this campaign was to drive subscriptions and we did not want it to make people think of anything else besides the images and the value of having a print subscription. We loaded it up into an inbox to see how it displayed. Did it drive the eyes to the action. Did it convey value and on top of that did it make me want to get a subscription. Well it was close.

(more…)

The Challenges with email and a lack of email standards across all the inboxes is that from time to time we can experience what we term an email blow out. What is an email blow out? Well is it quite simple. When you design an email there is the opportunity for it to hit an email client or inbox and go to hell in a hand basket. What you thought you might have designed has an issue you did not design for and will cause a table, a tag or an image to throw a wrench into the works and kill your formatting. 

What went wrong here? Well I am quite sure that it was a combination of a table and data feed error. I get this campaign every week and it has not had this issue ever before. What it looks to me what occurred is that the data being pulled from the CRM, CMS, or RSS feed had a character in it that did not play well with the formatting that this automated email template was prepared to handle. 

(more…)

I saw the post this past week Tamara and need to think about it as many of the blogs that you listed are some of the same on my radar. SO I will take a look and see if they will pass the baton as you have to me. Hopefully we can find a few new email marketing blogs that we might not know about. I often use your shared aggregator page to review the news at the end of the day in the industry. 

And by the way great new profile avatar (weird when I use that phrase, feel so geeky and dirty) on your Twitter Profile. I need to hire that artist to do one for me. But it needs to still hold a baseball bat. That is how I roll. 

So here is the list….

(more…)

Why the head of Vladimir? Well why not. He was a great revolutionary that would love the Wars we are fighting for the best email campaigns out there. So that being stated, I don’t want his head. I have 24 of them. Yes I buy random things that bring me some sort of joy or inspiration (stop by my office sometime). I have 24 of these Heads of Vladimir Lenin that are Cola Flavored Pops… and one of them can be yours?

Really you can have one? Yes and here is the deal that will get me to drop one in a special cola flavor sealing envelope and ship it right to you. 

1. You need to find an email campaign

2. It can FAIL or it can Exceed Expectations

3. It can be your own or one of someone else

4. You need to write up 150 words of why it was a success or failure and send it to me via email. Those that want to submit should COMMENT (I know soooo scary, but it is ok as I will not publish them all if they don’t need to be published to communicate with me) and I will email you my info if you do not have it already. 

Contest ends when I run out of pops.

After I get them all, I will read through them, share them with some of the eROI team and then select and present the winners. Note employees of eROI you are open to enter this contest as well and will be judged the same as anyone else. BUT I will not ship you a lolly. I will bring it to your desk.

That is all for now Comrades.

IBM to release Lotus Notes for iPhone - From The Email Standards Project

Now if they could just fix the desktop version so that it was not the biggest pain in the arse to render emails in correctly. I would really appreciate that one. It is one of the most challenging email clients to work in. No?

I had the “pleasure” of using Lotus notes at a prior company for years and as an internal email marketer and web marketer it was frustrating to make things work uniformly in the email client. I can only hope that this version works and does not cause us all mucho frustrations. And back to my earlier thoughts… can they just make the Lotus Notes desktop client more akin to other rendering engines? 

(more…)

WIth the 2008 Olympics in full swing I wanted to highlight two examples that I got right around the start of the opening ceremonies. Now why I am sharing both of these is for the fact that they are from the same company, but they manage the shopping experience for NBC online. They do a good job of tying in the sale of merchandise to a real life event and use the creative, products, and subject lines to capture your attention. 

The first one from NBC does a good job EXCEPT they failed at the above the creative personalization techniques. Why if they know my name do they call me “Dear Olympics Fan”? That to me is dropping the ball on the 3 yard line when you are heading in to score a touchdown. 

The creative is nice but the header is a little to fat so that it causes you to lose the rest of the email in the preview pane. They could mix in a salad in the design to think about how long the email is and how it renders when quickly reviewing it before fully opening it. They take the bronze here. 

(more…)