Now the colors black and white are stylish colors. They are both elegant colors that can really make a campaign stand out. She shared the results how used alone they made a big difference in test but also took it a little farther showing how they can work together. Now I like her use of the black frame on the white background, but taking a simple look at them again I really wanted to see how some other programs were using them and how they made me feel.

Well just after (might she have led the trend?) I read her article I noticed one email I get each week make the switch from the black border and white body to an all white body. Why is this important? Well in looking at them the new white one not only made the content more readable, but it also made the colors stand out and pop more. When you have a newsletter with more content, information architecture plays and important role and clearing the colors away from the content made this stand out to me.

Take a look at the old version:

This email used the black border and background outside with the white content blocks. Now the color bars to do a good job breaking up the sections, but not until I saw the new version did I realize how hard it was to scan, read and drive me to action. Thoughts from you?

But then they changed it all up on me this week, and maybe on you. Before I tell you what I think really works here, take a look for yourself.

Look at how cutting the copy, shrinking the header, removing the black border and background really make the content stand on its own. Not only does it work, but it allows the colored section headers allow the content to be much easier to read and visually navigate.

Maybe simpler is better in email. We always try so hard to design great emails but maybe what we are doing at times interferes with the content itself. Maybe what we should all test in content heavy email newsletters to to let the copy and content do the work, as that is what we are all really after right?

I would love to hear your thoughts and thank you Anna for making me pay attention to this a little more.

I know sounds too good to be true right? Well we are trying to put our team out there to help you. We look at and work on 1000’s of campaigns across every market niche out there each year, and with 7 plus years of doing this at eROI alone we wanted to allow people to get some tangible actions that they can take that are relevant to their job roles and email marketing plans and not just sit in another session.

Email Marketing – Auditing your Email Workflow

Learn how to engage your target audience through effective and branded emails. The experts at eROI will help you audit your email workflow from creative to deliverability and show how you can turn a dud into a success.

So we hope to see many of you there and make sure to sign up when you arrive to guarantee your spot at our table with us. Make sure if you do that you bring the things you want us to review. As player/coaches ourselves and eternal students of digital/email marketing we are really excited to be in a place to help you out in person.

We hope to see you there. And if you can’t make it for some reason you can always drop us an email or call as we are happy to take a look under the hood for you to make some calls on what might add some horsepower and drive some more RPM into your campaigns.

But what was it? The email itself was exactly the same size as all of their other ones. I had to actually hold them side by side to make sure as the image hat tip to the wide email format – sideways scrolling- makes you think it would continue on. I dove deeper into the image mapping and everything was going to the right places, so I wonder what percentage of the subscriber base actually found that arrow to the right and used it to go to the landing page.

Note that it is a interesting tactic to act as if something might have gone wrong, was cut off, or that more is hiding past the email itself. But I would love to know if people where actually drawn to the arrow.

As you can see from the creative they might have taken a little risk and gone wide with the 7 day a week approach. If you look to the landing page that the arrow takes you to, it is rather easy to see how they might have experimented and pulled this off. It would have been a good test, but not to steal any thunder from what we see here… this is a good test as well. I would have looked to do this in this way as well as the wide way and A/B test them here to see what the difference would be. And maybe they did and I was in one of the groups.

My only tip on this is I would have made the arrow work harder. I feel it was lost in the inbox as I was reading this email and I think with a different treatment it might have drawn me in more and made it clearer to me where to go.

What do you think about this? Was it effective? Would you have looked for more?

UPDATE:

I was forwarded this nice alternate gender version. I like the tie in the subject line and some of the other copy changes. Same campaign just tailored by gender all ecom in fashion should be as a default.

Nice work BR on getting targeted and focused.

I would have loved to have some actual scrolling ability in the email itself but I think they did a great job with the approach, copy and execution as a whole.

I know sounds too good to be true right? Well we are trying to put our team out there to help you. We look at and work on 1000’s of campaigns across every market niche out there each year, and with 7 plus years of doing this at eROI alone we wanted to allow people to get some tangible actions that they can take that are relevant to their job roles and email marketing plans and not just sit in another session.

So we hope to see many of you there and make sure to sign up when you arrive to guarantee your spot at our table with us. Make sure if you do that you bring the things you want us to review. As player/coaches ourselves and eternal students of digital/email marketing we are really excited to be in a place to help you out in person.

We hope to see you there. And if you can’t make it for some reason you can always drop us an email or call as we are happy to take a look under the hood for you to make some calls on what might add some horsepower and drive some more RPM into your campaigns.

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

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.

There are not many tools out there to report on mobile client engagement (Pivotal Veracity has MailboxIQ that does it) yet but I expect to either see more tools hit the market this year OR marketers getting smarter about testing emails to look at Web Analytics reports from their email campaigns. Either way it is time that you start to pay attention to these metrics in your own reporting and find ways to track and build on these stats. With a recent campaign we ran we had the fortune of already having some of this data which allowed us to build emails, mobile versions of emails, microsites targeted to work on mobile devices and ways to drive engagement via that channel.

So what do you need to know.

1. Odds have it that your emails don’t either don’t work right OR they are hard to read/act. In looking at some samples of some recent campaigns I receive on my iPhone prior to viewing them at the desktop I found that some companies are not really paying attention to the mobile rendering

experience. Now I am not saying that they do not render, but they either are hard to read OR they do not lead to mobile friendly sites. That kills the campaign right there. Take some time to experience your own campaigns on a mobile device if you have not already and try to get to the goals of your own marketing.

One company we have recently found is doing some great things with their emails. The way that they are coding them creates a fluid layout that no matter what size device or where you read it stretches and changes the fonts, images, etc to the right size. I am looking at how they did this so well as I think that is it something we can all learn from. Now I do not think that this approach can work for all emails. Why? Well from this one and others I have tested it looks to only work right with simple HTML copy based emails. Emails that are image heavy might present some challenges.

The image to the left here is an example of how it reworks itself to format exactly on the iPhone. While it sure does get long, it is really easy to read and renders so nice. But take that same email and look at it in a desktop email client (the one here is Apple Mail). It reworks itself to stretch to the environment and can be manipulated no matter what size you change your preview window or the full message to be. Pretty neat I think. It is an idea worth look at more and seeing how you can build your templates or HTML to work for your needs. Extra points to them that is was a list hygiene campaign working on getting their customer database in order.

2. You don’t have the rendering information you need. So you want to make some changes but yet you really don’t have a lot of information to help you craft these campaigns. Well you are in luck. I took some time to test not only preview size but also looked at functionality size when it comes to rendering and ability to scroll not only up and down but left to right. No with most smart phones like gPhone or iPhone we did not see challenges in the left to right scroll as they use a browser type environment, but with other phones we see some limitations.

Here are some shots of the Pixel test we run in some of the clients.

iPhone: Ability in Horizontal to render over 960Pixels (sorry for the sideways shot as this was in horizontal layout mode.)

iPhone: Vertical Layout over 600 pixels.

gPhone: 600 pixels in vertical layout but ability to scroll horizontal to an unlimited length. We actually only tested to 2800 pixels but it looks like it can go indefinitely.

So what does this mean? It means we all need to test. We know that presently there are some abilities to try new things but until we test we will not know for sure. And the wild card is that when new software updates or new phone models emerge we will need to test again.

3. It is not just about the email. Well you knew that right? The email is just the overall experience gateway to what we are tasked as marketers to provide. We need to be looking at the next steps in the mobile web site or simplify it with mobile campaign pages. We have been rolling out new mobile versions of sites lately when we build them for clients, but here is something you may benefit from… we develop a large percentage of websites with custom WordPress CMS platforms. Why would this help? Well if you are doing the same you can leverage many of the development communities plugins to create built in mobile versions of your sites or campaigns. I know that this will not work for everyone and in that case you need to look at creating mobile versions of your site. It is rather hard and can be expensive to do this for large sites, so start small and focus on the experience and goals.

Some recent examples to share would be.

Moonit: Mobile version of core website with Facebook Connect Mobile

Banfield Mobile version of website for core needs.

In the end there are a lot of things to look at and evaluate not only from an external use standpoint but also from an internal ability view. No matter the outcome 2010 is the time that you start to move these projects into your company goals so that you can step up and have an experience no matter the device that drives to engagement and conversion.

Look for some more test and ideas soon or share with me some examples you have come across.

]]> http://theemailwars.com/2010/01/20/investigation-into-mobile-email-marketing/feed/ 7 http://theemailwars.com/2010/01/18/what-will-email-idol-bring-this-year/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-will-email-idol-bring-this-year http://theemailwars.com/2010/01/18/what-will-email-idol-bring-this-year/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:39:30 +0000 Dylan Boyd http://theemailwars.com/?p=2377 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.

Round Two: Children International Newsletter – Original

Mighty Interactive:

eROI:

Responsys:

Round Three: At-A-Glance Promotion/Newsletter – Orginal

Mighty Interactive:

eROI:

Responsys:

Now as you can see from all of the examples everyone took a slightly different approach at all 3 emails and had their reasons for doing so. It was a great panel presentation that was packed to the walls. So this year it it moving to the Day Two Keynote session so that everyone can participate and share the process, thought and creative. But in keeping with the ideas of growing and learning (aka testing) that we all profess in our own work, keep your eyes peeled for some changes to the event/presentation. It will be a great one with some very cool brands, concepts and changes based on the factors we all need to be considering in our email marketing campaigns.

I hope to see you all there and feel open to introduce yourself to any of our team that will be around at the conference.

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.

The new layout does a much better job of reducing the header image while still having the city shot (hero shot) and the copy. But with the text location menu moving down the left hand side and actual room and location photos, information and ways to see what each offers is much better for me to make a decision and explore. Missing from this new layout (which might be their strategy) is pricing/deal information. If you look at many other hotel emails you will see that they incorporate costs or deals with the location information – which I always feel helps me to make decisions with more knowledge.

Overall the change is a good one. Looking for better use of pre-headers, discounts, costs and other decision making information would make this a home run. But remember all of this review is written without any true knowledge of the metrics and performance of this email. It may or may not be out performing the old one, I don’t have that info. But as a whole I enjoy the changes and like to see how they have made the changes that only add to the presentation of the options we have to select from.

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

I have attached some screen captures from my own iPhone below. Makes you want to try a few in one of your upcoming campaigns to see if it works for you.

The take away is that you should not feel confined to keep your emails the same each and every time but look to create a unique and unexpected experience. Testing only brings you closer to success.

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.

Working with the creative with this client is a pure joy as they have some of the most amazing photos to work with. You might not think it matters, until you take a look. Amazing. Heck I never get tired of seeing some of these images as they are so powerful and magnificent.

So here we go and I await your thoughts.

Let’s lead with vertical as is what you expect. Notice all the best practices employed in this email. Pre-headers, large headlines, clear buttons to drive action above the fold, and powerful images to drive the downward scroll. At the bottom of the main call to action you will find secondary offers, as well as clear social integration elements.

Just what you would expect in an email. I know that main image is really long, but it is powerful enough to make the reader want to see it all. Trust me here.

We then took the creative and changed it to work in a horizontal format. I know what the hell are they thinking trying to make people do something they are not used to and we could bet very few of them have ever seen in their inbox before. So what did we do to make it work right? First careful attention is paid to width. As you can scroll down forever in an email inbox, you cannot do so from left to right. There are boundaries in some popular email clients that do not allow emails to be larger than 2500 pixels. We err on the safe side and go no larger than 2220 pixels in most cases. We also added an anchor tag placed right where most preview panes would allow it to be seen that allowed the user to move right without scrolling but just a simple click. Little trick but it works great.

We also took the most important step and tested it on all email clients as well as mobile just to make sure that there would not be any issues with the experience. When you are messing with the norms, it is good to know how to make it work right.

So with seeing the two of these emails, which do you think did better? Or did one do better than the other? Hmmm we will have to let you know later as I would really love to hear your thoughts.