The Email Wars

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 >>

Look… I have not always been a fan of animated Gifs in emails, sometimes they work with a promo or special event, sometimes they just make things look cheap. But this Saturday AM (PS great day to get me thinking about going to drive a new car) I got this email from Lexus that has captured my attention. I think I might have looked at it 30 plus times and shown it to 4-5 people already. Maybe it was the car, but I have really thought that the idea behind the use of this was good.

I mean you run a risk running an animated gif/image as the lead into your email, the whole email in essence could be completely blank if the images are suppressed. You might not find it the biggest deal, but without any content it looks spammy. Is the fun animation worth the risk?

Now it is not because it is an animated GIF as the lead image in the email, but how it was executed. It was different. I mean it loads with basically an empty top half (which is all I could see) with a search box. My honest first impression of it is that it was junk. But then it started the dance. Slowly loading in terms into the search box (storytellling) that kept me engaged. Then the reveal of the brand and the car. It was clever.

It has had my head spinning with new creative ideas to test. And I might even go take that car for a drive too.

Here is the web version of the email so that you can see how it works. I was trying to grab the code from my inbox but could not get it to work perfectly. So enjoy the execution outside the medium here

Have you see animated gifs used well in emails? Do you have any good examples so share?

I am always fascinated with the horizontal scroll email. It holds a special place in my heart in terms of creativity and interrupting the typical inbox experience. Others I have seen are not in favor of it as they thing people will not know how to use it. I call BS on that.

Now I do not think it should be a staple unless it works for your email marketing programs but it can be effectively used as an interrupter at times during the year to mix things up and make people get re-engaged in your programs. Things get stale, people begin to get conditioned to your layouts, you need to mix it up once in a while. I am so conditioned that I actually find that I stop buying from brands where I am not enticed as the campaign look, layouts and offers are stale and consistent. I need some email shock therapy from time to time to make me wake up and convert.

I have covered many of these in previous posts, but this week Abercrombie and Fitch has hit me with a Tri-Fecta. Instead of scantily clad men and women (um boys and girls) they are hitting me with product emails that are horizontal. Although I am not someone that owns any AF I do think that they do an amazing job with the brand, photos, ads and enticing people to want to buy.

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I am always on the look out for testing programs, sampling programs that drive online to offline behavior. Now when it comes to my morning ritual of stopping at the “corner” Starbucks to kick start my heart I love when I actually get to test the campaign on myself.

So the first step was the email. Got it. Loved it. Simple. Great clear header copy that I could read in 3-4 seconds to drive my eye down to the goal. Little too much fluffy copy in between me and the goal, but the relevant image of the coffee and pastry kept me on the hunt. The button being at the bottom is OK, for a recovery, but they should have moved the action to the top of the email and then used the recovery footer as well. The wording on the button was interesting to “Print this Invitation” as I would have felt coupon would be more relevant, but who knows maybe they tested a few first (or was I part of an A/B test?).

So from there to the printable “Invitation”. Loved it. Even the ability to SHOW it on your mobile device and not even hand them a printable version was a great combo to test on here.

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We are all familiar with the selling of ad space or sponsorship of your email newsletters and publications in the standard CPM model. Sure ads are a simple way to drive some revenue to support your email marketing efforts, but really this model is for publishers and not really used for many of the brand communications that most of you use. Unless there is a creative fit for them OR even a way to bring in one of your supporting partners to give them some visibility to your audience.

Selling space in new ways is something that I like to look for in emails that I get as if there are additional ways to monetize your email campaigns then I am going to add it to my list of ideas. (more…)

How many of you have played around with changing the look and feel of the gmail client to allow a custom background image in the inbox. The ability to now skin your own email client is cool and I have done so on my own gmail account, but these past few weeks we have seen some rendering challenges with email campaigns sent to this ISP due to these custom backgrounds.

Now at first I figured that it would not have an impact on the actual area where the email renders, but with some client templates we have noticed some challenges. Now not all campaign creative designs have been impacted, but we have found that those with dark backgrounds in some of the default choices gmail gives users one can sometimes have an issue. What occurs is if you have a dark background in your email creative and a dark skin applied in your inbox it can create a blur between the email and the actual rendering space making an impact on the email creative itself.

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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.