Email Marketing The Clever Way A simple guide to email marketing and how to make your campaigns more effective.
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We need to start here YOUR INTRODUCTION
Why don’t you GET RESPONSIVE
LIKE ALL GOOD WHITE PAPERS, THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GOOD INTRODUCTION TO SET YOU ON YOUR WAY
DON’T LET CUSTOMERS SLIP THROUGH YOUR FINGERS BY MAKING SURE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS ARE OPTIMISED FOR MOBILE AND TABLETS
You may not know this, but email is among the most trusted and widely used medium of all digital marketing tools. It is often preferred above display media, banner ads, and brand websites. But are email marketers leveraging this communication channel effectively? What do consumers think about what we do? As often as we try to put the consumer first,
Responsive email design has been growing steadily in popularity, and it’s no surprise as to why: 47% of email opens are on a mobile device, and some brands see upwards of 70% of their emails opened on mobile. These brands turn to responsive design techniques to create better experiences for their subscribers, and in many cases, increase their click and engagement rates.
many times we miss the mark. A Digital River company, BlueHornet surveyed over 1,000 consumers to find out how they use email and what they think about email marketing. The results of this survey have been consolidated to help marketers look beyond the data, focus on their customer, and learn what relationship consumers really want to have with brands.
NEVER UNDER ESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS SOCIAL NETWORKS AND MOBILE DEVICES Email Opens are on mobile devices Times a Day people look at their mobiles Delete an Email if it doesn’t appear correctly on their mobile device
Power of Email 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase in 2013 based on a promotional email.
So, does that mean all email campaigns have to have a responsive design? Well not quite. Many mobile devices do not support responsive emails such as Gmail, Yahoo and most of the Windows based email clients. However, the Apple IOS mail client does accept responsive emails and has a large footprint in the market.
TO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A HIGH OPEN RATE SUCCESS, DESIGN YOUR EMAILS SO THAT THEY DISPLAY CORRECTLY IN THE MAJORITY OF MOBILE DEVICES Responsive Emails are Supported by IOS Mail Application Android 4.X (OEM) Mail App Windows Phone 7.5 BlackBerry OS7 BlackBerry Z10
Top Ten Email Clients 1. Apple iPhone 24% 2. Outlook 17% 3. Apple iPad 12% 4. Google Android 9%
Promote Incentives 7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week.
5. Apple Mail 8% 6. Outlook.com 7% 7. Yahoo! Mail 7% 8. Gmail 3% 9. Windows Live Mail 3% 10. Windows Mail 2%
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EMAIL MARKETING WAY TO GO!
A GREAT LIST OF COOL EMAIL FACTS
A FASCINATING BUNCH OF EMAIL STATISTICS THAT WILL MAKE YOU THINK AGAIN
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF EMAIL MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Email marketing is one of the most effective tactics for driving sales. According to a study by ExactTarget, 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email. Read And Learn • 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. (Convinceandconvert.com) • 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Convinceandconvert.com) • Roughly half of an email list will be active – either opening or clicking on emails. (Epsilon) • Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%. (Adestra July 2012 Report) • Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Adestra July 2012 Report) • For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” performed the best. (Adestra July 2012 Report)
64% OF SURVEYED RECIPIENTS SAY THAT THEY OPEN AN EMAIL BECAUSE OF THE SUBJECT LINE.
EMAILS THAT INCLUDE SOCIAL SHARING BUTTONS HAVE A 158% HIGHER CLICK-THROUGH RATE.
Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey
Source: GetResponse
• Emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate. (GetResponse) • Women click 10% more often than men on mobile emails. (Tailored Mail 2012 Email Marketing Trends) • Email marketing spend grows 10% year over year. (Forrester 2011) • 40% of B2B marketers rated the leads generated by email marketing as high quality. (Software Advice Survey) • For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email
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marketing investment. (Experian) 82% of consumers open emails from companies. (Litmus) 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices. (TopRankBlog) There are 3.6 billion email accounts in 2013. (The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016) By 2016, the number will reach 4.3 billion. (The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016)
• 64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line. (Chadwick Martin Bailey) • 7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week. (2012 Blue Kangaroo Study) • 39% of marketers have no strategy for mobile email. (eConsultancy 2012 Email Marketing industry Census) • 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email. (Earnest Agency) • 56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013. (The Small and Midsize Business Email Marketing Survey 2013) • Monday emails had the highest revenue per email. (Experian 2012 Q4 Email Benchmark Report) • 27% of consumers were more likely to say their favorite companies should invest in more email. (ExactTarget) • 1 in 2 marketers use animated gifs in their email campaigns. (Experian Email Market Study) • This year, about 84% of all email traffic will be spam. (The Radicati Group) • Email ad revenue reached $156 million in 2012. (Interactive Advertising Bureau)
EFFECTIVE EMAIL DESIGN
Consider This...
GETTING YOUR AUDIENCE’S ATTENTION IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK Now that you have read just how effective email marketing can be, let us now turn our attention to how to design effective emails so that they capture the attention of your audience and improve click through rates. To make things a bit easier, these steps and suggestions will be categorised into three main areas, namely layout considerations, image and contents and finally production and detail.
Its all about the LAYOUT
Due to circumstances out with anybody’s control, Web embeddable fonts shall not appear in your inbox. Keep things simple and use standard fonts such as Arial, Verdana and Georgia.
Fonts Are Important!
Keep Everything Within 600px Wide This one is first, because it is the most important. Forcing your subscribers to scroll from side-to-side is the kiss of death for an email’s response rate. Why? Numerous eye-tracking studies have discerned that the average Web user’s reading habits skew more towards scanning rather than word-for-word reading. This means that stuff on the left gets more attention than stuff on the right – and stuff that doesn’t appear at all might as well not even exist. Keep Your Calls-to-Action High The majority of your subscribers likely only see the very top portion of their email messages and will therefore make a quick decision about whether the content is worthy of their time. Make sure to give your readers the opportunity to act immediately. Tell A Story The most effective emails weave a compelling and cohesive story between the subject line, the header and the content. Each of them should dovetail with the other, and provide just a little more info than the previous item. Click here to check out irresistable email teaser campaigns that perfectly illustrates a tight interaction between the headline, the image and the content, with the result being a truly memorable message. Plan For No Images The vast majority of email clients block images in messages unless the user opts to see them – that means your beautiful images will never get seen unless the rest of the content (i.e. the HTML text) is descriptive enough to persuade recipients to allow images from you to be shown. Headlines and body copy play crucial roles in this decision, so avoid embedding critical content in images, or at least back them up with alt-tags which display even with images turned off.
Clear and Large Call To Actions (CTAs) Design isn’t art – everything we create is intended to elicit action on the part of the user. To this end, prominent calls to action are critical for virtually every kind of email. Make sure they stand out, make sure they’re powerful, and make them look clickable. Everything about your CTAs should make people want to click on them – to do something, see something, make something happen. As a side note, larger CTAs may be more than a cosmetic consideration, now that mobile email consumption is on track to surpass that of desktop use – now’s a great time to make sure those buttons are big enough for touchscreen use. Repeat Your CTA Don’t force your subscribers to scroll all the way to the top of your email just to take the action you’ve spent the last 600 pixels trying to persuade them to. A brief repeat of the main call-to-action at the end of your email can be super-effective at getting that elusive click. Make It Clear Who’s Sending The Message Most people are a little suspicious of strangers who don’t clearly identify themselves, and the same goes for email – make sure it’s clear right from the start who exactly is talking to your email subscriber. Make sure your logo is prominently displayed at the top of the email, and even better if your email ties in with your overall brand. Quick Getaway – Treat Your Email Like A Homepage Given how limited a window of time and space you have to persuade subscribers that your email is worthy of their time and attention, your goal should be to get them away from the email as soon as possible. Make sure to review your email design, and remove anything that keeps them lingering. Overly complex layouts, long copy paragraphs and superfluous design elements should almost always get the axe in favor of clean, simple messages that get straight to the point.
No More Than 3 Columns Max Given that you have a max of 600 pixels in width to work within, creating a layout with more than 2 columns and still making it visually impacting may be difficult. Do yourself a favor and keep it to no more than 2-3 content areas laying side-by-side. Images On The Left, Text On The Right Assuming you followed our advice about the number of columns above, your next question may be how to arrange said columns. Studies have shown that readers’ eyes are attracted more strongly to striking imagery over text – even if the text is important. With this in mind, put the image on the left, so it’s the first thing your readers see – once they’ve satisfied their visual curiosity, they can continue reading your oh-so-important headline.
REAL-TIME USER ATTENTION HEAT MAP
PICTURE THIS... IMAGES CAN INSTANTLY CONVEY A MESSAGE WITHOUT THE NEED TO ENGAGE THE READER IN UNDERSTANDING YOUR SALES MESSAGE.
Stay On Target – Keep The Message Focused Think about when you send a colleague an email – how many topics do you typically cover in one message? If you answered more than 3, you should probably rethink your use of the medium… Emails are focused messaging channels meaning that the most effective content is limited in scope. Trying to cram too many different topics into one message results in a diluted response. Limit your message to no more than 3 different topics to concentrate your subscribers’ responses. Remember, you can always send a separate email.
Beauty Is In The Bandwidth Of The Beholder It’s tough enough that your email likely appears to subscribers without images – the last thing you want is to successfully persuade them to trust you by opting to show your beautiful images only to sit there waiting for your gargantuan hi-res photos to download. Make sure you optimize your images for output – but don’t downgrade them so much that the compression introduces noise. As broadband penetration grows around the world, this is becoming less of an issue, but for now, exercise a little restraint with the file size.
Look Them In The Eye Using awesome images is great, but using awesome images of people is even better. Click here for further proof of this useful tip.
can take on the whole burden of fully explaining your message, so you only need to tell them enough to decide to click through in the email.
Make It Quick Keep your copy sections short – preferably 3 lines or less. Remember, there’s a whole landing page ahead of your recipients that
ALWAYS USE IMAGES THAT ARE INSTANTLY RECOGNISABLE Don’t Use Background Images Just how sweet does that lovely CSS3shadowed type look when laid against that awesome wood texture you just yanked from iStockphoto? Hate to break it to you, but it’s actually pretty un-sweet, given that background images are stripped out of many of the major email clients. Avoid setting type against gradients, photos, patterns, or anything else that would require an image file to render. Remember: solid-color backgrounds only. The Magic Of Animation Did you know that – despite the many limitations of email – you can embed animations in your emails? If you want to do this, you’ll need to embrace that favorite medium of meme-fiends, the animated GIF. You could be forgiven for raising a quizzical eyebrow – the use of animated GIFs is, after all, pretty rare given the time-intensive nature of creating them frame-by-frame, and how Mos aut res ea se pro officia sum doloresectet easy it is for their file size to balloon with even aut pro blaut ut eos dolut quia volume perunti simple effects. cus exernat endit, nonse pratiandis et, volori tetur ate ommoluptat vid mi, conseque volori
IMAGES CAN ENVOKE PASSION SO MAXIMISE THEIR USE Make Your Buttons ‘Button-Y’ As with any of your call-to-actions, make sure your buttons have weight and presence above all other elements in the message. Paint A Picture Use large, stunning photographs and imagery to visually convey your main point in the message – this is especially important for retail emails, since image quality have a direct impact on your conversion potential. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. While shopping online, the only things a customer has to go on before clicking that chunky orange “Buy” button are the images and words on the page. They can’t touch the product or inspect it from any angle. Human beings tend to be tactile creatures, so the better your images, the closer you’re getting your customers to a real experience with the product. tetur. Ipiendi cum conseni cus endi reptat. Everio velendicatis apelit, quos dolent voluptis.
PRODUCTION AND DETAIL IN ADDITION TO THE DESIGN TIPS ALREADY DISCUSSED, KNOWING SOME OF THE CHALLENGES AND PITFALLS OF THEIR PRODUCTION CAN SAVE YOU A LOT OF HEADACHES DOWN THE ROAD. Test It On-The-Go As CampaignMonitor compellingly explains, your emails are now more likely to be viewed on a smartphone or mobile device than on a desktop – so you’d better make sure they look their best under those circumstances. Encourage Engagement On Other Platforms Let’s face it, no matter how awesomely designed your email is, it’s just not going to resonate with some people. So give them a soft out: add links or icons for them to follow you and/or subscribe to your other main communication methods. Let your audience choose how they want to hear from you. (Don’t) Keep Them Separated Make sure the overall look and feel of your email ties in with the aesthetics of the page you’re driving them to. Give your
subscribers overt visual cues that they’ve arrived at the right place – things like button styles, typography and color scheme all factor into this. A Glimpse Of What’s To Come Banner blindness is everywhere – and it’s the fault of marketers everywhere. Over the last 12 years of online marketing, Web users have learned to tune out the blinking, flashing, swooping and fading ad banners of yesteryear, instead honing in on areas of interactivity on the page. Take advantage of this by changing the perception of your images by presenting them as the gateways to interactive elements in the email – like, for example, a content slider, or a video.
Don’t forget the “View in Browser” link! It’s simple – if all else fails, let your readers view the email in their web browser, where the frustrating quirks of email clients no longer apply.
CALL TO ACTION
Step Right This Way Arrows are a fundamental part of all UX design, as they’re used to explicitly direct the user’s attention towards important elements or actions. Within the context of email design, you can use arrows to help lead your recipients by the nose to your most important info. Large Typography Often with email, it can be difficult to find high-quality photos that convey your
message appropriately. In cases like these, consider leading with an interesting and engaging typographic arrangement. Watch Your Borders Web designers love their modules, sidebars and callout sections, and with good reason – they help distinguish important or related pieces of content to emphasize their points. Often, these sections are treated with types of borders to further separate them from the main body of the layout, however in email designs, this can require the use of excessive image slices, which add weight and complexity to the produced email. Do your developer a favour – minimize the use of tricky border styles, and drop shadows, which only serve to take up the limited width you have available for the layout.
WE HOPE THAT THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT WILL BE OF HELP AND ASSISTANCE IN THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF YOUR ONLINE DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS.
Dave has over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry and has worked with and developed products for IBM, Apple, GEC-Marconi, Lear Astronics, ICL and Kwik-Fit Insurance Services.
TO TEST THIS THEORY, WE USED AN IMAGE THAT RESEMBLED A MEDIA PLAYER Banner ads typically convert at around 0.15% – the one above converted at nearly 10 times that. Other evidence lies in heatmapping studies conducted on the homepage for SlideDeck.com – each time we see large hotspots over anything resembling an interaction button, even if they’re embedded within an image, its more likely to be clicked. Use this knowledge for good, not evil!
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR OF THIS WHITE PAPER
He was the original founder and shareholder of Recruitment Scotland.com, a leading UK job website acquired by Monster for £9 million. He has started a number of online and development businesses over the last 10 years with a particular focus on business to consumer Internet based technologies including the software development for LoveFilm.
DAVE YOUNG BONGOMAGIC INNOVATION DIRECTOR
Dave is recognised as being one of the pioneers in online recruitment in the UK and holds innovation awards in recognition of his work in referral-based systems. In 2009, Dave contracted Motor Neurone Disease but has continued to work tirelessly on the development of online referral and recommendation systems and more recently was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the Scottish business community.
recommendation email marketing software Information and thanks go to the following: Jason Amunwa - Betterment Blog Nielsen Norman Group ExactTarget Convinceandconvert.com Adestra BlueKangaroo eConsultancy 2012 Email Marketing industry Census The Small and Midsize Business Email Marketing Survey 2013 Experian 2012 Q4 Email Benchmark Report Tailored Mail 2012 Email Marketing Trends The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016
telephone
+44 1383 435987 email
sales@bongomagic.com web
www.bongomagic.com