The Email Wars

We all know that content is king. And we know just as well that one of the hardest things to do is constantly create new content in time for all of your email marketing campaigns. What makes it interesting was this approach that Zinio took a few weeks back by looking at the content that they create for their publishers and using it as a way to produce an impactful daily email that not only is cool but really does a great job of exposing their subscribers to the breadth of content available to digital subscribers.

Now how hard was this? Not too terribly difficult from speaking to them. It was something that was readily available and already being produced in the digital publications they worked on every day. So why not leverage what already exists and use it as a source of compelling content to share and drive engagement and exposure for not only their clients but for themselves.

The great part about this idea is that it completely maps back to the business goals… selling digital magazines and publications. WIN.

It makes me think about all of the clients we work with that might have existing content that they don’t realize they might be able to use, driving down the cost of campaign creation and mapping back to success. Are you blogging, Tweeting, posting, writing, uploading images, videos etc in your other business units and marketing activities? If so are you making sure that the time spent doing all of these things are being utilized and exposing them to the fullest in your audiences? So many times I see companies all working hard on siloed content that is only being used by certain teams and being shared with specific people. Why not think bigger and think about how you can share this content across relevant segments of your markets? Who knows you might just stumble on a gem of a email marketing program and end up boosting the bottom line not only of your team but of the company as a whole.

Get out and take stock of what you are doing and what you are producing to see if you too can benefit from content in your companies already existing tasks.

What a difference a little TLC in updating your email creative can make. Although you might not be overhauling the information that goes into your emails, just working on better information presentation and organization can make a huge impact on the readability of the content itself.

I was happy to see an eROI client take this to task with the updating of their daily news email recently. In applying some simple techniques of colors, boxes, headline copy sizes and the addition of some images it is now such a better experience. What really made an impact to me was the division of information/content in the changes. I can now easily scan and make decisions based on what is important in this email.

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Come on now we all know that black and white is so 2002. What we need to see more of is great colors used to drive the user through the email creative. When you see this email it makes this hotel seem so much more than just a place to lay your head on your next stay. It is selling the experience of travel and the many things you might be able to enjoy.

What some people might immediate feel about this creative though is that it is ALL image based. So little copy that what happens if images are blocked? I agree on this point, but since I did not have my images off nor did I have this coming to an inbox that blocks images I cannot tell you if they had alternate versions set up to render differently in email clients with different settings.

But what I do know is that the visual presentation was enough to make me want to read down to the bottom of the email. It is simple, well organized and easy to navigate. Even the “footer” area with the city names were great links to “save” my scroll and incent me to explore the cities that I travel to often in order to see what might be of interest to me on my next trip.

Why do colors matter to drive action? Well they make us take notice of action. Anne Holland shows us this in a recent test she ran that might help you understand why. I encourage you to try bringing more “life” to your emails and the experience that color brings to action.

There was an interesting idea at Online Marketing Summit in Chicago last week about mapping the image paths you use in your emails to file locations that you can change IF there is a timely event. What does this mean? Well imagine that you have a time based event or sale going on and your email creative has images in it that give a time based offer or discount code. So what happens to this email if your subscribers open it after the event is over? Should they still get that image and offer? OR could you control the email after the send?

Not at all like this image here in this post, but it is a little tricky and if you do not do it right you could fail. What I mean by this as if you are going to do it you need to be really careful that you are matching the file path location exactly. If not you risk inserting the wrong image or blowing out the creative. They need to be the exact same size.

Well I think that you can and maybe you should. Why? Well to get an email that is now past it’s date could create a bad experience. Maybe you REALLY wanted that offer and it is gone. You can swap out those images when a sale or event is over if you hard map the image locations in the email creative. Then when the time comes you can simply replace those images at those hard coded image paths so that if they get called or loaded they are replaced with new ones. No one ever knows. No harm no foul.

Many email platforms store or cache your email creative from those that I am familiar with so you will need to look into that in your specific scenario. But if possible you could extend the life your your campaigns to have an even greater impact on those that did not open them (due to so many reasons) after your event is over.

It was an interesting idea that was advanced that I thought I would share with you to see if it might help you in your email campaigns.

Just how wide should and email be? I know that everyone builds them a little different when it comes to girth, but I have not seen many under 300 px wide. This one in point is 265 px wide. So skinny I thought for a moment that maybe I had a rendering issue. But alas I scrolled down and found the rest.

Now I see lot of European email marketers roll it thin, but in my opinion they are running it way too narrow for the US. Now Icebreaker is a NZ based company with new North America HDQs in PDX and I might need to walk up there soon and give them an hour on changing the approach to the US audience.

Why? Well ake a look. They left so much on the table. Typcially we see emails between 500 and 610 px wide in design. Over twice the width of this email. If they would have only looked to stretch the body out they would not have driven the actual product of this ecom email so far down, well below the fold.

The header image was engaging but there was nothing to do with it. Once you got to the actual product it was a 4 by grid and little copy and no actional buttons in site. Time to get the button genie out and create some Homer Simson-esque button pushing desires in the US audience.

Now I love Icebreaker as a whole, amazing clothing and the site (if you have not seen it) does something I wanted to do for a Natural Foods company some time back… they source trace back every garmet sold to the exact farm that it was sourced from. Amazing.

So skinny — > Good or bad? You know my take.

Good design makes an email. There I said it. All we read about in blogs, magazines, white papers so often is how data, timing, delivery, frequency, etc, etc make a campaign. Well if you don’t have design and a clear eye for email layout you are only fighting 3/4 of the fight. In the end if it gets delivered, has good copy but the design fails, then all that work fails. I want to challenge everyone to spend more time on the pretty and not just the nitty gritty.

There are so many emails that I could use to illustrate this, and most likely you or I could shoot some holes in this one, but it is just so damned pretty. Design is an art in itself that makes people have an experience that represents how people feel about you as a company. So please try to put your best foot forward when you put another email into the inbox. Create an expeirence through your design that makes people look forward to your next interaction with them. Just text and shiny buttons only go so far.

Are you happy with your design or your internal resources? I know many people I talk to are happy with the efforts but want some outside help. Well lucky for you we are not only in the business of business making, but in the business of functional pretty.

I don’t pimp eROI that much, but as a reader I think you owe it to yourself to look to us for your next idea or campaign. OK self promotion over. Thanks for allowing me the rant.

When you go into designing an email campaign most likely the last thing that you are thinking about from a marketing perspective is the footer, right? This is where you tell them who it came from, how to get off a list, and the address that they can use to tie a note to a brick to hurl through your window (I use our CEOs Suite # as it is much closer to the street level and I like to make things easy). But what about providing some additional value in the footer and even some humor to make people think twice about bailing out?

I noticed this past week one of the email I subscribe to from the UK that does just this. The footer it seems is not just a past thought, but just as important to the voice and goals of the email campaign itself.

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Morgan’s Hotel Group is a favorite of mine not only for the timeliness of the emails that they send, but the design that they use. They seem to have a balanced frequency that, for me the traveler, is relevant to me looking to book that week or for an upcoming trip. I seem to relish the times that they deliver something to my inbox.

But I wanted to focus on this latest one for the good and the ways that they could improve them.

1. The pre-header: Now leading with “If you can’t view this email” is no longer the best thing to design into your email. Why? Well it is the first thing you can see. While having this element is important, more important today is to lead with what is in the email, the offer or the value of what is below. With so many people reading emails on mobile devices and processing emails faster, getting to the point in a clear manner is the way to go. They should add a text pre-header to the top of the email to focus on this, then follow with the “If this is all messed up or your images are turned off” method. Leading with failure is a failure with the goals of the campaign.

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I came across an interesting study this past week on the impact that images have on heat mapping in emails and the web. The study provided a few examples that they tested but this one in particular stood out to me due to the focus on the face instead of the copy and product.

What they found was that people are conditioned to look a the facial features of people when presented with the image on the left instead of reading the copy as much as they might be inclined to when the person in the photo was looking at the copy or product.

IMAGE from USEABLE WORLD

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As I am always opting in for more email programs as I work with new clients in industries I get to see ALOT of email ideas and creative. But I am constantly floored by the Abercrombie emails. Now don’t get me wrong I love them and they always get opened, but what exactly do they sell again? Is it young people, youth or sex. Now I can tell you that I do not spend a lot of time shopping with them and that their stores, sites and creative is compelling, but I just never have a clear idea of what I am buying or what they want me to buy.

I assume that they want me to buy into the brand and along the way maybe jeans, a sweatshirt, a hat, and from this email it turns out cologne. Or is it something that makes people shove their hands down your pants? Actually another female co-worker I asked for an opinion told me that a nice young girl was being “helpful” and helping this young man that smelled so good tuck in his shirt. Yep, silly me as I must just be an “old married” now and had a hard time seeing that.

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Let me lead with the fact that I like the company used as the example in this post. What happened can happened to anyone, even with testing prior to a email campaign. I know from talking to them that they did not see this in campaign pre-tests before they sent this email. I feel the pain.

Now having complete control over the rendering of an email campaign is something that most all of us test and account for prior to sending. But there can be factors in the set up of any random user’s inbox that can tweak your creative. We have seen it many times. This is a simple table blow out on the right hand side that should be able to be controlled but at times tables go wild in email clients. This might not happen even in all of the users that use this email client, but it can happen from time to time.

Testing it important but the purpose of showing you this is that is happens, even to the best of us.

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You have the idea.

You have the copy.

You have the creative.

Everything is done and you have an email marketing program/campaign that you are ready to get out the door. Check, Check, Check. But what happens when it leaves your location and enters into email inboxes around the globe? Well you could get on your knees, pray to the gods of the WWW that all will be well, OR you can continue to go blind into battle hoping that you do not get flanked by image or HTML rendering along the way, the device or the inbox. IMHO both of those methods are not aligned to produce the best results.

So what if you had the ability to know before hand what you need to do to have your hard work pay off when it arrives? Do you know that you can see this before you send it? At eROI we always test our emails for delivery and rendering with projects that we work on. So why doesn’t everyone else?

Maybe it is costs, but there is very little cost to test an email. Maybe it is time, well if you don’t have the time then maybe you should move to HR or Building Maintenance. It is typically just not having a provider, partner or solution to use. If you work with us, you have it all.

I have added an example of our latest email newsletter to show you what we see before it goes out the door which allows us to make design or coding changes to give this campaign the best possible chance of working. Testing is the norm and if you are not testing you are fighting battles at half speed.

Let us know if you would like to run some tests to gauge inbox rendering performance and be in a position to share with your team, agency, execs what needs to be done. We will help you build a case in 24 hours or less.

Love is in the air, or in the inbox this week with many brands reaching out to their subscriber lists with Valentine’s Day email campaigns. Now many retailers are predicting that the economy is going to impact this major retailing holiday as well. Are we all going to cut flowers from our yards and make our own greeting cards this week? Maybe the economy is taking some of the “love” out of the air. Fear and uncertainty can do this I think. 

But let’s get back on track here. I had three examples that I wanted to share with you of Valentine’s day email campaigns that are worth pointing out. 

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Well not only was it one of the best events at the eec conference this last week but we wanted to make sure that those of you that could not be there for it could enjoy it and learn from it afterwards. So we have posted the video in a round by round format as well as have loaded the presentation up to Slideshare for you to enjoy and pass the knowledge to your teams.

It was eROI Vs. Responsys Vs. Mighty Interactive and it was close. The client projects were for eSurance, Children International and At-A-Glance. Great ideas, approaches and best practices all the way around from all 3 teams. One real interesting part of this is that none of the agencies were allowed to talk to the client in any way, shape or form before they went to design. Totally blind… only able to rely on THE Eye of the Tiger.

Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon was the Moderator/Referee of the event and TEXT to vote was used in real time round by round on the screen.

We look forward to doing this event again at another upcoming conference in Indy. Connect with you there?

Round 1- Round 3 can be found on the eROI Youtube channel if you want to watch it BLOW by BLOW and learn from the experts in email design WHY they made the decisions they did. 

A thought I often have when seeing so many email campaigns everyday is: “Is there an ideal font size in email?”. Now I know that some browsers and email clients have some extra settings to the user that can change font sizes based on their preferences, but shouldn’t you start out thinking bigger? 

This example of a recent email I got made me think about this again as the fonts were so small in comparison to all the others I get. Sure you might have a lot to say in a small environment, but if I can’t read it easily why does it even matter what you have to say? 

Thinking about usability in email/the inbox is important to understand. We all know that we have a very short time in email to tell someone what is important, what our call to action is and what to do. So if they have to squint and work to read it chances are that they will just move on. 

Give yourself the 3 second test with your own emails. Do you:

1. Have a clear message?

2. Use just enough copy to incite action?

3. Have the ability to easily read the sentences and copy without a magnifying glass. 

Class dismissed.