The Email Wars

If you missed the most thrilling show in town last week in Miami at the EEC 2010 Conference, don’t fret I made sure to video them so that you can see how it went down. Three agencies took the stage to show off their best efforts at email stardom, redesigning three emails chosen by fellow Email Evolution Conference attendees. Watch as each agency busted out their best moves and unveiled their email redesigns. Watch as the votes were tallied by a live text vote for each round’s winner. Lisa Harmon from Smith-Harmon praised and critiqued the contenders, plus she dished out her own email diva tips. When all is said and done, though, the winner is chosen.

Round One: USAA Teen Checking Campaign

Round Two: National Geographic Kids Magazine

Lots of best practices and ideas were brought to the table and the votes were cast. Who won? Guess you will have to watch and see.

Which agency will be the next Email Idol?

Moderator: Lisa Harmon, Director, Creative Services, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company
Panelists: Sam White, Creative Director, eROI
Jim Spence, Designer, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company
Mike Corak, Director of Interactive Services, Mighty Interactive

It is here. You know it, I know and your customers know it. So what does mobile mean to email marketers? I am sure you have some thoughts as to your own campaigns seeing them on your iPhone, gPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or yes (gasp) Palm Treo – but I wanted to take some time the past 2 weeks to look at some examples, test some ideas and look at some things that we can all use to do better.

The top things to look are email rendering, email readability, action paths, ability to complete goals, and need for a mobile version of your website, blog, ecommerce site, or simply a paired down mobile version of the content you are presenting.

The good news is most all companies are in the same boat this point in time so you have time to explore, plan and react.

With eMarketer reporting that over 42% of US consumers are stating that they had a smart phone as of Dec 2009 we need to take this seriously. This same study also reports that nearly 13% of respondents are planning on purchasing one in the next 90 days. Tick Tock. I have also seen some recent studies citing that around 17% of smart phone users are already making purchases. Just imagine if we had mobile friendly emails, campaigns, websites and ecommerce. What a difference that would make in these numbers. So what is it going to take 60%? 70%? Most likely it is just going to take time for companies to start making strides to deliver in this fast growing environment.

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Well we are t-minus 12 days till we descend upon Miami Beach for the annual Email Experience Council conference. Our team is once again in the email design competition facing off against one prior challenger (Mighty Interactive) and a new one (Ogilvy). The last time we met it was a great battle of not only design but reasons behind making design decisions. So without giving away the rounds and brands we have all been working on these past few weeks I wanted to share with you some of the original and new designs that were presented. Look for more attention this year paid to rendering, social, mobile and driving conversions with the campaigns we were tasked to overhaul.

You can view last years PPT, Video and write up here.

The First Round: esurance Campaign – Original

Mighty Interactive:

eROI Design:

Responsys:

Now everyone had a different approach this email but the key things were clearly presenting the savings, using buttons to drive the actions, and pulling in key brand elements (like Erin the heroine) into the action for quick processing and recognition of the sender.

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There have been some great email makeovers recently. They always grab my attention as I think we become so conditioned to emails that rarely adapt or change that we actually turn our response mechanisms off to them. So some new creative takes me by surprise in a good way.

I wanted to share the changes that Hotel Indigo recently took and talk through how they might help them drive more conversion.

The prior emails were always fun and focus on a Haiku but the real estate was poorly used above the fold to really give people they want in exposing them to hotel locations and deals to make some impulse reservation planning. When people are in market they want to be provided with visual choices and not simply a photo of one location that might not be relevant.

There was good placement of the 1-800 number which I always find to be good with travel as people still like to call and talk to someone when they are making a reservation at a new location. But with all the locations listed in a simple text menu there is not phsycological connection to the physical place itself. Call me old fashioned but I like to see where I might lay my head down at night. Photos with travel and hotel email do more for me. With other travel (like airlines and destination travel) emails seeing a city shot might work, but when dealing with hotels lets share some of the hotel itself.

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I have been seeing a resurgence in the use of animated gifs in email campaigns. In the past they have been an eye sore, but this past week I was surprised when one in my iPhone made me stop, pause, and actually pay attention. Now it was a really simple method but got me thinking about how we could use them more (and the fact that they rendered on my mobile device).

But creating action in an email does in fact help sometimes. See Style Campaigns post on it from yesterday.

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I have shared many campaigns that always wow me when they turn the email from vertical (as we all normally expect) to horizontal (scrolling right to left). We have used (at eROI) this approach a few times with client campaigns and had great success. But a few weeks back I wanted to test one vs the other to a random segment of a client list.

Now understand that this was a test. Only a test. We wanted to see if we tried the same creative in a different inbox presentation if it made a significant difference to the overall campaign metrics. Same time of day, same offer, same imagery. Controlled.

Well I wanted to share with you two versions of this campaign and before releasing the results with you to see if you have any ideas on how they performed. I know many of you will have some thoughts about it and hope to hear your hypothesis about the outcome.

You can click on each image to see them in a larger format.

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I’ll be the first to admit that it has been years since I “woke up with the King” but I am constantly impressed with the constant slew of campaigns radiating from the Big Guy in the robe and crown (king of like the eROI Crown don’t you think). This Angry Gram was first sent to me by one of the team – hope he was just sharing and not really ANGRY (since this email he went o Belize for two weeks and I hope he has recharged his batteries).

But let’s take a look at this campaign from an email marketing standpoint.. cool?

The Email – yes this was the Angry Gram I got and it made me angry. Why? Why don’t brands or agencies learn that LONG SCARY URLS WITH TONS OF ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS are not friendly. Mask those in copy – create a tiny URL like KNG.me or BK.me – something rather than that. But then I am am email marketing snob right?

They actually tell me I can opt out from ANY other emails – so if other friends find this site to… hypothetically these emails will never reach me. Does that kill the viral effect/impact? Sure but it also is a great practice to keep people from really getting angry or reporting a spam complaint.

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We are in the midst of another massive shift in the inbox. It is not the inbox itself, but where the inbox lives during the average day of business communication or consumer marketing outreach. Today, it should be known and understood that people are checking email everywhere and at all times, looking on iPhones, Blackberry, Treo, Windows Mobile and maybe even devices we don’t rank as the top mobile platforms yet. So I wanted to put the thought out to you….

Should you care?

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Sure put out an offer, make a price deal, throw in a photo and you have a campaign. Pure Genius… in 2003. But look we are in another time and place now. You might still have the mindset to build launch and blast (sorry for that last one) but your customer is looking for more. Some old skoolers out there with heavy DM background like to argue this and try to stir the pot of the informed by saying it is a numbers game. Sure I won’t argue the numbers game but I will argue to my last breath that if you are not connecting you are not going to meet your goals not matter what they might be.

This example of the new Columbia Sportswear digital strategy reflects this (sure our old Art Director is over there now and took some awesome learning with him – plus they assembled a ROCK STAR team) change in selling.

Rule One: I am here for the product.
Rule Two if I would wear your logo then you are a “Prom King” brand and people love not only your wares but your lifestyle and include you as part of their lives where your wares intersect what they do.
Rule Three: You owe them a relationship – they give you their hard earned money and in this new media world want to participate with you past just throwing on a new super wicking light weight fleece.

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Hotels: Long the source of good and bad experiences, wild nights, hallway yellers, desires to not get up as early as you normally do and just lay in bed a little while longer… places of things that you share.

So why is this relevant? Well we have long seen online retailers focus on driving customer reviews and sourcing their community to rate products they have bought – but pulling it out into a hotel chain newsletter is a great idea. Sure travel aggregators like Travelocity have done it for a while, but rarely do I notice hotel chains doing it. (would love to see car rental companies do it by airport code)

But Tablet Hotels had recently added Guest Reviews next to the view details text call to action. One might think that you would be more prone to asking them to book now OR make a reservation – but the fact is that they are giving their travelers the ability to influence a booking. Great idea.

Also not that when they are introducing their new properties they are taking a different approach to those and leading with price and rates as opposed to starting rate and offers/value prop. I think not using the review on new properties is a safe approach as when opening anything new you need to get your sea legs under you before you have everyone firing on all cylinders. Give them some time to get a collection of Guest Reviews before you open them up to lead with in your email campaigns.

This brings into question if you did a program like this would you be transparent and allow everything to go free on these reviews (answering publicly those that are bad and making amends)? I put this out there as I would say yes but I can see legal and the (more…)

Sure you have heard this once or twice, heck you might have even used the line yourself. But what I am so encouraged by is seeing Abercrombie & Fitch continue with a strong mix of expected, long and WIDE emails entering into this retail season. We have seen close to 16 in the past weeks and see no sign of ending, to me this means that it is working with their email subscriber base. That for me is very exciting as I am a BIG fan of the WIDE email. Now I don’t want everyone to be jumping on the WIDE band wagon (sorry for the TUESDAY IS THE BEST DAY TO SEND EMAIL CAMPAIGNS – guys it is different across lists, industries, and many other factors), but I am hoping to see a few more companies give some new ideas a try in the inbox.

One other thing it looks like is that they are learning what is working when trying these formats out. I have seen PLUS 2700 pixel wide formats (too big for Outlook) and now this one is 1550 by 700 pixels. To me that is a good sweet spot to test. The range of 1700 to 2200 pixels is kind of a good place to try and still have some good controls in place.

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So these past 7 weeks (July 17th to August 27th), I have been reporting and tracking the email campaigns from Abercrombie and Fitch on the use of WIDE, horizontal email formats. I have seen 12 in total over this period of time and have been fascinated with the results that they might be getting from these tests. It is not very often that retailers, or anyone for that matter, use this format and as I saw more and more come out I was sure that it was due to great results.

Why? Well they are a smart marketing machine. After hypothesizing on my own and with others in the industry, I thought it was time to reach out to their team and ask. Since we had placed our “Spy” KillROI (the eROI Spam fighting Robot) into the AF offices some time ago we had an in. I reached out at the end of last week to see if they had some details that they would not mind sharing publicly with the rest of us to learn from. Now what I can share is not going to be the top secret results. As there are others out there that they compete against that would love to copy what they are doing (actually I have now spied American Eagle ripping off, I mean testing, the same WIDE idea) and we don’t want that.

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We know that so many people spend time and money to create an email template that works well in all the email clients, save time and money with each new campaign, build an expected email for subscribers to know where to look and what to do, and give some flexibility for promotions and new content. But what gets to me is when people fail to actually use and complete a template leaving a area of it blank. It feels so JV to me and makes me wonder why they don’t take the time to see what else can be added, or simply edit the template to work for that campaign.

As I travel frequently I am signed up for most of the Airline emails and am impressed with most of them. But SW seems to frequently be the culprit in using an email template and failing to use it right. I mean they are a discount airline so could this lack of content save them money? Doubt it.

What I would hope that you learn from this post is to look at how you are using your templates if you use them in your email platform and find ways to create a few versions of them so that you can not leave massive blocks of emptiness in them. It feels unprofessional and to me shows a lack of effort by the email marketer. Even taking the time to reorganize the content in this case could have helped them to deliver a flushed out email, avoiding the gaps.

Have you ever been guilty of rushing a campaign out the door with a lack of content or taking the time to button it up?

Here is the funny thing about this email that I am critiquing, I actually booked a flight from it for a trip this month… so maybe it does not matter in the short run to conversion, but instead does some harm to the overall brand.

Thoughts?

That’s right folks, we are going to give away some of my time and other members of the eROI team to audit one of your email campaigns.

What does this mean for you?

Well one lucky person is going to get some time from us to comb through the creative, opt in process, profile systems, opt out and overall execution of one of your email marketing campaigns. We will spend time as a team with the winner of this contest to review what you are doing right, wrong, and what we would suggest to change to your process and campaign. You will get a deliverable like the ones we do for many of our clients that you can take action from.

How do you enter? Glad you asked…

What we are looking for it for you to send us your WORST campaign or one you want help with improving. All you need to do is send it to me and then wait for the results. We will be closing this contest down next Monday, August 24th at 5pm. So don’t delay and get it in to us. You can submit more than one if you want to make your chances better.

We will announce the winner next Tuesday, August 25th in this blog and then start to work on it so that you can take some action in time for the Sept – Dec end of year rush.

I am really excited about this and hope to see a large number of submissions.

To enter:

Send and email to dylan AT eroi DOT com. In the subject line write – My Entry

Include a link to the creative OR attach the JPG of the email.

If you wish to have us consider the landing page, opt in page etc please note the URLs.

Include your name, email and contact information as well so that we can only contact the winner.

I think that this is going to be a lot of fun and am looking forward to your emails.

I pulled out an article I wrote recently that was featured in iMediaConnection that you might enjoy. It covers some past posts that I wrote into one article that highlights the things that you should look at to learn from with your email marketing campaigns.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Ultimate Email Fail

The more experience you gain as an email marketer, the more you come to understand the true purpose of an email. It isn’t simply to blast something to subscribers without relevancy or reason. It isn’t to make a quick, dishonest buck off them. It isn’t to pull off a massive bait-and-switch. It isn’t even to release the hounds on the competition. It’s about nurturing, building trust and relationships, and ultimately increasing and solidifying the reputation of your brand.

Every email sent must have a purpose and needs to personally relate to the subscriber. If the email lacks personalization or has no purpose, you’re taking a risk that may cause subscribers to not only opt-out of your emails, but also mentally and emotionally opt-out from any future engagement with your brand. When this happens, the recipient immediately becomes emotionally unsubscribed. We in the industry identify it with a very technical term: email marketing fail.

Everyone fails at some point. A recent study by Return Path discovered that up to 20 percent of top brand marketers continue to send emails to addresses on their lists that have unsubscribed — more than 10 days after a confirmed unsubscribe request.

Read the full article here >>