Do you seek the holy grail of email personalisation? Or as it’s known by its other name: one‑to‑one content.
As technologies have become more sophisticated, so too have customer expectations. But to reach the point of true personalisation is a journey with several steps.
1. Say my name
Let’s start with the bargain basement of personalisation. Greeting your customer by name in a subject line has been measured to increase open rates by more than 25%.
Just don’t mess that name up. "Hi, Adrian" is good. But "Hi, ADRIAN", "Hi, adrian", or "Hi, Young" looks bad. Yes, it would be me the customer who had made a mistake with your form in the first place. But the onus falls upon you to validate and fix your data.
2. Preferential treatment
At The Email Factory, we swear by preference centres. What better way to embark on an email journey with a new subscriber than by letting them pick and choose what to receive?
A preference centre gives your customer the choice of content or product types. But why stop there? Grant your customer further control over their inbox by including frequency and timing options.
3. Divide and convert
Whether your mailing list weighs in at a few hundred or a few hundred thousand, it is comprised of individuals. Not everyone is interested in the same content. So why send everyone the same email?
Segmentation is an essential part of email marketing. Divide up your lists into categories and keep your subscribers engaged with relevant content.
4. On your best behaviour
Personalisation isn’t all about what your customer likes but also what they are doing. And none of your customers are doing exactly the same thing at the same time. There are those that have newly discovered your brand. Some have just treated themself to a shiny new product. Others haven’t engaged with you for a while. Your task is to communicate with each of them based on their current actions.
Behaviour‑based emails let you react automatically to your customer’s activity (or lack thereof). When someone signs up, a welcome series is launched. If your customer has recently purchased a product, that can trigger an invitation to review it. For those who haven’t interacted for a while, a re‑engagement programme can rekindle their interest.
5. Where in the world
Your customer’s location matters. Maybe there’s an in‑store event or other locally relevant content to share. You might even want to send automatically-tailored content based on the local weather. Those hooded jackets sound a lot more useful when it’s pouring outside.
Location doesn’t only determine what to send but also when to send. Send time optimisation ensures that your subscribers receive your emails at a time of day that is personally convenient.
6. Welcome to the machine
As humans, we can only do so much. Luckily that "much" includes the development of ever‑more‑sophisticated machine learning software. As email marketers, we can harness that technology and take personlisation to another level.
Product recommendations are the obvious showcase, for now. Why guess at what your customer might like to buy when you can learn patterns from their previous purchasing and browsing activities?
While the current capablities of generative AI have been over‑hyped, its future potential is hard to grasp. Every aspect of your email, from copy to imagery to layout to timing to colouring, could all be generated on an individual basis.
True email personalisation
Your customer is a human and an individual. But they are likely one of many thousands. To talk to them one‑to-one ironically requires a fundamentally impersonal means of machine‑based automation. The concept of chummy person‑to‑person communication is an illusion.
But what really matters is relevance. Present your subscribers with the content that matters to them and the results will speak for themselves.
In the wake of the iOS 15 update, marketers and agencies like The Email Factory faced a stern test of their resilience and adaptability, navigating through the challenges with creativity and determination. As we embraced the shifting landscape and focused on personalised engagement, we discovered new ways to thrive amidst the changes.
However, just as we thought the storm was successfully weathered, here we go again!
With the impending release of iOS 17, Apple is once again set to disrupt the email marketing world, this time with the introduction of link tracking protection. As we take time to analyse the potential impact, it’s time for us to gear up and prepare for yet another round of adjustments to our strategies and practices. So, let’s dive in and explore what lies ahead with iOS 17’s link tracking protection.
Apple’s continuous efforts to prioritise user privacy have led to the introduction of new features, and this time, link tracking protection takes center stage. As industry experts analyse the implications of this update, it becomes evident that email marketers must prepare for a shift in their strategies to navigate the evolving digital terrain.
iOS 17’s Link Tracking Protection:
The key feature of iOS 17 that is set to disrupt traditional email marketing practices is link tracking protection. This security measure aims to shield users from the intrusive tracking of their online activities via hyperlinks in emails. As a result, marketers will face challenges in tracking user engagement, and it’s crucial to understand the implications for future campaign planning.
Implications for Email Marketers:
While the link tracking protection in iOS 17 may pose challenges for email marketers, it’s important to remember that this is not the end of email tracking altogether. Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) use unique links for each and every link in an email, including the unsubscribe link. So, there are still ways to track user interactions to some extent.
However, email marketers should be prepared for potential limitations in data insights related to user behavior. Traditional link tracking methods, such as analysing click-through rates and conversion metrics, may become less effective or even obsolete. As a result, measuring the success of email campaigns could become more complex.
The impact on personalisation efforts should also be taken into account. Access to certain data necessary for creating tailored content may be limited due to link tracking protection. This may make it challenging to understand user preferences and deliver relevant messages, potentially leading to a decline in engagement and conversion rates.
Evolving Strategies and Collaboration:
To adapt to the changing landscape, email marketers will need to devise new strategies that focus on alternative metrics for assessing campaign performance. Traditional methods, like open rates and click-through rates, may no longer provide a complete picture. The emphasis may shift towards engagement-based metrics and user actions that do not rely on link tracking.
Collaboration with Email Service Providers will be vital as iOS 17 rolls out. Marketers should work closely with their ESPs to understand how this update impacts their tracking capabilities. Exploring alternative methods for analysing user interactions and collaborating on potential workarounds will be essential to continue delivering effective email campaigns.
Conclusion:
As iOS 17’s link tracking protection looms on the horizon, email marketers must prepare for a paradigm shift in their strategies. While some challenges may arise, there are still ways to track user interactions to some extent. Most ESP’s unique links and UTM parameters will still work in this iteration of iOS17 but it’s surely only a matter of time before an iOS works out how to stop those too. Staying agile, informed, and open to alternative metrics will help navigate the challenges posed by iOS 17 and continue to deliver impactful and relevant email campaigns. Ultimately, the successful adaptation to iOS 17’s link tracking protection will be a testament to the industry’s ability to evolve with changing technology and prioritise user privacy.
Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should! It’s an old adage and one many email marketers would do well to consider before embarking on their email marketing strategy.
If we start from what is possible the prospect of drawing up an email marketing strategy, budget, resource and timelines is daunting. I like to start from the other end, not what is possible but what does the business need. It sounds simple and the oft flippant response is more sales but that doesn’t always hold true. So start with a blank canvas and decide your business’s short, medium and long term goals. They may all turn out to be the same – sales, sales and more sales.
If that’s the case your email marketing strategy is a fairly simple one. Build product led emails and send them to everyone on your list as often as you can. Automate basket and browse abandonment, cross sell in sales notifications and dispatch notices. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But in truth this approach, even if your end goal is more sales, tends to be a short term solution. Data apathy, data churn, price marginalisation, stock management, all tend to make this approach, in isolation, one that’s unsustainable long term.
Email drives sales
So what to do, as in truth the ultimate goal of any marketing comes down to sales. We dress it up as brand awareness, customer retention, brand engagement, social media presence – but ultimately all marketing has one goal and that’s to drive long term revenues. So, if we accept that we need to plan our email marketing to fulfil long term revenue targets. This is done using a combination of sales and value-added content which engages the customer as well as sells to them. In essence you need to become the trusted source in the inbox. This has its challenges because marketers have an irrational fear of being seen as spammers. In his book, “Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing”, Dela Quist says: “It is time, for legitimate email marketers – who bend over backwards not to be seen as spammers – to stop feeling so guilty about something they don’t even do”. It really is okay to send an email a day, or even two if you have something new and interesting to say.
In order to understand how best to use email we first need to look at how the long term goal is achieved.
List growth
New customer acquisition, grow the number of people you can realistically sell your products and services to. The more people on your list who look like the other people on your list the better.
List retention
This is like the silver bullet. Grow your list using customer acquisition tools and reduce the churn in your database. Increase the time someone stays a customer then the return on your initial CPA becomes exponential.
Automation
Automate touchpoints to deliver relevant and timely content. Keep your user engaged, recognise special life events and deliver new purchase user guides/vlogs/updates.
Example email automation workflow
Loyalty and incentive programs
Make your user feel special, make them part of your inner circle.
Targeted communications
Segmentation in the data based on generic product offerings. Utilising the one-to-one marketing tools available to you to customise your one-to-many emails.
One too many sales emails
Don’t be frightened of emailing everyone in your base every time you have something to say. The idea of one-to-one marketing is in truth not achievable because you’re just not sure what I want next. It’s okay to assume I want something I looked at, just don’t assume I don’t want something else as well or instead.
Next, we will look at how we utilise the strategies outlined above to maximise our customer relationship and ultimately drive higher, long term revenues.
Let’s take a look at how you go about implementing some of the ideas mentioned. It’s time to flesh out the opportunities afforded by the medium of email marketing.
List growth
How do you go about growing your list? You can do this in many different ways, each one having their own level of effectiveness. The standard tools available are:
Newsletter sign-ups:
Have a clear and obvious way of letting people sign up for emails, hiding your newsletter sign up at the bottom of the contact page is almost apologetic. You’ve paid for the eyeballs, now try and capture them. Place the sign up somewhere obvious. Also, look at using downstream popups to incentivise sign up.
White paper downloads:
Put your valuable content behind a simple sign up to access a download page. In old fashioned sales you’re always taught to get a name for a name. No difference here, you have valuable content, the price of which is an email address.
Competitions:
Run competitions on your site, and in your existing email encourage people to sign up to be entered. If possible, give away experiential prizes rather than material ones. People are much more likely to enter a money can’t buy competition.
Referrals:
Incentivise your base to refer people like them to sign up for the newsletter or sales emails. Remember, people know people like them, if they enjoy your emails so will some of their friends.
Example sign-up page
Point of purchase:
Be it on or offline, when someone makes a purchase it is the perfect time to ask permission to market to them via email. Make sure your staff do this routinely if on the phone or face to face in store. Make sure your site has a very obvious sign up tick box available when checking out. If at all possible also advertise text to email gateways in store and incentivise those.
Rented lists:
As long as you manage your expectations, renting lists can still be an effective way of building your database.
List retention
List retention for me is the silver bullet, if you can reduce your churn while at the same time growing your list you should be looking at exponential growth in revenues. Email on Acid believe in a “70/20/10” rule for brand emails. This means 70% of emails should be educational demos, tips, storytelling or advisory information. 20% should “centre on content from thought leaders, creating a feeling across your list that your brand is giving them exclusive access to content” and the remaining 10% should be product-focused. This rule is said to establish valuable relationships with your customers making them feel important, which they are! The more important they feel, the more engaged with the brand they will be.
Automation
Take some of the workload away and automate as many of your emails as possible. There are many tools available to help you collect site side data, send an API call to your email platform and subsequently trigger a timely email reminder. These types of communication tend to have the greatest open and click rates and the highest ROI.
The sort of things you can try are…
Welcome/acquisition:
Welcome programs work best when they come as a series of emails which lead the recipient down various paths of action dependent on whether they open and click a particular email or take a specific site side action.
display block workflow
Basket abandonment:
Someone has put a product in their basket on your site but not completed the purchase in a timely fashion. Post that data to your email automation tool, most of those on the market (ours included) can handle this easily. This data will then populate a predefined template and trigger an email to the recipient encouraging them to complete their purchase. Fresh Relevance in their Rip Curl case study show in excess of 10% of those customers receiving a basket abandonment email go back to purchase the item.
basket abandonment uplift from Fresh Relevance
Browse abandonment:
Almost identical to Basket Abandonment, Browse Abandonment happens when you implement business rules such as “identified email address has viewed a product 3+ times without going further, trigger this template with this personalisation in it”. These type of emails are seen to generate in excess of 3% increase in sales.
Event led:
Birthdays, anniversaries, insurance renewals, these type of emails just sit there in the background and trigger daily depending on when someone matches the criteria. This is a simple but effective way of increasing your brand loyalty and triggering clicks back to your site. In their birthday email, Audit Experian said birthday emails out perform promotional emails in nearly all KPIs
Experian Birthday Emails Campaign Audit KPI’s
Cross Sell:
Not only should you cross sell in your order confirmation emails but also dispatch notifications, delivery confirmation and in truth, any other order point of contact. Forrester Research found a 10% increase in AOV on purchases where a recommendation was clicked on.
I am just scratching the surface of what’s possible with automation, essentially, if you can whiteboard the process we can implement an automation program that will sit in the background and increase your revenues from email.
Loyalty and Incentive programs:
This is just an extension of the Nectar, Clubcard, MyWaitrose (other loyalty cards are available) card you have in your wallet but in an online format. Richer Sounds do this very well at point of sign up. You’re encouraged to be a VIP and you’re told what you’ll get by becoming one. It helps with both list growth and list retention.
Targeted communications:
Your email platform will almost certainly have the functionality to segment based on any data held within your database. You can then send targeted communications to people based on the products they’ve previously bought, those they’ve browsed, those that compliment previously purchased products, the list is almost endless. You can do many different targeted emails or if you can code using the dynamic tags, or outsource that bit to an agency like us, you can build one email that dynamically inserts the relevant targeted element based on the data. It is also possible to use some of the personalisation tools out there to scrape in particular offers from your website in real time and drop them into the dynamic personalised section of the email.
The takeaway
The possibilities and the opportunities afforded to you by utilising the tools available and the skills of a professional email marketing company can have a material effect on your bottom line. It is no coincidence that the companies who have fared better in the current pandemic are the ones whose online presence and email marketing programs are constantly pushing the boundaries, whereas the ones that have struggled were slower to embrace the opportunities afforded them by the technologies available.
Lifecycle marketing is a term that describes the process of engaging with your customers throughout their relationship with your brand, from awareness to loyalty. It is a way of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, based on their stage in the customer journey. But how do you achieve this level of relevance and personalization with email marketing? How do you know what your customers want and need at each point of a lifecycle lasting 2 or more years? How do you create email campaigns that adapt to their changing behavior and preferences?
The answer is simple: you need to think of lifecycle marketing as an aggregation of individual email customer journeys.
What are email customer journeys?
Email customer journeys are the sequences of emails that you send to your subscribers based on their actions and interactions with your brand. They are designed to guide them towards a specific goal or outcome. For example: making a purchase, renewing a subscription, or becoming an advocate.
Email customer journeys can be triggered by various events. Examples include signing up for your newsletter, browsing your website, abandoning a cart, completing a purchase, celebrating a birthday, etc. They can also be based on different criteria, such as demographics, interests, preferences, behavior, etc.
The key to creating effective email customer journeys is to map out the different paths that your audience can take. You can then design email campaigns that cater to each one. For example, you can send a welcome email to new subscribers, a reminder email to abandoned cart users, a thank you email to recent buyers, a replenishment email to repeat customers, a birthday email to loyal fans, etc.
By adding all these individual journeys, you can create a rounded and consistent experience that nurtures your audience throughout their lifecycle. You can also optimise your email performance by delivering relevant and personalised messages at the right time that increase engagement and conversions.
The challenge of complex journeys and the role of expertise
While many email marketing platforms provide templates for simple customer journeys, more complex journeys often require specialised expertise. This is where we can help.
Complex email customer journeys may involve advanced segmentation, triggered emails, dynamic content, and sophisticated optimisation techniques. Our customer journey expertise can assist in building out these complex journeys, leverage our knowledge and experience to ensure success.
Benefits of email customer journeys
Implementing email customer journeys, whether simple or complex, offers numerous benefits for your marketing efforts:
Increased relevance and personalisation: sending emails that align with customers’ needs and preferences at each stage of their lifecycle enhances their satisfaction and loyalty.
Improved engagement and conversions: motivating customers to take action through targeted emails at each stage boosts their involvement and drives revenue.
Reduced churn and attrition: retaining customers’ interest and trust throughout the lifecycle decreases the likelihood of them leaving or unsubscribing.
Enhanced brand awareness and reputation: showcasing your brand’s value proposition and personality in emails reinforces awareness and advocacy among customers.
Conclusion
Lifecycle marketing requires an understanding of your customers’ behavior and preferences at each stage of their relationship with your brand. By creating email customer journeys that cater to individual needs and preferences, you can provide a cohesive and personalised experience.
While many platforms offer simple journey templates, more complex journeys may necessitate specialised expertise. Collaborating with an agency like The Email Factory can provide the necessary skills short-term.
I last wrote about the importance of tone of voice in emails in 2015. While much has changed (in part due to the rise of social apps like Tik Tok and Instagram and more recently generative content AI), many businesses are still creating marketing collateral that comes across as stilted and impersonal when it comes to email.
Whether the excuse is ‘we’ve always done it this way’, fear of brand perception or just plain lack of imagination, adopting a corporate approach no longer fits with how we behave online.
Certain business sectors allow for more flexibility than others but there is scope to increase the appeal of your email messages with colloquial writing.
TV advertising has been doing this for decades because you can see and hear people in situations where anything other than relatable interaction seems out of place (although there are unnatural situations – those cringe-worthy life cover or funeral plan ads for example).
TV ads actually lean toward extremes to create dynamism so human interaction and everyday language is pronounced and quick-fire to make the most of the short message time.
The ways we interact online now is much the same as if we were there in person – screen communication is second nature, especially to Gen X, Z and Alpha.
And now there is a new player in town for writing, creativity and ideas in general; the rise of the robots!
The easy life?
Yes, the likes of ChatGPT can save time and generate copy in the style of a range of writing styles by accessing past works but it’s not original, nor will it work for a brand wanting to express individuality or stand out from the crowd.
I have spoken with time-poor marketers who find it difficult to avoid generative AI, but promising at the least to rework content output to fit their brand, products, current offers and timings.
But even using AI as a start point means the initial creative process suffers and whilst emails shouldn’t be novels, they should have original content, an individualistic approach and be created by people immersed in their brand with mind-mapping capabilities. It’s no bad thing to have a human flaw or two in the mix either.
The alternative is the emails we receive becoming increasingly similar and there are enough of those out there as it is.
AI for email has been around for a while and is one of the tools many ESP software platforms incorporate so digital marketers aren’t afraid of it – but perhaps we should be this time. The pace and global adoption of AI for creative use should be a concern for all of us.
Don’t get lost in the noise
Creating copy for emails is about more than brand voice. We need to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and peers to stand out.
Many marketing emails – particularly in the B2B space – have a generic tone and display stock images in a linear layout in the hope people will read on and click on something. Adopting a conversational approach doesn’t have to be boring or misrepresent your brand.
By sticking to the script – be it generalising or by using output from generative AI – we risk coming across as robotic and detached which means our message becomes less appealing, leading to diminished engagement.
Attention spans are short online and fragmented across multiple channels and devices so it’s critical to engage people as quickly as possible with a friendly and distinctive approach.
The ever-increasing hours we spend with our devices is driving change in communication styles, making a less conversational approach to marketing feel outdated.
Grab me now
Two key areas in marketing emails are the initial headline – which should draw people into the rest of the email – and your call-to-action. Your headline should be succinct and pique interest, maybe using a question or humour as long as it is consistent with the theme and content.
The call-to-action should be different to what we all see too often. ‘Buy now’, ‘Read more’, ‘Don’t miss out’, ‘Find out more’ are better than ‘Click here’ but they’re all overused and easily passed over.
Instead, come up with copy unique to your brand and email theme. There are more words to play with in text links but you can have fun with button text too.
And it’s not just the tone of voice in an email – the design, layout, images and call-to-action placement all need to be connected and coherent. Emails should work well on mobile devices and be able to appeal in multiple physical settings.
By the book
If you don’t already have one, create a ‘copywriting brand bible’ with customer types, tone of voice, language and style – including words that encapsulate your brand identity (and ones that don’t). Follow brands that have a tone of voice and identity you like, as well as ones that don’t.
Join the dots
Ensure the brand message remains consistent so as not to confuse or disenfranche customers. All emails – newsletters, sales, order confirmations, delivery notifications, follow-ups etc. should tie in. Make the customer journey as memorable and joined up as possible.
Look at me
Vacassa, Nonny and Howies all send emails that are visually striking and easy to read:
And you don’t have to be a small or ‘funky’ brand to look good – Apple, M&S and VW use clean images combined with bold colours and good use of space in these examples.
It’s only natural
Marketing should reflect how integral the online world is in our daily lives. Allied to effective segmentation, targeted content and unique language, people will feel more comfortable and trusting when interacting with brands – not just see them as faceless entities mirroring each other in our inboxes in the hope of making a quick buck.
Change can be a scary prospect for some brands and marketers but the beauty of email is that it is quick, easy and cost effective to test. Sending to small data segments to gauge how well messages are received and how well they perform will give marketers the knowledge to get closer to customers and that’s a win for both sides.
The likelihood of any of us being offended by a brand being more approachable is remote, in fact we prefer it. We’re all human and we’re all unique, so why communicate with us as if we’re not?
The Journal of Interactive Marketing published an article on the effect of basket abandonment emails and how they correlate to customers going to purchase the items. They found that insights from the persuasion knowledge model (Friestad and Wright 1994) and using an advertisement wear-out method can be used as an explanation for why basket abandonment emails are such a persuasive and successful way of marketing items that customers have had an interest in. However, other things also affect the likelihood of customers purchasing due to basket abandonment emails. These include but are not limited to the time of day the email is sent, how soon after the abandonment and the time of the month sent.
In 2021 there was expected to be 19.5% of the total worldwide retail sales were performed online. The increase in the e-tail industry has resulted in a greater need for email marketing, which has come to be a staple in generating sales leads. Over 69% of all businesses use email marketing as a daily tool.
Persuasion knowledge
Persuasion knowledge is an important tactic when it comes to email marketing. With the aim to influence a customer’s actions, and drive awareness to the product. This is why companies use dynamic content to deliver products the customer has been looking at. However, this can come across as the company trying to persuade the customer into buying the product which in some cases can be detrimental. It has been found that when the message is more subtle in a Customer Relationship Management email (CRM) the customer is more likely to trust the company and is therefore more likely to purchase the product. As the email hasn’t been sent with the obvious message to buy that product. From this, it has been determined that emails with discounts for the product or just in general provide good persuasive knowledge and increase the sales of said product.
Therefore, an explicit sales intent email is likely to achieve less success than an email that has the sales message interwoven into it. Similarly, it has been found that emails with a low level of persuasive knowledge may work at the start. However as time goes on these emails become less effective, whereas those with a high level of persuasive knowledge have a non-monotonic effectiveness.
Performance response
With that being said, the readers that opt in to specific content respond better to that specific content than those not opted in. However, once the content strays from what they opted into there is no difference in those who either opted in or out of that content.
Although basket abandonment is a beneficial way to drive sales of the product, to be able to send these emails the company has to go through extra tracking and identifying measures to be able to perform this. This has been shown to evoke a somewhat negative reaction from some customers as they question their privacy. So even though a customer has the product in their basket shows a high level of interest, a basket abandonment email could still have a negative effect and cause them not to purchase the product. For basket abandonment emails it has been found that a more explicit and direct message is the most likely way to convert into a sale.
CRM emails or basket abandonment or both?
This is a contradictory finding between CRM emails and basket abandonment emails. Whilst CRM emails are shown to provide an increase in the spending amount of a customer, converting the customer’s shopping cart into an email has been shown to allow for more effective results in the long term when combining both and using them as a dual email strategy. This allows for the CRM emails not to be as frequent. The frequency of the CRM emails can affect a customer’s intention to buy as a higher frequency has been seen to get annoying and put customers off.
Looking at opt-in messages that vary from what the customer has specifically opted in for have been found to have varying results. Those who opt in are shown to have a more amenable attitude towards ongoing communication with the company. However when the emails stray too far from what they originally opted in to the click-through rate drops. It has also been found that the spending amount for customers that opt-in and receive CRM emails are higher than for those who do not receive these emails.
Targeted CRM emails
The spending amount increases even more when the CRM emails have a relation to the specific area the customer opted into. Adding promotional emails into the mix, to serve as a reminder to the customer rather than a tool used for price reduction has been shown to have a beneficial effect on reducing basket abandonment and increasing sales.
Overall, it has been found that the use of email marketing as a tool for strategic persuasion is very beneficial and if it is done right can produce great results. However, if not done properly the effect it can have can be detrimental in the fact of converting sales and lowering the click-through rate.
In the current economic climate, it’s important for brands to focus on keeping
existing customers engaged. The cost of acquisition is high because the return
on ad spend is low. As a result, many companies are paying more attention to
email marketing and asking a lot of their existing in-house resources. However,
this has created a catch-22 situation where businesses need more automation to
deliver this, but they’re too busy to implement anything new.
This is where The Email Factory comes in. As an agency specifically designed to
work with companies that do email marketing in-house, The Email Factory can
help businesses make the improvements they need to their email campaigns.
From redesigning triggers to automating templates and improving deliverability,
The Email Factory can help businesses be more productive and engaging with
their email marketing.
When Mike Parry, founder of The Email Factory, reached out to me about his new
venture, I was excited to join as a non-executive director. The agency’s approach
fills a real need in the market, and I believe it’s what businesses need at this
moment in time. The Email Factory is based in the UK, giving businesses the
opportunity to work with people who are familiar with UK best practices and
brands at a competitive price point.
There are companies that offer similar services, but many of them are offshore.
The Email Factory is different. It’s an agency that provides tailored services to
businesses that want to improve their email marketing capabilities. As a non-
executive director, I look forward to helping The Email Factory grow and bring
much-needed support to businesses that want to improve their email marketing.
Is ChatGPT for email marketing subject lines the Messiah or a very naughty boy?
So with Intuit Mailchimp running nationwide radio advertising announcing its new subject line analytics tool, for the record we built something very similar back in 2018 and you can read about it here. Subject line optimisation and the role ChatGPT could have in it has become increasingly prevalent. Every second post on LinkedIn seems to be about ChatGPT and how it’s going to revolutionise content writing and that includes subject lines.
Having tested ChatGPT for subject line content generation exhaustively, here are my thoughts. I preface this by saying these are my thoughts, not that of the business but those of one cynic who works for the company, just in case Microsoft come after us. Needless to say my conclusion is… ChatGPT is a fraud! There I said it.
ChatGPT does not generate better subject lines for open rates. I can’t write email copy using it without having to edit it enormously. Actually taking more time on the edit than it would if I wrote my stream of consciousness!
For the purposes of this blog let’s concentrate on subject lines. I asked it for 5 subject lines for an electronics company selling TVs and it came up with the below.
The results were as follows
Generate 5 email subject lines
Now I thought these a bit “Stateside” and as I am based in the UK and wanted to compare it to UK companies’ subject lines I changed the question to reflect that…
Generate 5 email subject lines in the UK
ChatGPT thought it important to inform people that this was for UK TVs showing a scant understanding or “intelligence” of the actual requirement. Now some of you will say that perhaps I should have been smarter with my question but and here’s the rub – if I can be smart enough to ask the question in a way that ChatGPT spits out a killer set of subject lines, then I can probably write those subject lines myself way quicker. I’ve already spent more time than I’d like to have done asking the 2 questions and not getting answers I could use.
So then I took a real life situation.
I took 5 subject lines from a client which had been used in specific campaigns and asked which one it thought would be most successful. The first time I did it, it ignored the first subject line because I hadn’t put it on a separate line from the question. It then subsequently said the following…
Which subject line would perform better
So I asked my question again but this time put the first subject line on its own in the question. ChatGPT then contradicts itself from the first set of questions and decides that the subject line that was missed out was in fact the best but the one it previously said was the best is now not so good because it’s too generic. But it doesn’t move it down from 1st to 2nd but from 1st to 3rd!
Which of these subject lines would perform better
So I asked it to rank them in order of effectiveness and it said this
Rank these subject lines by performance
What happens if you apply real intelligence instead of artificial?
Now I have real life data, I have a subject line tool which we built in house, which I can ask the above questions and get real answers. You can read about it here or Dela Quist’s SubjectLinePro or even Intuit Mailchimp’s version of our tool but ChatGPT, well I found it wasn’t useful at all. In fact it got things completely wrong.
So in order of their effectiveness in real life marketing solutions the rankings were…
1. Superb Sale savings… starting online today!
2. Our best 85” TV megadeal ever…
3. Samsung, LG TV and soundbar offers for an improved home cinema experience
4. Inflation-busting TV megadeals including a Samsung 70″ at £699…
5. Bring your TV to life
And to remind you what ChatGPT said
Samsung, LG TV and soundbar offers for an improved home cinema experience
Inflation-busting TV megadeals including a Samsung 70″ at £699…
Superb Sale savings… starting online today!
Our best 85” TV megadeal ever…
Bring your TV to life
At least we all agree that last one was the least effective. So my advice is, while AI is great and ChatGPT in particular is fun to play around with I will take real intelligence over artificial intelligence any day of the week! So in conclusion ChatGPT is a very naughty boy!
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic. There are several AI-powered tools on the market, whether in a commercially-viable or prototype form. Perhaps most significant is ChatGPT by OpenAI, which was made public at the tail end of last year. What’s ChatGPT? Why don’t we ask it:
To describe itself as a “language model” may be correct but it’s a little modest. ChatGPT’s abilities are vast. It can answer questions, generate code, write articles, translate documents, tell you a joke, or engage with you in some good old-fashioned chit chat.
This of course is an impressive piece of technology and a fun tool to experiment with. But its scope and usefulness extend far beyond curiosity. It has practical, real world applications. Why spend time programming a website component when an AI can do it for you in a fraction of the time? Why struggle with writer’s block when a copywriting deadline is looming? Why be presented with adverts when searching for information online? Prompt ChatGPT and it’ll take on the task and output some code, content or answers within minutes if not seconds.
Amazing, right?
Let’s take a step back
The validity of the phrase artificial intelligence is often contested. As a species, we are yet to develop something that is actually aware, or truly understands what it is doing. Perhaps a more accurate description is fancy algorithms. Patterns, machine learning… and sometimes very wonky output.
On that topic – ChatGPT makes mistakes. That’s not a criticism. Just like a human, ChatGPT learns from mistakes… but it doesn’t feel embarrassed about it. When things go wrong, you can tell it so. It’ll then take steps to rectify the error. There’s some give and take when working with ChatGPT.
What artificial intelligence could mean for email
The combination of email and AI (or fancy algorithms) is nothing new. One-to-one product recommendations have been around for years, picking relevant items based on previous shopping behaviour. Spam filters automatically guard inboxes against emails of the shadiest kind. Customer journeys and automated emails are made possible through complex workflows with little post-development need for human intervention.
What is new however is the concept of emails that are predominately or even completely designed and coded by computers. Imagine high-quality, on-brand design and copy that is generated in seconds. Perhaps the same AI tool could then select the audience, send the email, read the report and optimise the next send. Is there a point at which human input becomes zero?
What artificial intelligence currently means for email
Don’t worry – we’re not at the human irrelevance stage yet. In my tests with ChatGPT, I’ve seen it output some erroneous facts and broken code. From what I’ve seen it’s neither ready to fly solo nor likely to achieve such independence any time soon.
That doesn’t mean it’s not a revolutionary and practical technology in its current state. I already use it almost daily for writing inspiration and to help with coding questions that would otherwise mean trawling through forums for answers.
ChatGPT and other pioneering AI technologies have already changed the way we work, and they will only continue to evolve. It’s incredible to think that what was only recently in the realm of science fiction is now becoming a reality. The future really is here.
Email is a fantastic graphical way of communicating with others. But so often in email design the primary function of an email is forgotten. It may be time for a fresh look at user experience in email.
Sure, some emails are just to pass on information, but nearly every single other email is about selling. It is currently impossible to complete a purchase with just an email but this is no bad thing, it streamlines the email’s function. The email exists solely to drive traffic to a web page.
The email exists solely to drive traffic to a web page.
Email is not website-lite
This key idea is so often lost in email design. Often it is closely tied to reproducing a similar or lesser version of a website instead. I think this is a terrible waste of space, and poor design that doesn’t challenge the ways email should look.
Instead of the ubiquitous ‘view in browser’ link, the logo, and a site navigation bar, why don’t designers just go straight into some products? The Subject line, Pre-subject line, From address and Friendly From address could all be used to establish the brand. The ‘view in browser’ link doesn’t have to be at the top. Lastly the navigation bar is just a poor version usually of what is on the site. Furthermore it nearly always links away from the main campaign … which is the primary purpose of the email!
Emails are ephemeral messages, they focus on what’s happening now. Including links in a navigation bar at the top of an email design just takes the user away from the sale that is happening now. This is a bad user experience. It’s equally bad for the sender because the click has been wasted. The purpose of the email was to get the user to go to the sale section and now they have clicked something else in the navigation bar.
Link with purpose
Emails also need to consider where they are driving traffic to. If it is easy for people to complete a purchase from nearly any page, that’s great. However if the email can misdirect users to contact pages or other areas of the site before the reader has even seen the primary content of the email, that’s not great. There would be an argument to say the content is incorrectly ordered.
Large full-width images are also a component that can affect the overall user experience of an email. First, it must be said stated that they are necessary and often provide some much needed beauty and spectacle to a design. However, they can be tiresome to scroll through and take up a lot of space for a single link. Consider their use carefully.
Text links form the backbone of the internet and were the first types of link on the internet. In email design, however, designers don’t always stick to the rules and sometimes only use bold links or just colour them differently. Always apply underlines to text links. Format them with sufficient font size and line height so that they can be clicked easily. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to find many text links all squished into a paragraph of small text. This makes it very hard on some smaller screens to click the link you intended.
The primary message must be the focus in order to provide a good user experience in email design. Links that might scatter users all over the website should be kept to a minimum and collected at the bottom of the email. Analysis of email heat-maps always show the vast majority of clicks happen toward the top of an email. They gradually decrease as you move further down the email. With this in mind, email designers should focus on making the primary message content of the email as close to the top as possible. Migrate all other types of content towards the bottom.
The courage to break convention
This could mean a layout that reverses the content order completely would be a better email design. Start with the products you want to focus on, then any other content and finally add the branding and any footer content necessary. This would be designing in a manner that takes into account where the most clicks happen and relying on people to know who sent them the email. This is a step designers have so far been too scared to take.
To this date I have not encountered a brand that has been brave enough with their email design to use such a forward thinking approach. There are some examples, though, where brands do drop superfluous components such as navigation bars, however I have never seen one brand completely flip the email design.
Design for clarity, not confusion
Individual components in email design often provide terrible user experience. For example, an email might be trying to sell a high cost item. Instead of solely linking to that product, the email links to all sorts of other things relating to that product. For example, the product might be a new car. Rather than taking the clicker to the new car page it links to the car accessories page. It can be argued that at least the user is on the website, but the point of the email was to sell the car. The goal wasn’t to sell windscreen wipers for their existing car. Polluting the layout with complementary links to add-ons or related products only decreases the traffic to the main intended link.
To have the best user experience in email design, the email’s components need to be concise and link to a single location. Prioritise content order and remove superfluous components. Subject lines and From addresses should factor into the email design. Place recurring content at the bottom of the email.
