Email Marketing

10 typographical effects to prettify your emails

5 minute read

Adrian Young

10 typographical effects to prettify your emails

Text needn’t be plain. Modern CSS can apply all manner of visual effects to text. That makes it possible to create some eye‑catching typography without resorting to using images.

Well, all of that is true in web design. Email on the other hand has inconsistent support for CSS from one application to another. But don’t worry – that’s nothing a bit of graceful degradation can’t handle.

1. Letter spacing

CSS property: letter-spacing

Kerning is typographical lingo for the gap between letters. Increasing the kerning is a neat way to bump up the visual impact of a text banner or heading.

Before:

After:

And the good news? It works everywhere.

2. Drop shadow

CSS property: text-shadow

A drop shadow can add a subtle illusion of depth. Unlike letter spacing, this CSS property isn’t so widely supported in email. But it works in Apple Mail on iPhones and Macs, and that alone makes it worthwhile. With no particular fallback considerations, text shadow is a perfectly viable design option.

3. Outline

CSS property: text-stroke / -webkit-text-stroke

An outline can accentuate a heading or call‑to‑action. Just like drop shadows, support is not universal. So consider it a progressive enhancement and don’t rely on it for contrast!

4. Pseudo 3D

CSS property: text-shadow (again, but fancier)

Masterful coders can wield CSS like a paintbrush. Code‑based reproduction of the Mona Lisa, anyone? To create something like this, you only need bucketloads of artistic talent, abstract thinking, coding prowess and mathematical aptitude!.

These works, incredible as they are, are the endeavors of hobbyists. But the point is that CSS can do a lot more than basic styling. You can combine effects with limitless potential for creativity.

For example: you can apply as many text shadows as you like. How about layering a few to create a 3D text effect?

5. Gradient fill

CSS properties: linear-gradient / background-clip / -webkit-background-clip

Colour gradients, a once‑beloved staple of web design, can be easily applied to a background in CSS. But with just one extra property, they can also be applied directly to text. Nice.

Beware if using this technique – some email clients will recognise the gradient, but not the clipping mask – thus leaving you with a coloured block and no text. These are essentially experimental techniques in email, so some degree of fallback content may be necessary.

6. Texture fill

CSS properties: background-image / background-clip / -webkit-background-clip

Gradients aren’t the only thing that can be applied as a text background. You can use an image. I guess you could call it a texture.

7. Web fonts

HTML element and CSS properties: <link> / font-family / @font-face

So far we’ve only looked at effects to be applied to existing text. But we’re missing a trick. A major part of typography is of course the choice of fonts.

Once upon a time, web designers were limited to a small pool of web‑safe fonts. Arial, Times New Roman and the like. The advent of web fonts meant that developers could remotely load any font under the sun onto the user’s computer… thus opening up a new world of typographical creativity.

Do web fonts work in email? The answer – as is so often the case with this medium – is sort of. Compatibility is all over the place. This article isn’t a how‑to on web fonts, so let’s note only the most important points regarding support. They work fully in Apple Mail, in an extremely limited form in Gmail, and not at all in Outlook.

Here’s a comparison of web fonts and their more prosaic fallbacks. When they work, they undoubtedly enhance an email. They also make it possible to produce designs that are more on‑brand. But the downside is that the fancier the web font, the bigger the fall! Perhaps one day all major email services will cater for them.

8. Rotation

CSS property: transform: rotate(#deg);

Text doesn’t always have to lie horizontally. A little bit of rotation can make a big visual impact.

9. Text scaling

CSS property: font-size: #vw

Huge text‑based headings can sometimes present a challenge on mobile. Multiple breakpoint‑triggered classes to resize the font can work, but it’s pretty clunky and requires some trial and error. If only there was a way to scale the text smoothly, as if in an image.

Well, there is. One of CSS’s many units of size is viewport width, or vw for short. That lets text scale relative to the screen size. It’s surprisingly well‑supported among mobile email clients.

Here’s an example, placed on a background image because, well, why not?

10. Animation

CSS properties: animation / @keyframes

CSS comes equipped with a couple of options for movement: transitions and keyframe animations. In the right hands, the latter can produce some richly complex animation. The results are far smoother than an animated GIF, and they’re not limited to that format’s paltry 256‑colour palette.

Here’s a very simple example with some skewed text. To see what can really be achieved, I recommend checking out the myriad examples on CodePen.

Note: this is a GIF-based recording of a CSS animation!

Is this really worth doing in email?

Maybe, maybe not. I’ve written in the past about the value of simple design for this somewhat fragile medium. But I’ve also written about all manner of experimental interactive content. Clearly those concepts are at odds.

But I believe there’s a time and place for both ends of the spectrum. There are accessibility and compatibility considerations for sure. Often an image with an alt tag will be the better choice than CSS text effects. But if you’re feeling adventurous and fancy producing an email that looks spectacular on the strongest email clients… then I reckon it’s an adventure worth having.

Email best practice

Have a think about that link

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Links are a cornerstone of the web. After all, the HT in HTML stands for HyperText. And HyperText is a fancy way of saying text with links.

Marketing emails are of course also based on HTML. And marketing emails also largely revolve around links. They’re a fundamental aspect of the medium. Better get them right, then!

Think like a customer

You built your email. So you know where everything is and what everything does. Your customer, on the other hand, is viewing your mailing without this inside knowledge.

Before linking anything that isn’t a call‑to‑action, ask yourself: is the destination obvious? It makes sense to link a product image or your brand logo, as their role is self-explanatory. But links applied to section headings or paragraphs of text or decorative images don’t necessarily have a clear purpose. If in doubt, leave it out.

Stay focused

An email should have a purpose. That purpose should be apparent at a glance. If an email is instead saturated with links, that purpose becomes diluted. Multiple secondary links result in a confusing user experience and muddied mailing reports.

There’s a balance to be struck between options and aimlessness. While an email may be made up of multiple stories and products, each of those items should link to a single place. Focused, fast, and fit for the medium.

Button up

Large, button-styled links are an email design stable… and with good reason. They’re easy to see and easy to press.

A button’s link should always go to the same place as any other part of the feature. And yet it’s surprisingly common to see emails in which the button leads to a different destination than the associated image or heading. Why?

If a secondary link is essential, an outlined ‘ghost button’ is an excellent design choice. A marketing email is rarely a thing to be perused. In this fast-paced environment, effective visual cues can make all the difference.

Now that your buttons are in place, you just need some text to put on them. About that…

Say the right thing

Calls-to-action are often dull and repetitive. Find out more, buy now, or the dreaded click here. Yawn.

While a user is likely skimming over product descriptions or other paragraphs of text, a call‑to‑action is short and prominent enough to be seen in its entirety. The more specific the phrasing, the better. Shop gift cards is instantly more descriptive – and noticeable – than the generic shop now.

There’s also an opportunity to be creative, where appropriate. Really Good Emails are masters at this. Every email has a unique call-to-action that oozes with brand character while being relevant to the topic, such as uncage the beige or give a ship. Cheeky!

Accessibility is a guiding light

Good design and accessibility are intertwined. By following the tenets of accessibility, you are automatically on-course to producing a good email.

The implementation of links is a factor in that. Much of it comes down to common sense. Does it make sense to apply a link to this thing? Is it clear what will happen when I press it? Are there too many links to the same place? Or are there confusingly many links applied to parts of a single feature? Are clickable elements sufficiently spaced apart?

Better links, better emails

The humble link seems like something that is difficult to get wrong. But in reality it deserves as much consideration as any other aspect of email design. Plan it out, and link it through.

Email Marketing

Email: the big picture

3 minute read

Adrian Young

Email is a wonderful marketing medium. Its ROI is legendary. One might go so far as to say that it’s the best marketing channel. They might even be right – but there’s a better way to look at it.

A component of a larger machine

What’s the best meal in a restaurant you’ve ever had? Compliments to the chef! Of course, the (head) chef isn’t alone in the kitchen. There’s a sous chef. And a saucier. In fact, there’s a whole team’s worth of culinary talent.

We can keep zooming out. The waiter who delivered exceptional service, the interior designer who cultivated the perfect ambience, the couriers who delivered fresh ingredients, and the farmers who produced them. Remove any part of the equation and it all falls apart.

Email marketing is also a part of a bigger picture. The most effective marketing campaigns are those in which multiple channels actively work together. But even when this hasn’t been consciously planned, it’s still happening to some degree. An email engager wasn’t always a subscriber. They arrived via your website or social media or by some other non-email means. That raises a question.

Who gets credit?

Attribution in marketing can be seen through tunnel-vision. It’s a little too easy to give exclusive credit to the most recent link in the chain. The truth of attribution is that it’s often more fuzzy than focused.

Even when a clear click-to-conversion can be tracked from a particular email, who’s to say that a series of emails hasn’t influenced that decision? Maybe there wasn’t even anything particularly tempting about that latest email, but it happened to serve as a convenient conduit to your website.

We haven’t even left the scope of email and this is already becoming blurry. There are broader factors to consider, such as your social media activity, or web content, or external influences like third party reviews or good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. A complex series of events leads up to every conversion. The marketing report may assign success to Wednesday’s email, but it’s worth taking a step back and considering the full story.

Clicks aren’t everything

It goes without saying that clicks are one of the key indicators of an email’s performance. After all, the goal of a marketing email is usually to drive traffic to a landing page. A click therefore seems like the email’s final goal, before Team Website takes the baton.

By that theory, all clicks could be considered equal in value. Except they aren’t. An enthusiastic clicker might be disappointed by the content they’re met with online. Is that a weak landing page’s fault, or a misleading email? Most likely some hard-to-measure ratio of the two.

Are conversions therefore the best way to measure an email’s success? Maybe, but not the only one. A non-clicking opener has potential latent value, as does a non-purchasing clicker. As humans we often think in absolutes, but reality is rarely so black and white. Sales may be the most direct way to gauge an email’s performance, but its real contribution to your brand runs deeper.

The depth of design

Design is another aspect of email that is easy to oversimplify. An email’s design isn’t just its layout and colours. It’s the whole shebang. Copy, imagery, links – they’re all intertwined.

Even the subject line isn’t as isolated or single-purpose as it may appear. Its influence extends beyond the initial open, and perhaps beyond the scope of that one email. Words are a big part of your brand’s personality.

Design considerations like responsive layouts and dark mode and accessibility should not be treated as standalone concepts. It’s far better to make an accessible design… than to make a design accessible.

Back to reality

It’s easy to preach. In the real world and the hubbub of business, there isn’t always the luxury of stopping to think about the big picture. It might even come across as an excuse. Hey, this email had a terrible click rate… but at least it raised awareness!

Nonetheless, it’s worth pausing from time to time to consider how everything fits together. There’s a causal chain. Nothing is random. No two things are truly distinct. These concepts aren’t only relevant to email or marketing or business, but to every aspect of our existence.

Email Design

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

4 minute read

Josh Green

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

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

Email Marketing

Can I share a secret?

3 minute read

Mel Jewell

Question:

How do you go about building and sustaining your customer base in the crowded world of email marketing?

Answer:

Why not let your customers do some of the work for you?

This is where multichannel marketing comes in to play. You can reach your untapped potential through other channels than email, such as your own website or social media to encourage new signups to your brand.

But is there a missed avenue to gain even more signups? Your best advocates may turn out to be your own users – if you’ve created engaging, exciting content then why wouldn’t they want to shout about it? Make it easy for them.

Here’s how we do it…

Share on social media

Through us you have the option to share the whole email on social media, or to specify a URL instead for shareworthy articles. Built in to our platform are direct links to open new posts for Facebook, Google+, Twitter (X), LinkedIn or you can select “Generic” and build a link to any social media platform of your choosing.

From a coding perspective it is a doddle, it’s just adding a link tag into your template. If you want to share the whole email:

<a href="#" social-network="facebook">Share this email on Facebook</a>

<a href="#" social-network="linkedin">Share this email on LinkedIn</a>

Then a click on this links will simply set up the post ready to send:

Or to set the post copy as a URL instead of the email image:

<a href="#" social-network="facebook" social-url=" https://www.theemailfactory.com/the_biz/how-ethical-are-your-emails/”>Share this email on Facebook</a>

For Twitter…excuse me X…you know the one I mean, you have the option to pre-write the tweet:

<a href="#" social-network="twitter" social-tweet="Check out this article: https://www.theemailfactory.com/the_biz/how-ethical-are-your-emails/”>Tweet this link</a>

Share by email

You might also encourage your users to share directly to their friends and family, people they would likely only target if they knew they already had an interest:

<a href="#" social-network="sendtofriend">Click here</a> to share this email with a friend.

This is slightly more involved as your user will have to fill out a few details, but if you’ve got them excited enough to share, that shouldn’t stop them!

Once they’ve filled out the form, their lucky chosen recipient will receive an email with the message from their friend saying why they are receiving this email with just a sneak preview of what the email is and a link to the full thing:

Then reassurance that they have not been added against their will to any mailing list and that their data privacy remains well and truly intact:

By making it as easy as possible for your users to spread the word and share your content amongst themselves, it’s up to you to give them a reason. This should inspire you to create innovative, eye-catching emails with a great message that might just motivate your users to share, especially if all they have to do is click a link.

Here’s some ideas on adding interactivity to your emails which could be a good place to start! Not only will well designed and captivating emails help sustain your current base and stave off lethargy and loss of engagement, it might also help it grow if word starts getting around.

Interactive email

Four useful ideas for interactive email

2 minute read

Adrian Young

You can do all sorts of things with the checkbox hack. But not all of them are useful. For the unfamiliar, the checkbox hack is a clever CSS trick that makes it possible to build interactive emails.

All email content must be useful to the customer, and interactive content is no exception. So, forget about those gimmicky drop-down nav menus product carousels. Let’s aim instead for the kind of interactivity that enriches our emails.

1. Rotatable products

It’s common on a retail websites to be able to view products from multiple angles. But in email there’s usually only a single, static product shot. It doesn’t need to be that way.

By assigning animation triggers to left and right arrows on either side of an image, you can let the user rotate a product right there in the email. Drop in a few frames of animation for each of the quarterly rotations and you can achieve an effective illusion of movement.

For our demo, I grabbed a mug from the kitchen. But just imagine this technique used for cars or any other product where every angle matters.

2. Colour selector

On the subject of cars – they tend to come in a variety of colours. So too do clothes, phones, items of furniture, toasters… and so on. You can guess where this is going.

Place some colour swatches next to the product image and let the user browse all colours before committing to a website visit. This isn’t just a cosmetic effect. Whilst swapping out the image, you can also swap the link, thus directing the customer straight to their chosen colour variation on your web page.

3. Multiple choice quiz

But maybe your customer isn’t so sure about what they want. Why not guide them? A multiple-choice quiz is the perfect way to present the customer with a result based on their personal interests… and you don’t even need any prior data. In fact, you can even use it to start building up a customer profile by tracking the links. How good is that?

Our demo uses a topic close to my heart: dogs. There are 18 possible combinations of answers, each leading to a specific breed of dog. This technique could of course be used for any topic under the sun. Perfect holiday destination, perfect perfume, perfect anything-you-like.

4. Randomiser

Oh, about those holiday destinations – sometimes it’s fun just to spin the globe and discover somewhere completely new. Well, you can do that in email too. Engage your customer’s curiosity with randomisation.

Here’s how it works: you can secretly cycle a series of identical-looking buttons. The random factor is time – i.e. when the user clicks the button. Dress that up in some fancy animation and you’ve created an engaging piece of content based on the element of surprise.

We’ve chosen holiday destinations for our demo, but as always you could pick any topic you like. The possibilities are endless.

What else can you think of?

Done right, interactive content can really bring an email to life. With a bit of imagination, the medium of email can be transformed into something incredible. (Just don’t forget that fallback content for non-compatible email apps!)

Email best practice

It’s a feature, not a bug: email edition

2 minute read

Adrian Young

Are those pesky email applications messing with your design? You didn’t want that address to be automatically linked to Maps, and you certainly never asked for telephone numbers to be underlined! It’s time to squash the bugs.

The battle begins

Overriding a piece of email software’s functionality often isn’t a simple task. The only tools at our disposal are HTML, CSS and a bit of imagination. Email development forums are awash with questions and suggestions on this topic, plus a graveyard of now-defunct solutions. There’s much trial & error, and the successful method usually amounts to some kind of hacky trick.

Here’s an example. Some versions of the Outlook mobile app will recognise and auto-link dates and times to the user’s calendar. This also turns the associated copy blue. One effective solution is to secretly break up the text with an invisible special character called a zero-width non-joiner. Congratulations – you have successfully tricked an application into losing functionality!

Don’t fight functionality

But why would anyone want to do that? The fact that there’s often no easy ‘fix’ for these ‘problems’ says a lot. The problem does not lie within the application’s functionality. It lies within the sender’s design and objectives.

Suppressing a piece of functionality is not in the spirit of accessibility. And to be frank, it’s not the sender’s decision to make. Nobody likes it when a website blocks or forces the opening of links in new tabs. A similar etiquette applies to the world of email.

Design around it

Addresses are another type of content that could be auto-linked and coloured blue. If they’re sitting on a coloured background, that could result in an ugly clash and illegible text. The solution: place them on a white background instead. Cosmetics do not trump usability.

Example of address in an email being auto-linked to maps — Outlook has helpfully linked that address to the maps application. Should we break that… or change our background colour instead?

Reallocate the effort

I mentioned trial & error earlier. That means editing code, uploading it to an email platform, sending tests, and checking them on real devices and/or previewing services. All of this all takes time. But this is not a task that deserves it.

Imagine what could be created in that time rather than destroyed. Optimum email designs. Improved accessibility. Better content. Don’t squash the ‘bugs’ – give them a better habitat instead.

Email best practice

Simple email design for a fragile medium

4 minute read

Adrian Young

Google recently caused a ruckus in the world of email marketing. As part of an update to Gmail, support for background images was (accidentally) knocked out. Oops. The result was an industry of marketers in panic.

Email developers scrambled to find a fix. Workarounds were found, and Google ultimately resolved the fault at their end. Crisis over. This incident will soon be forgotten – which is a pity, as there lessons to be learned.

Things change

This isn’t the first time such an event has occurred. Changes to email platforms are fairly regular. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. I recall at least two times when a major email platform made a change that immediately broke responsive stacking content on mobile devices.

Or how about some ancient history? In 2007, Microsoft made the infamous decision to switch its ubiquitous Outlook application from a web browser-style rendering engine… to one based on Microsoft Word.

These sort of sudden, unexpected developments vary from subtle to industry-changing. But they have a couple of things in common:

They are beyond our control as email marketers.
The more complex the email, the greater the chance of it being affected.

Ours is a diverse but fragile digital environment

One customer is viewing your email in Apple Mail on an iPhone 14 Pro Max in dark mode. Another is looking at it in the Gmail web app in Firefox on Windows 10. Someone else is using a little-known third party Android app on a flip phone. The point – there are countless devices, platforms, versions and personal settings to cater for.

Now add Outlook and its archaic code support to the equation. With all this in mind, it’s clear why HTML emails can only work thanks to an array of coding tricks and extensive ongoing testing. The more complex the design, the more liable it is to break now or in the future.

Overloading the medium

Like all email developers, I’ve been faced with many moments of hair-pulling frustration. Inexplicable gaps in emails, font problems, wrestling with truncation… the list goes on and on. This raises a question – why are we going to all this trouble?

Thinking specifically about the Gmail background troubles, I cannot imagine any email content in which a background image is essential. Nice, sure. Fancy, sure. But essential, no. As a means of conveying useful information to a customer, a regular image and some text will do just fine.

All of this boils down to the fact that email is far more fragile than a website. And that is not a bad thing. The trouble only starts when we try to force email beyond its capabilities.

Simplicity is key

Most email development struggles are of our own creation. Why battle for hours to achieve a particular design when the easier option is to simplify? This isn’t admitting defeat. It’s making the smart choice to design for the medium, rather than trying to shoehorn a pseudo-website into an email.

Neither does it mean making an ugly email. Simple is not a synonym of dull. A simple email can include static images, and a static image can be as eye-catching and complex as you desire. The email that houses them doesn’t need to be convoluted, and will only benefit from simplification.

Complex email design is less accessible

The hidden beauty of accessibility is that it benefits everyone. The design and coding techniques that it involves will often directly improve your overall email, or serve as a reminder to clean it up.

Complex email design is the enemy of that. It increases the chance of colour clashes, screen reader navigation difficulties and inconsistent use of text and images to communicate information. Simplicity in design means that we don’t have to strive to find clunky solutions to these problems – we circumvent them entirely.

Email code is absurd

It’s easy to forget just how ridiculous email code is. HTML data tables are used for structure. Multiple nested elements are used to achieve something that could be done with a single HTML tag on a website. Spacer objects are often required to force items into place. An assortment of tricks and hacks loosely pins everything together.

And yet we repeatedly choose to attempt complex designs in this environment. Surely the logical choice would be to have less of this clunky code, not more?

Email designers are their own worst enemy (or at least the email developer’s)

Mobile phones have some fairly decent photo editing apps. But they’re no replacement for Photoshop on a desktop computer with a mouse or tablet. The mobile apps are suited to quick, simple edits only. Trying to do anything more in-depth is convoluted if not outright tortuous.

Designing emails that look like websites is like trying to perform complex photo editing on a mobile. It’s simply not the right tool for the job.

Breaking from convention takes courage

Almost every brand sends fancy HTML emails. Companies need to adhere to brand guidelines. No-one wants to challenge the status quo.

That could be good news for you. The one who breaks convention reaps the rewards while others struggle on. Be that one!

Email Marketing

Planning and implementing your email marketing strategy

7 minute read

Mike Parry

Email marketing strategy

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.

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.

display block email capture form — 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.

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.

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

Birthday email campaigns audit — 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.

Artificial intelligence

Up your marketing game with generative AI!

3 minute read

Dela Quist

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been a topic of discussion, with most debates focussing on its potential to surpass human capabilities. However, it is crucial to shift the focus from comparing AI to human excellence towards understanding how AI can enhance individual skills and abilities. So I was pleased to read a recent interview with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. He highlighted the value of AI as a tool to assist and improve creative processes – even for him!

Neil Tennant’s viewpoint aligns with the idea that AI can be a valuable resource even for established musicians and artists. He cites the example of a song, "Forest Floor," which the Pet Shop Boys never finished. Tennant suggests that if AI had been available at the time, he would have used it to generate multiple versions of the chorus, potentially uncovering an unexpected gem. This demonstrates how generative AI can act as a creative catalyst and assist artists/experts in overcoming writer’s block or exploring new avenues.

The real question: does AI make me better?

Often, discussions surrounding AI revolve around its ability to outperform humans in specific fields. However, the true value of AI lies in its capacity to amplify individual potential. When we reframe the question to focus on what AI can do for us, the possibilities become apparent. This mindset shift opens up new opportunities for marketers, designers, and generalists who may lack specialized expertise in certain areas. By leveraging AI, individuals and organizations can level up their skills and accomplish tasks that were once time‑consuming or costly to outsource.

AI as a levelling-up opportunity

The potential of AI to level up individuals in various fields is evident, especially for jobs requiring multiple skills – marketing being a prime example. If you are a marketer who also has responsibility for email, or an email marketer who lacks specialized expertise in an aspect of the role or have limited resources at your disposal, leveraging generative AI to enhance their skills, produce quality content, and maximize their productivity.

AI in copywriting

Copywriting plays a vital role in marketing, and AI‑powered generative models have proven to be valuable aids in this domain. While there are skilled copywriters who excel without AI, many marketers can benefit from using AI to generate and refine copy. By providing a straightforward brief to AI language models like ChatGPT, marketers can swiftly create subject lines, short‑form copy, bullet points, and newsletters, all while maintaining control over the desired tone. This collaborative approach allows individuals to become better email marketers and enhances their overall productivity.

SubjectLinePRO for instance, is a valuable tool I use that harnesses the power of ChatGPT to assist in writing and then testing compelling subject lines. Several other AI‑powered solutions are available in the market, offering similar benefits. These tools empower marketers with limited copywriting skills to craft engaging content more efficiently and effectively.

AI in image creation

The process of sourcing images for articles or marketing materials can be time‑consuming and expensive. AI‑powered image creation tools, such as Bing Image Creator, have revolutionized this aspect of content creation. Marketers can now generate their own images based on their envisioned concepts, saving time and eliminating the need to rely on external designers. Although having a skilled designer will still result in superior outcomes, AI empowers individuals – like me, who lack that luxury to produce higher‑quality visuals that effectively convey their ideas.

Three email-themed illustrations in different styles, generated by AI. — Images created by Dela Quist using Bing Image Creator

AI in email coding & deployment

While generative AI is a powerful ally, certain aspects of marketing particularly email, still require caution. Challenges related to email deliverability, rendering and accessibility across various email clients necessitate expertise or collaboration with coding specialists. Agencies like The Email Factory (who I recently joined as a NED) specialise in optimizing email design and build to ensure rendering consistency and compliance with industry standards. In terms of email deployment, segment creation etc. I am yet to see a tool that performs those functions.

By recognizing the areas where AI is yet to reach its full potential, marketers can make informed decisions about when to insist on expertise.

Conclusion

Generative AI’s role in the creative process is not to replace human expertise but to augment and empower individuals in their respective fields. By adopting a mindset that focuses on AI’s capacity to enhance personal abilities, rather than comparing it to the best human talents, we open ourselves up to a world of opportunities. Neil Tennant’s perspective, along with real‑life experiences, supports the argument that AI is a tool for levelling up and improving individual skills. Marketers in general, Email Marketers in particular, can benefit from AI‑powered solutions for copywriting and image creation, enabling them to excel in their roles without extensive specialization. Embracing AI as an enabler rather than a competitor will ultimately lead to personal growth and professional advancement in the evolving landscape of marketing.

This article and associated images were produced by me using #chatgpt ChatGPT and #Bing Image Creator.