The Email Factory

Email personalisation

Do you even know me? Watch out for these email personalisation pitfalls

7 minute read

Adrian Young

It’s ready. Your beautifully designed, flawlessly coded email is one click away from being fired off to thousands of customers.

There’s just one problem: everyone is about to receive the same message. No, the forename which has been shoehorned into the subject line doesn’t count. It’s spray-and-pray dressed up as one-to-one.

Email marketing deserves to be more sophisticated than that. And it can be. We live in an age of dynamic content, data science and machine learning. To the benefit of customer and business alike, it’s possible to send expertly tailored content based on a person’s purchasing and browsing activities.

But even a richly personalised email programme can sometimes trip up. Read on for a list of personalisation perils – and what to do about them.

First name faux pas

The most basic form of personalisation – addressing someone by name – is laden with a surprising number of potential blunders. A marketing email isn’t a casual message between friends, so it’s important to avoid these embarrassing errors.

First of all, there’s the prospect of getting the name wrong. Let’s say Christopher was in a hurry when he signed up to your newsletter, so he entered his first initial rather than forename. Pierre happened to have caps lock active while submitting the form. And Helen accidentally typed her title into the wrong box. Regardless of who is to blame, it’s not going to look good when you greet them with an enthusiastic "Hello C!", "Hello PIERRE!" or "Hello Mrs!".

Then there’s sentence structure. The injection of a first name will often call for additional punctuation in order to be gramatically correctly. An absent comma can completely transform the meaning of a phrase. I once received an email which promised: "This weekend only: enjoy 25% off Adrian!". 25% off me? I’m not even sure what that means but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to enjoy it.

Next up is first name overload. I sometimes receive emails – particularly those which are part of welcome programmes – which are peppered with my first name. It’s in the subject line, the headline and a couple of times in the message body for good measure. Such overuse comes across as forced and artificial – and it’s no substitute for genuinely customised content.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
Address the customer by name once and put some controls in place to make sure it’s validated and presented appropriately.

By means of SQL processing or dynamic rules in your ESP, you can filter out invalid values such as initials and titles. Likewise, you can add or remove commas to ensure that a sentence reads correctly with or without a first name. You can even convert names to title case using CSS. Pierre will be grateful that you’ve stopped yelling at him.

Meaningless exclusivity

I’ve lost count* of how many times I’ve been presented with the subject line "Exclusive offer for you, Adrian!" or some variant thereof. For example, one time I was offered a free greetings card – just for me – by an online gifts retailer. That could only mean one of two things:

A: They thought of me as a really special customer
B: It wasn’t really just for me

Considering that I hadn’t bought anything from this particular company since my first purchase over half a year prior, I suspect that I wasn’t their star customer. That only leaves option B. The offer had been introduced with a lie. Not a good start if they were hoping to build rapport.

Ok, so calling it a lie is a touch melodramatic. It’s a throwaway attention-grabber akin to advertising puffery. But taken literally, it’s untruthful. Whether that’s enough to deter someone from opening the email depends on the individual. Some won’t notice, some won’t care. But on some level, consciously or not, customers might realise that the brand isn’t being entirely honest with them.

(* I wasn’t really keeping count. I have better things to do, such as writing articles complaining about it.)

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
Be honest. If an offer is open to everyone and their mother, drop the empty claims of exclusivity in favour of the offer details. "Adrian, get a free card when you spend £15" works for me.

Of course, if you’re running a promotion which is only open to a particular group – your Gold tier customers or top reviewers perhaps – then that is absolutely worth shouting about.

The illusion of personalisation

I recently conducted an experiment. By opting in to a multi-channel retailer’s mailing list and taking care not to venture beyond the homepage, I wanted to discover what sort of offers I’d be sent.

Some non-personalised marketing emails landed in my inbox over the weeks which followed. These included promotions which were broad in scope and liable to appeal to a general audience. That made sense.

After a while, ostensibly tailored offers started to creep in. These were presented as ‘Deals for You’ and pushed very specific products. Their proposed SIM card for an obscure model of mobile phone was a real stab in the dark and I can safely say that I’d never even thought about organic air fresheners for cars before. But there they were, served up as items of relevance to me.

The moral of the story: if an email isn’t personalised, don’t pretend that it is.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
Only use phrases which suggest hand-picked products if you genuinely possess enough data to build a customer profile. Split your lists or use dynamic headlines to switch the copy to something more apt for people with no browsing or buying history. Phrases such as "popular with other customers" and "trending now" make great headlines for dynamic content and encourage your customer to explore.

Algorithm blues

I’d like to share an anecdote about an email personalisation calamity. Yes, I am a riot at parties.

A colleague of mine once ordered several items of classic literature which were required reading for her daughter’s university studies. A few days later, she received an email with some personalised recommendations. Unfortunately these suggestions happened to be precisely the same works of literature albeit from different publishers. Oops. She didn’t take them up on their offer.

The company in question usually does a world-class job when it comes to personalisation so this incident is an unfortunate hiccup. Nonetheless, it serves to illustrate the dangers of assuming that your AI-generated content always hits the mark.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
Test it. Set up dummy accounts and put through dummy orders. If nonsensical recommendations crop up then it’s time to adjust the settings.

Better still, why not consult members of staff who you know to also be customers? You can’t get a much more authentic picture than that.

A/B tests are your friend here too. Measuring personalised versus non-personalised or different personalisation rules against each other will yield significant insight into customer engagement.

Yesterday’s news

Common sense dictates that you would only send a sale email while the offer is still running or a final few email while there is stock remaining. But what happens if someone opens the email a little too late and unwittingly clicks through to your website only to discover the bad news? Disappointment – that’s what happens. That’s a risk inherent to static emails since you have no control over them once they’re out the door.

Let’s consider another scenario. You’re issuing single-use discount vouchers to your VIP customers. To encourage as many conversions as possible, you’ll also be sending a reminder and last chance message. But to whom are you sending these follow-up emails? Crying "don’t miss out!" at a person who has already redeemed the voucher could leave them feeling undervalued as a customer. Nobody wants to feel like just a number.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
Dynamically-rendered images to the rescue. By generating an image at the moment of open, your email automatically stays bang up-to-date – even after it has landed in your customer’s inbox.

Sale finished? Strike through the headline and drop in an alternative message encouraging people to check out your other great offers. Using a service like Movable Ink or Fresh Relevance, you can even monitor the stock of individual products and update your mailing post-send.

As for who you’re sending emails to – that’s where effective tracking and segmentation comes into play. Check your mailing reports and exclude customers who have already taken you up on an offer. Fantastic – now you’re no longer pestering your most loyal customers.

Forgetting that the customer is always right (about the customer)

Do you know who is the leading expert on me? It’s me.

Retailer X may have collated and harnessed lots of data regarding my activities as a consumer but their subsequent product recommendations are still essentially an educated guess.

We don’t always know why someone looked up a particular item. There’s room for misinterpretation. Let me share an example from personal experience.

I am not a fan of comic book movies. But I am a fan of my home town’s successes. That’s why, when The Avengers was being filmed in Edinburgh, I kept an eye on media coverage of the proceedings.

Ever since, cinematic superhero-related articles have been cropping up in my newsfeed. To the data mechanisms behind the scenes, this is a logical conclusion. To me, it’s an irrelevance to be ignored.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
Use a preference center. An old-school tick-the-box form may lack the futuristic glamour of AI but it remains a crucial tool in the email marketer’s belt. What better way to send the right content to the right people than by letting them choose? Combine that with machine learning and you have the recipe for truly personalised emails.

Ignoring the age of AI

Artificial intelligence – whether or not the technology deserves such a grand title – is here to stay. Machine learning gives us the power to track customer interests and predict their behaviour. Today that means content such as product recommendations, which are great of course, but soon it could mean entire emails designed from the ground up for individual customers. AI already has a significant role in email marketing, and that will only continue to grow. Be ready!

Conclusion

Any email marketing programme worth its salt must incorporate some level of personalisation. Customers expect relevant content. And they expect it to be correct.

This isn’t just hearsay – the statistics back it up. Picking some figures from Segment’s 2017 State of Personalization Report, we can see that 37% of customers will be deterred from buying something and as many as 23% will unsubscribe if a brand gets information wrong when sending them direct marketing. That’s nearly a quarter of your mailing list who are prepared to up-and-leave if your data isn’t spot on.

Get it right however and you’ll be basking in the flipside of those stats. A third of consumers will feel inclined to give you a positive review following a personalised shopping experience. 44% are likely to come back for more. And half of the shoppers out there have made an unplanned purchase on the strength of a relevant product recommendation.

It’s fair to say that good quality email personalisation is complex, both strategically and technically. But you’re not in it alone. There are tools and services to help with every aspect, including specialist areas such as browse abandonment or product review invitations.

Once of all the personalisation pieces are in place, your emails will leave customers with a comforting thought: "they really do know me".

How to master lifecycle marketing with email customer journeys

2 minute read

Dela Quist

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.

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.

Email Marketing

Set the tone

4 minute read

Tony Macpherson

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?

Email Marketing

Email marketing as a tool for strategic persuasion

2 minute read

Erin Parry

Basket abandonment emails sell!

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.

Email Marketing

Why I am joining The Email Factory

< 1 minute read

Dela Quist

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.

Email coding

Was Outlook right about email all along?

5 minute read

Adrian Young

Ask any email marketer what their biggest bugbear is, and there’s a strong chance that they will answer Microsoft Outlook. The desktop Windows application is notoriously uncooperative with modern coding standards. It’s a place of archaic development techniques, myriad quirks and unpredictable rendering glitches. That sometimes leads to protracted development times and hair-pulling levels of frustration.

Here’s a comparison of clean web-style code versus Outlook-targeted bloat:

But I don’t think Outlook is entirely to blame. Here’s why.

Outlook is not alone

Modern web browsers, for the most part, agree on how HTML and CSS code should be interpreted. The same cannot be said for email services. The various pieces of desktop software, webmail sites and mobile applications all behave differently. Each email platform, from Gmail to Samsung to Yahoo, has its own strengths and weaknesses. The only significant exception is the ever-reliable Apple Mail. This uneven landscape is the reason for email-coding being a profession of tricks and workarounds.

While Outlook is inarguably the least code-friendly of all major email applications, it’s not alone in its patchy support for modern web-coding standards.

I’m here for the offer

I don’t open a marketing email to see brand fonts or fancy design or flashy GIFs. I open it because I think there’s something of value to me in there. That might be a special offer, or a new product that matches my interests.

And I want to absorb the information in the quickest time possible. A marketing email is rarely a thing to be perused. If I crave visual stimulation, I will look at art. If I’m in the mood for reading, I open a book.

When I open a marketing email, seeking that tempting discount, a plain-looking design or a graphical defect is not going to be a deal-breaker. It’s an irrelevance.

Email is email, the web is the web

I missed an if earlier: if I want to browse the internet, I’ll browse the internet. Email – electronic mail – used to be the digital equivalent of a posted letter. But at some point it became standard practice for marketing emails to resemble mini websites. Navigation bars, complex layouts, rich graphics, fully-blown footers. Even interactive components such as drop-down menus have become fairly commonplace.

To achieve such an email requires layers upon layers of non-standard coding techniques. To a front end web developer who is used to coding efficiently, it’s likely to look like an incomprehensible mess at first glance. I picture it as a ramshackle machine, bodged with duct tape and liable to break down at any moment. And what is all this effort for? To force a medium to do something that it was never intended to do!

Word games

Microsoft made an industry-changing decision when they released Outlook 2007. Emails would be displayed using the Word rendering engine. Yes, that’s Microsoft Word as in the word processor. And, at the time of writing, it has remained this way for all subsequent Windows editions of Outlook.

Not only does this explain the platform’s extremely limited support for modern web code, but it’s also the reason for sporadic rendering glitches. Marketing emails are often fractured by pixel-thin lines appearing as if at random. One common cause of this is content falling on Word’s unseen page breaks behind the scenes.

But is this truly a flaw in Outlook, or a problem created through misuse of the medium?

Things change: part I

From time to time, email vendors update their platforms and significantly change how they interpret HTML and CSS code. Sometimes that means improvements, sometimes it means email-breaking regressions.

Here’s a good example. More than once, I’ve seen the code used to stack content on mobile suddenly stop working. The solution: yet more unorthodox coding techniques.

This is part of the reason why companies (should) regularly check their mailings on as many email services and devices as possible. An email may display perfectly today, but tomorrow could be a different story. Even the most robust HTML email template is ultimately fragile. Keeping things simple is an effective future-proofing technique.

My needs are simple

From a consumer’s perspective, Outlook is perfectly capable of everything I need a marketing email to do. Formatted text allows me to scan over an email and pick out key points such as product name and price. High resolution images show me what a product looks like. Large, clear buttons give me a means to move onto the next step – in a web environment – should I choose to.

But what about pixel-perfect design, drop shadows, cool GIFs, web fonts, animation, and other bells and whistles? I don’t need those. Such non-content is of immeasurably more concern to a marketing department than it is to a customer.

Things change: part II

And now it’s time to unravel everything I wrote above. Technology progresses, trends move on, and I don’t want to be a closed-minded Luddite.

When I claim that Outlook does all I need it to, I’m seeing things through a conventional lens. In actual fact there are several pieces of enhanced functionality that would benefit me as a customer. It would be handy to watch a movie trailer, or to listen to a snippet of an album, or check out a t-shirt in different colours… all without leaving the mailing. Just because email has traditionally been a gateway to a website doesn’t mean it must always be that way.

So, is outlook right?

I’ll pick a side – no. There are definitely lessons to be learned from Outlook’s approach to email, and it reinforces the importance of substance over style. But ultimately its resistance to modern web standards is resistance to progress in general, and holding the medium back. And if Microsoft was truly making a stand about what email should be, why equip Outlook with a diluted level of HTML and CSS capabilities rather than none at all?

Google’s AMP for Email is a determined move to transform email into a rich, fully interactive experience. The technology may not have taken off in dramatic fashion, but adoption rates are slowly growing. In any case, it would be absurd for the world of email to maintain its antiquated coding techniques forever.

There’s also a new version of Outlook on the horizon. Anticipated for late 2026, there are convincing rumours that it will at last support modern development techniques. That changes everything.

When that day comes, we’ll be given the gift of time. Instead of wrestling with rendering problems, let’s focus our efforts instead on customer-focused content and design.

Email Design

Can AI design a marketing email?

4 minute read

Adrian Young

AI is a big deal at the moment. And by “the moment”, that likely means from this point onwards in human existence.

We’ve previously talked about AI’s skills as a copywriter and its influence on email marketing in general. Now it’s time to look at another major branch of AI content generation: imagery.

The journey begins

Midjourney is one of the most advanced and best-known AI image generators in the market. If you’re not familiar, let me explain – it’s a form of digital magic that needs to be seen to be believed.

Picture something in your head. Anything. Now type it into Midjourney’s prompt bar. Within seconds, it will generate four images based on your input. How about:

a Jaguar E-Type parked next to the Eiffel Tower in the rain

Incredible, right? Pictured unmistakably are the vehicle, landmark and weather conditions of my choice. But after the initial wow factor has worn off, it doesn’t take much scrutiny to spot the flaws. In one picture the Jag is making a nuisance of itself in the face of oncoming traffic. In another there’s not one Eiffel Tower, but two. This is a landmark that surely doesn’t need any more replicas!

As a user, there are several options at this point. We can spin again and get four brand new images based on our original prompt. Or we can ask Midjourney to create variations of what it’s already generated. Maybe we’d like to do some manual editing in Photoshop, feed the image back to Midjourney and ask it to work from that. Perhaps we’d prefer to rewrite our prompt and be a little more specific.

But let’s move on. We could play with whimsical pictures of this and that all day, but we’re here to examine Midjourney’s potential visual contribution to email marketing.

An a-eye for design

We’re going to test this from two distinct angles:

Overall email layout
Individual images

I should preface this by saying that Midjourney clearly isn’t intended for the design of websites or emails. It’s a tool with an artistic bent (and one that gives it a distinct character from its rivals). Nonetheless, let’s see what it can do as a source of design inspiration.

We’ll work with purpose. Our goal is to design an email for a make-believe travel company. Its brand colours are a sunny blue and a beachy tan. Those can sit on a traditional white background, with body copy rendered in an eye-pleasingly contrasting dark grey. AI can’t read our minds (yet), so my request is quite specific:

Marketing email for a travel company. Beach imagery. White background. Dark grey text. Use of colours #6084f7 and #c1aa60

And here’s what it came up with:

TO TE MAIAY THI – do you know what language that is? It’s mangled English. And that’s an indicator as to how AI image generators work. The output is a visual echo, based on countless source images that have been fed in. That’s why it’s not uncommon to see distorted intepretations of brand watermarks or artist signatures. As with all AI products, we’re seeing the results of complex algorithms rather than any real intelligence.

But can we make use of these mock-up emails? Of the four images above, option 1 is the most useful. It may have largely disregarded my colour choices, but in terms of layout and volume of content it’s the most plausible as an email. Now we’ll conjure up some imagery to bring it to life.

It’s a kind of image-ic

The big beach image from our layout mock-up is pretty nice:

That picture is of too low resolution to use in its current form but thankfully Midjourney is a flexible tool. I’m going to feed the image back to the platform, along with some instructions:

[beach.jpg] panoramic illustration of a yacht next to a tropical beach with palm trees and rocks --ar 11:4

That ‘ar’ tag at the end is a way to define the aspect ratio of our images. We don’t want the default square shape in this case, so I’ve picked dimensions that suit a long strip-like image.

Here’s the result:

I like option 4. So let’s upscale it to a useable resolution, and I’ll modify the colours a little in Photoshop to make it more on-brand.

We have a layout. We have a main image. Now we can move onto the final step.

Assembly required

Let’s put the AI-generated components into an actual email. If this was a real commercial mailing, we’d have generated many more trial layouts and images, and made a lot more edits along the way. Working with AI tools feels a bit like the infinite monkey theorem. Spin and spin again until we finally get the result we had in mind.

But what we have here is good enough for experimental purposes. Here’s the final product:

Is it a revolutionary design? No. Could the main image be better? Yes. The point isn’t perfection but progress.

Some final thoughts on AI email design

AI content-creation tools are becoming more sophisticated and widespread. It’s not far-fetched to see image generators becoming an everyday tool that lets marketers conjure up fresh, on-brand graphics in seconds.

In answer to the opening question – can AI design a marketing email – my verdict is sort of. It can certainly help. But at the current rate of progress, who knows what it’ll be capable of a year from now.

Email Design

How to make light work of dark mode

5 minute read

Adrian Young

Black text, white background. That’s been the go‑to colour scheme on websites and emails for a long time. After all, it emulates the printed typography of a book or newspaper.

But a digital display isn’t a piece of paper. That’s why some bright spark came up with the idea of dark mode – an inversion of the default colour schemes of old. And there’s a point to it beyond ‘because we can’. Light text on a dark background is easier on the eye, especially in a dimly‑lit environment. It’s also easier on battery life. Whereas ink comes with a material cost in physical media, light comes with an energy cost on a screen.

The use of dark mode is entirely optional. You can generally switch from light to dark whenever you like, or set your device to react automatically based on light conditions. Most modern operating systems, lots of applications and some websites cater for dark mode.

We’re not here to talk about any of those. Email is our thing. Let’s take a closer look at how dark mode affects email, how to design for it, and how to code for it.

Don’t be afraid of the dark

There’s an important point to set down from the outset: the objective is to optimise your emails for dark mode, not to override your reader’s settings.

That means we all need to be flexible with our brand guidelines. Whether your customer has a visual requirement for dark colours or simply prefers them, user prerogative trumps everything else.

Google homepage in its light and dark versions — If Google isn’t afraid to invert its brand colours, none of us should be!

Discover the dark mode landscape

Rendering quirks and the tricks to get around them are at the heart of email development. The handling of dark mode maintains these traditions.

Some email services allow full control – you get to set the dark mode colouring. Others ignore your styling and force a dark colour scheme of their own. Some offer partial control, and a few don’t support dark mode at all. The challenge is to design and code an email that looks good on all of them.

It’s important to note that those services which apply their own dark mode colours are not a lost cause. You can and should still optimise your design so that they look as good as possible. Familiarity and consistency ward off unsightly surprises and the wasted time of trial & error.

Don’t be vexed by text

Warning: please excuse the rant‑like nature of this paragraph. It’s frustratingly common in email to see images used to display copy. There has never been a convincing reason to do so. Images‑of‑text instead of actual text is often a way to foist a brand font or elaborate design on users. And one that comes at the expense of accessibility, usability and best practice.

Dark mode is one more reason to use text. Image‑based text can lead to a messy, partially inverted email in dark mode. Real text puts the email developer in the driving seat. Some email services support web fonts, so it’s still possible to show brand fonts to a reasonable percentage of your audience. Other accounts will fall back to standard fonts of your choice.

Let’s be (partially) transparent

Email supports a handful of image formats. JPEGs are common, and best‑suited to photographic content such as product shots. GIFs are also popular, and handy for simple images such as icons, or for short animations.

Somewhat less widely used are PNG images. Which is a pity, because their built‑in transparency support is a dark mode designer’s best friend. Let’s take a logo as an example. Save your logo as a JPEG and it could end up sitting in an unsightly white box against a dark background. Utilise the PNG format instead and it’ll automatically let the background colour shine through. If your logo itself is dark, it could be lost against a darkened background. A white outline or glow effect – invisible on light mode – can counteract that.

Here’s how a logo might look in various light and dark mode setups

It’s worth noting that GIFs also have a transparency capability… but it’s limited. It’s an all‑or‑nothing deal – a single colour can be set as fully transparent. While that can be useful in some situations, it doesn’t allow for the smoothly‑blended curves of a PNG.

Code for the mode

It’s time to get coding. First up, you need to explicity enable dark mode in email. That’s a two‑step process. Add the following HTML <meta> tags in the <head> of your document:

<meta name="color‑scheme" content="light dark"> <meta name="supported‑color‑schemes" content="light dark">

And then create a new <style> sheet, separate from your existing responsive styles. Now add a couple of root selectors to define light and dark mode:

:root { color‑scheme: light dark; supported‑color‑schemes: light dark; }

These colour modes can now be targeted via media queries. Not only does that mean you can set up specific custom colours for dark mode, you can even swap images.

@media (prefers‑color‑scheme: dark) { .email‑background { background‑color: #313336 !important; } .darkmode‑show { display: block !important; width: auto !important; overflow: visible !important; float: none !important; max‑height: inherit !important; max‑width: inherit !important; line‑height: auto !important; margin‑top: 0px !important; visibility: inherit !important; } .darkmode‑hide { display: none !important; } }

There’s an important reminder in that prefers‑color‑scheme syntax! We should always bear in mind that light or dark mode is a user preference.

Give it a go

We could go on about the technicalities of dark mode all day. But let’s now put it to the test.

Below is a simulated email. It’s interactive – try the controls to see how it looks in various states of light and dark mode.

Note: this demo approximately simulates light and dark conditions in email. Specific email services and devices will have their own rendering quirks. This simulation is set to automatically disable the use of swapped images on forced dark mode, so some switches will be tripped automatically.

Simplicity keeps things… simple

The more complex the design, the more work will be involved in making it dark mode‑friendly. That raises a question: is that design essential, or can it be stripped back? I like to find the answer in a second question: does the design help to relay information to the customer, or is it a box‑ticking exercise for the marketing department?

In light of that way of thinking, the best solution is often to simplify the design rather than piling on more and more CSS code.

Final thoughts

Dark mode is a good thing. It’s a piece of functionality in the spirit of accessibility and respects the user’s autonomy.

As with all things development, you don’t need to work from scratch every time. An email template and snippet‑based coding style mean consistent results.

Despite that, surprisingly few companies are actively supporting dark mode in email or even the web. By designing for dark mode, you are helping to lead the way.

Perhaps it isn’t light work, but it’s definitely the right work.

Email best practice

How to figure out when is the best time to send your email campaign

4 minute read

Josh Green

It’s a question that comes across our desk almost weekly, “When should we send out the email, when is the best time?” – The answer as with so much in email marketing is… “it depends”. Working out when you should send an email is really unique not only to the company sending it but even unique to the content of the email itself. If your goal is to increase your engagement rates then you are going to need to work out when is the best time to send emails.

We have been sending out emails for quite a few years now and to say ‘we’ve seen it all’ would be a bit of an understatement. With over 5 million emails sent every month by myself alone. Therefore we can say with a great degree of certainty that there is no one perfect time to send an email. The best time really does vary from industry to industry, business to business as well email to email. Unfortunately for you dear reader there is no singular time that is best for all emails to be sent. Although that would make all our lives a lot easier.

The main goal of any email is to drive traffic to a website. This email engagement can only be improved if every part of the email is carefully designed to suit the audience. This includes everything from the pre-subject line, copy, design, email length, buttons and even the send time.

Test, test, and test again

Getting email engagement to increase really does require quite a lot of different tests. This includes testing the send time, subject lines, copy, design, and other key elements of the email. Ideally each aspect of the email is tested one part at a time as to not cloud the results from any specific test.

Having so many things to test and evaluate may seem daunting at first but by systematically working through each with a number of A/B tests you should start seeing patterns of engagement. Make sure to test one aspect at a time and also try run 1-3 A/B tests per item so you are sure of the results. Employing other tools like our subject line creator tool can also assist with this process.

1. Divide your list into segments

The first step is to divide you database into smaller segments. Ideally the divisions are not arbitrary but based upon matching characteristics such as, purchase history, geographic location, age, gender or as many matching characteristics that seem relevant. Hopefully by grouping similar subscribers together they will produce less random results and make testing to those segments more accurate.

Most email marketing platforms have segmenting tools built in and if not we can assist with any data segmentation you might require.

2. Create your tests

With your newly created segments it’s time to start testing. It is important to be able to measure the success of each test so try not to test multiple things at once. Always be goal orientated with each test. For example, “Does placing high value products near the top of emails result in higher sales for these item?” Make sure you tests are also based on some real world knowledge, for example people will always spend more closer to pay day. So this might skew some results if you’re testing close to those days. Try and isolate your tests as much as possible.

It is also important to also build on the findings of your tests. So for example if your Sales email is always the most profitable email and you know people spend more on payday. You should certainly then test if your Sales email is more effective if sent closer to payday.

3. Divide each segment into control and test groups

Once you have decided what you are going to test divide each segment into two equal numbered sub-segments. Your ESP should be able to do this for you. It is important to ensure each sub-segment is large enough to produce meaningful test results. If you think the segments are too small you might want to adjust what you are testing or add more data. The final option would be to run more tests to remove and randomness from the results. There is also a useful calculator you can use to calculate a good size

4. Create two versions of the email

To make the test create the email as you normally would then create a version that will test your hypothesis. This can be anything such as reordering of content, subject line, overall design, button placement.

5. Measure the results

Ideally your ESP has a robust reporting suite or heat-map capability. This should allow you to easily see which email generates more engagement as well as allowing you to see what element of the email is generating all the clicks. To really make sure of the results you could run 1-3 additional tests, testing the same thing to remove and randomness from a one off test. For evaluating send times make sure that you’re getting the same type of engagement you would expect regardless of when you send the email. Then choose the send time that gets the most engagement.

Build on the wins

Now that you have established the best time to send or any other aspect you have been testing implement these results on the main database sends. As long as the results are replicated in the main sends you are good to begin at the beginning of your testing cycle again. Testing should be a consistent practice that you continuously include into you marketing calendar. Remember also that just because a Sale email might perform well close to pay day doesn’t mean you should send your welcome emails out then to. You might find Welcome emails perform better if sent only 30 minutes after sign-up.

The key point with trying to improve engagement through email testing is to remember to constantly tailor your tests and ultimately your approach to your audience. Use your educated guesses to guide your questions and then make decisions based on the real data you get back from tests.