Email Marketing

Sweat The Small Stuff

We were recently asked to talk at an Email Marketing Summit by Figaro Digital and our C.O.O. Tony MacPherson presented on “Sweat the small stuff”. A look at all the nuances, the 1 percents that make the difference in email marketing campaigns. The attention to detail that really makes a difference to your bottom line, not a silver bullet but a long term strategic change.

Depicts a lozenge button in email

A look under the hood

So, this week with Black Friday in full throw we thought we would give you a sneaky look into what the presenter sees when you go to an event to see a talk on Email Marketing or CRM or any of the wonderful seminars out there. You can download Tony’s presentation here… However, this time we’ve left the presenters notes, the explanation, what Tony was seeing as he presented. This will explain the slides in a way just looking at them doesn’t.

Take a look and let us know your thoughts.

Email best practice

Woe is me…trics

Does anyone remember the good old days when your campaign report was full of lovely metrics that told you perfectly how your email campaign had performed?

What’s wrong with my metrics?

With companies like Apple implementing Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and Google using a proxy server to open emails to hide identity and add security (a noble cause of course) this somewhat blew up the open metric. It was never 100% reliable in the first place as it was measured by a 1×1 pixel image being downloaded, but at least before it had to be your user doing it. Now any user with MPP or Google Proxy in place shows up as an open, irrespective of what they actually did.

Want to do a resend to non-openers?

It used to be a good idea, but now you’re going to miss out on a lot of people that never saw your email. It’s still worth doing, but the effect will be watered down. Some clients see up to almost 90% of their openers obscured!

Obscured Openers Counts

Well what can you do with that?

Testing subject lines?

Subject line tests should be random, so you’d hope the non-openers that get caught up in the test is fairly evenly split and won’t affect the outcome. But the trust is gone. The next obvious candidate for campaign success is click rates. This may not be ideal for testing subject lines, as that behaviour is likely driven by the email content.

But that’s okay, right? Openers are one thing, but what you are really trying to do is drive people to your website or another call to action. So, we can just stick with click through rates?

Alas, mail scanners and spam filters are now throwing a spanner into the works!

They are for the protection of the recipient, testing links to ensure there is no malicious content lurking. Fair enough. But these clicks annoyingly appear as genuine at first glance, ruining our new go-to fallback stat.

Want to automate a response to people that did or didn’t click on a link?

Your click may now be unreliable, leaving people scratching their heads over receiving an irrelevant follow-up email.

What can be done?

Openers

Is there a solution to the openers issue? Not really – I think across the board everyone accepts this is now pretty much a “dead” metric – only worth comparing relatively to see if your campaigns are trending in any particular direction with no real other insight to offer.

Clickers

Is there a solution to a clickers problem? First you need to identify if it is an actual problem for you. A heatmap is a nice way to spot it especially if a banner is sliced up with lots of clickable areas – if all areas show very similar numbers, you know something is up.

Heatmap Click Totals

Then you need to look in the raw data and remove any records that show multiple clicks and clicks within an excessively quick time period (e.g. 1 second) which would be the expected behaviour of a “good” bot but not a human (unless you possess superpowers). This will help you clean up your report and give a much more accurate picture of the campaign performance.

Automation

How about automation? You could assign a specific link to a workflow and if clicked, send out a follow-up email. A bit risky now. If you want to trigger something as a direct result of a show of interest on a link, it may have to end up being on an external landing site. Say, a form they can fill out then trigger the follow-up. A clunkier user journey for sure, but a more reliable solution, nonetheless.

Conversion tracking

As a retailer the next solution to measuring the success of your campaign is easy. Switch the focus to conversion tracking. Knowing how many sales your email campaign has generated is now the most reliable metric. If your campaign is not sales-driven, it is also still possible to still return a “conversion”. You just need to capture a desired result e.g. landing on a specific page you wanted, which can provide added insights.

It is getting harder for us long suffering email marketers to truly gauge the success of our campaigns. But by being creative and focusing on what really matters we can still work out what is going on and use these insights to keep on improving.

Email best practice

Email mistakes to be avoided

Email marketing is our business, and that includes a sneaky peak at some top companies. Along the way, we’ve come across some surprisingly basic mistakes, plus some poor designs and strategies to be avoided. Without wanting to name and shame, here are some of the top errors we’ve spotted.

 

Spleling and grammar mistakes

Just joking! The number one rule before sending any email out is make sure it has been thoroughly proofread and tested. So what happened here?

Christmas Subject Line spelling mistakes

No! They couldn’t possibly have misspelt Christmas, could they? Twice!

 

Subject Line spelling mistakes

This from a well known fashion retailer.

 

Mother's Day bad grammar

Apostrophes can be tricky, but this is a bad one for both subject line and copy.

 

Getting basic things like spelling or grammar wrong shows a lack of attention that may lead some people question what else are you are being inattentive about?

Encoding mistakes

Email checking tools like Litmus or Email on Acid will highlight most rendering issues, but not necessarily how the subject line or pre-header will look across all email clients. Good old Outlook is one example where you might encounter an encoding problem:

Encoding mistakes

In this pre-header example you would be better off using a straight instead of curly quote, and avoid any other symbols that could cause similar issues.

 

GIF design

Whilst pretty much all email clients support GIFs, there are still some that don’t, for example, Outlook 2007-2019. A common GIF design seems to have the initial frame as just a blank slate or a single word.

The finished product might look amazing after all the frames cycle round…unless you use Outlook 2007-2019. Understanding the percentage of your mailing list that will see only the static GIF should determine whether you can get away with this design with only minimal fallout.

GIF Example 1 GIF Example 2 GIF Example 3

Unless it will utterly destroy your GIF design, it’s worth planning the first frame to look presentable with any pertinent information you are trying to convey. Or use a static image as an alternative for the necessary Outlook versions.

Fake Countdown Timers

Creating a countdown timer normally involves dynamically generating a GIF to create a set number of frames with a second value decreasing by 1 each second. We all know how a timer works! They operate under the assumption that the user won’t leave their email open for so long the GIF cycles back round to the first frame and starts again with a misleading time. If they do open the email again, the counter should start again from the correct time until hitting 0 when you can display a message or all 0s to indicate time has run out on whatever fantastic offer was available at the time. This is a great way to add impetus to the customer.

Creating a fake countdown timer, i.e. a static GIF that always reverts back to the same time is a terrible idea. This relies on customers all receiving the email at the exact time it is released (impossible) and not opening after the event has finished (also impossible). For people that fall outside this working window, they will be annoyed to believe the offer is still open only to discover they’ve missed it.

Cheat Countdown Timer

Every time an email involving a countdown timer was opened for this retailer, no matter what time of day, there always seemed to be about 4 and a half hours to go! After enough time, people will start to notice.

 

Images

Images spice up an email and can paint a picture without all that tedious text to read. But shockingly, even now we have seen some emails that are entirely made up of images, and not even Retina-sized images. The quality will look terrible on Retina displays which is just plain bad practice. To make matters worse, every square inch of the email is clickable, which will only serve to confuse the poor user, rather than a nicely focused single CTA.

All Images and clickable areas

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, a missing image looks terrible:

Missing Image

Just a technical glitch perhaps, that may have happened after the send (one would hope not before)? However, scrolling through the inbox and seeing that is off-putting! Whilst all the effort can be made beforehand, it is still worth monitoring sends afterwards for any mishaps.

 

Bad data hygiene

People are notoriously bad at entering their own details into things like forms. There is simply no time for capitalising or writing full first names when an initial will do! Data cleansing is therefore essential, especially before any send that will use some kind of salutation. “Hello,”, despite being non-personalised, would naturally be better than “Hello a,”. Otherwise, you get something like this:

Bad Data Input mistakes
A quick once over to remove funny characters would have done the trick here.

 

Email as a first name
Even worse, somehow using the email as a first name.

 

Bad data management

If you are going to personalise with salutations you may have people with missing names. You will likely need to employ some kind of template language for scenarios with and without names.

No use of template language

Here are examples where a comma followed by a lower case word would have been the correct grammar usage. We have sophisticated template language available to us that would have enabled this, with a capitalised word where the first name was non-existent. Of course template language can go wrong:

Example of template language error
How did this get through the testing phase?

 

Here’s a niche case, but worthy of a mention, for potentially bad data management. We stumbled upon a company that had multi-brands to promote. Unfortunately, these brands were not differentiated at all, apart from a different header and footer. To make matters worse they were sent mere seconds apart, leading to two practically identical emails appearing at the same time.

Undifferentiated brands
Different header, but same subject line and hero image

This may have an unfortunate effect of casting suspicion on the brands – did I really sign up to both of these? Which one should I click on as the email and websites seem to be exactly the same? At the very least it might be worth sending them at different times to avoid confusion, but brand differentiation should be a consideration.

 

Repetition

This one is a bit subjective, but having seen hundreds of emails from the same companies, patterns emerge. You want your brand to be recognisable, naturally. But what you don’t want is to do the same thing week after week leading to consumer blindness. Keep the core elements of your brand, but make your emails dynamic to ward of staleness. Seeing the same hero image week in, week out led me to simply stop reading. Seeing the same subject lines every 3-4 days for months with pretty much the same email each time gave very little incentive to open.

Repeated Subjectlines

Avoid too much repetition, I repeat, avoid too much repetition.

The Oops email

Of course, despite all the best efforts in the world, mistakes still happen. But the cost of sending an “oops” email (both monetary and annoying your recipient) has to be weighed up against how bad the mistake is. We’ve seen an email re-sent with no reference as to why, with the only difference being an emoji added. Ummm…that does not seem a reasonable reason.

On the plus side though, Oops emails get a huge open rate, it’s like car crash TV for emails! But, if you make real mistakes, like a discount error, it is worth it. It could even work in your favour! Look at these stats from our own subject line tool:

Oops Email Stats
These are some mighty fine open rates!

Vigilance

Mistakes such as these can be distracting to a user and take a chip out of your professional image. Enough chips, and trust in your brand could begin to fully erode. Many of these mistakes are avoidable, and might have been caused by complacency or lack of time. Extra vigilance would prevent the majority, but some of these highlighted issues run deeper. If design capacity or time resources are holding you back, why not get in contact and see if we can support you in any way.

Email Design

How to improve your email design – Notes from an email designer

One area of email marketing that is always changing is email design. All our clients often look to improve their email designs. Whether it’s questions about what a certain email platform can do or simply where to start with an email design, the questions about email design can be endless. We have many articles on good email practice and email design on this very blog as well as on our sister site display block. In this blog however I’d like to ask some questions I usually ask myself, or our clients when starting on a new email design project. A collection of these questions might be helpful in your next email design project, and help you create a more engaging and effective email.

What should you consider before starting an email design?

Companies or organisations seldom send one-off emails so it’s important to know if the email sits within a wider marketing campaign. If it is to run alongside in-store promotions or any other type of marketing their might be a wealth of guidelines that the email design might need to stick to in order for it to seamlessly join the rest of the marketing effort. Even in the case of one-off emails it is important to match the branding and voice of the company or organisation sending the email so if at all possible try and collect as many previous communications as you can. Lastly it is important to understand the primary goal of the email. Are you selling products, telling people about an event and so on. The goal needs to be clear to best inform your design choices.

How to organise your content or create a clear content hierarchy

Once you know what the goal of your email is then it is time to start to organise the content for your email. Most emails these days lead with a large hero graphic and there is nothing wrong with this, emails need to be eye-catching. Make sure to try keep the top of your email as clean as possible. Minimise cruft, ask whether the logo needs to take up that much space? Can the view online link be moved or made smaller. Is it possible to drop the navigation bar (emails are not websites)? Once you have the pre-header and logo area decided the rest of the email’s content needs to flow in a way that supports the goal of the email. Common and effective layouts are the standard grid, inverted triangle, bulleted list, and zig-zag.

How do images fit in with the design, does it even need images?

Good design is simple design, and great design is design you probably don’t even notice. Images can be great visual pieces of colour or interest for a design however it’s important to ask if you even need them. Product emails are great and including an image of the product is a usually a great idea but then you might ask is the additional lifestyle image also really needed?

Another common pitfall in email design is just adding everything in. Great emails use a lot of empty space where necessary to really allow the content enough room to draw the eye and focus the attention.

Can you strike a balance between message and design?

Text is a vital part of email and not only helps the email get delivered literally but also by getting the message of the email across to the reader. It is important to strike a good balance between text and images. If an email is too overladen either way the email can quickly be discarded by the reader as either to wordy and boring or just images and vague or confusing. Striking a good balance also allows you the designer to place important email parts like buttons where the reader can see them.

What can you do if there is too much copy?

Concise copy in email is essential. When writing email copy the goal should always be as succinct as possible. Edit it down as much as you can to get the message across as simply as you can. If you imagine you only have a few seconds, probably less than 7, to keep someone’s attention you need to keep the brand’s voice and get the message across. It’s no easy task but with the right amount of editing you can get there.
Remember the goal of any email is to be relevant to the reader, email copy needs to be engaging and entice with clearly actionable conclusions.

How many CTAs can an email have?

Too many CTAs can quickly get confusing and disrupt the focus of the reader. I suggest including one CTA per concept or section. e.g. If there is an email about men’s shoes and women’s shoes, I would include one CTA for men’s shoes and one CTA for the women’s shoes. While each individual shoe might link to its own product page sometimes having a button for absolutely everything can make things too crowded.

To summarise

  1. Keep it concise. Emails need to have a clear purpose and be easy to read and understand.
  2. Content hierarchy is important. Make all the content flow to an action point.
  3. Stick to tried and tested grid layouts, but this don’t mean the design needs to be boring.
  4. Create a good balance between images and text too much of either can be overwhelming.
  5. Make sure the brand identity shines through.

Need more help with your email designs?

Get in touch and we can create you a solution specifically tailored to your requirements. If you’re just looking for a second opinion or would like some analysis on your current designs get in touch and we can help you.