Enabler provide best practice advice within content marketing within email, from a multi award-winning email marketing agency, offering top tip advice.

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Optimising your email campaigns for mobile

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Email opens and click-through rates on mobile and tablets have been increasing consistently in recent years. We’re a generation of smart device users, as shown by the recent statistics of mobile users: 51.7% of all marketing emails are opened on mobile, with a click thru rate of 43.9%. With these statistics it’s imperative, now more than ever, to optimise email for mobile and tablet.

It’s also important to remember that results will be different based on the audience. For example, many B2B emails have lower open rates on mobile and tablet because their end users will be sitting at their desks during the work days and are more likely to open emails on desktop. This will, understandably, change the importance of responsive emails per company.

 

Responsive design email example

Research also shows that email is the best way to reach millennials  and that 80% of millennials sleep with their smartphones by their bedside – so if you’re not optimising email for mobile, you could be alienating key audiences. The main benefit of designing your emails responsively is improving the user journey for your customers. So how do you go about preparing for this?

 

Mobile-first design

This concept was first developed in 2009, to adapt for the increasing amount of users who were interacting with content on smaller devices than their desktop computer. It’s an approach focused around designing for smaller screens first and optimising that experience, then adding more features and content for bigger screens. There are pros and cons to this approach:

Pro #1: The disappointment factor – imagine you’ve spent your time designing a stunning email that does all sorts of fancy things… only to try scaling down for mobile and realising that all the tricks that worked so wonderfully on desktop, don’t translate into mobile. Disappointing. Mobile-first design eliminates this and ensures that your email is cohesive across all devices.

Con #1: Crushing creativity – the problem with mobile-first is that you immediately discard some of your great ideas, just because they won’t work on mobile. Isn’t it better to be as creative as possible for the people who will experience it, rather than limiting yourself?

Pro #2: Selective content – When designing for mobile-first, you have to whittle your content down to its most vital elements. Now you’ve selected the content you most want your users to see, when it comes to the desktop version, you get to figure out how to make it more exciting instead of facing the ‘what to cut’ dilemma.

Con #2: Demoralising – It can be really difficult to get into your design if you are completely restricted from the get-go. It can also be a different design experience, even for little things, like the difference between targeting your email for people to click on, or tap on.

 

As you can see, there are different positives and drawbacks to using mobile-first design, however even if you choose not to go down that route, you can still prepare in other ways:

Font considerations

Think about your font style and size. A key thing to remember when designing for mobile is that the minimum font size displayed on devices such as iPhones is 13 pixels. If you have any font sizes smaller than this in your desktop version, many mobile devices will upscale this and it could make your design look very strange. There is a way around this, which involves adding a small bit of CSS to your code which will override this occurring on the iPhone and keep your text at the font size you want.

 

To scroll or not to scroll?

Think about how far your users have to scroll. Scrolling on a touch-screen is much harder than with a mouse wheel. The best way to avoid unnecessary scrolling is to make sure you’re placing the information you most want users to see at the top of the email.

The other way you can keep your email shorter is to use the ‘hideonmobile’ CSS class, which can be used to hide extra spacing and even images. This will help you display the information your users need to see nearer the top of the email and keep the email relevant, without them losing interest before they’ve got to the good bit.

Where possible, use the tag ‘display:none;’ to hide extraneous elements in your mobile design. For example, social sharing links. These can often be really tricky for users to interact with on mobile (as clicking is easier than specific pixel tapping) even if they are a must- have on desktop.

Keep your single column layouts no wider than 600 pixels. It works the best for mobile devices as your copy is easier to read.
If you’re going to include things like social sharing links, or any buttons in general, try giving them a minimum area of 44 x 44 pixels. These are part of the guidelines Apple sets, and definitely worth adhering to. Fingers were not meant for tiny buttons on mobile.

 

Get creative with your images

Think about how you slice up your images. Is your entire image really something your mobile viewers need to see? You can get creative with how different parts of your images will display on mobile. For example, you may have a header which has text on the left and image on the right. You could slice the header in half and hide the right hand side on mobile. This would reduce the length of your email on mobile. Alternatively you may have a large image on desktop that you only need a part of in order to still get the same effect on mobile.

 

Consider every element

Make sure everything about your campaign works well on mobile. There’s no point sending a beautifully designed, mobile friendly email if the form/survey/landing page users are clicking through to isn’t also responsive. There’s nothing more frustrating as a user than clicking through to a teeny tiny form and having to do the awkward two finger zoom, and select the exact part of the form that you want to fill in, only to miss and end up with your name in the email field and your address as your first name.

A huge percentage of your audience now open their emails on mobile every day, so responsive email isn’t a ‘nice to have’ any more, it’s a must-have. Make sure you’re not missing out on one of the biggest trends email has seen in the last decade and make your emails responsive!

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How to avoid email marketing mistakes

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Email is a huge part of most companies’ marketing mix but many brands are still swinging and missing when it comes to delivering great campaigns. Email is an integral part of many marketing campaigns. We use it every single day. The first thing I do when I sit down at my desk in the morning is check my email and it’s also the last thing I do before I leave. It’s the one thing that stays up on my screen for the whole day.

When we’re dealing with something that impacts so many people day to day, we can’t afford to be getting it wrong. So, what are the challenges of email and how do we overcome them?

1. Getting noticed in peoples inboxes

  • Subject line testing
    Every data list is different, so there’s no magic solution to email subject lines. The best way to achieve results is to test subject lines through A/B testing and then roll out to the rest of your list. For example, send 20% of your emails to one subject line and 20% to another. Leave it 24 hours, assess the results and send the winning subject line to the rest of your list. Over time you’ll get a sense of what engages your audience and what bores them to tears.

  • Do something a little different
    Emojis in email subject lines can work really well when used cleverly and sparingly.

  • Know when to send
    Different databases respond to different send times. At Enabler, we find that 9am, 11am and 2pm work really well as send times for B2B. This enables you to catch people as they start work, on their morning coffee break and during the post-lunch slump. Again, the way to find out what works best for you is testing. Split-send to your list at different times of day and compare the results.

  • Know how often to send
    No-one wants to be spammed with emails after they’ve signed up for a newsletter. With the introduction of Gmail’s inbox tab system, which separates everything into primary, promotions, social and updates you don’t want to be stuck in the junk section! A way to deal with this is to ask your users what they want; find out what they’re interested in and send them that.

 

2. Ensure your emails are rendering correctly

There is nothing worse in the world of email than opening up your inbox to find an email that hasn’t rendered correctly. Maybe you’re missing half an image, maybe you can’t see images at all. Maybe you’re missing half a call to action button on your Outlook client because a lazy developer didn’t run the email through an email testing client before sending it to your inbox. The key to making sure you get it right is to test on each email client before hitting the send button. I prefer Litmus because it allows you to email your HTML directly to the program and shows you how your email will render on both mobile clients and desktop clients. It also shows you all the versions of the clients rather than just the latest ones. Top tip: Outlook 2007 and 2010 basically support nothing.

 

3. Keeping up with trends

  • Mobile vs desktop
    Know what percentage of your list are opening your emails on mobile. I generally work to the rule that if it’s more than 10% you should definitely be using responsive design and if it’s anything over 2% you should definitely be at least considering using it. We’re a society of mobile users, and that’s only going to grow. With that in mind, email marketers can’t afford to delay making their content accessible to mobile users.

  • Dynamic content
    Gone are the days of building 30 emails, one for every category you have in your database. It’s all about building one email, and using conditional content conditions to ensure each user sees what you want them to see upon opening your email. All decent ESPs will have this functionality built in, so what are you waiting for?

  • Rich media
    Knowing how to make your emails stand out is more important than ever. Emails can drive sales and brand awareness as well as provide platforms for event attendance. Explore GIFS, Video, Twitter feeds, Social sharing and more to support your email campaigns. With technology developing so rapidly, it’s important to be creative to ensure you stay on top of your game.

  • Be practical
    This is a big one, there’s no point sending great content to your database if they won’t be able to see it, and the email therefore loses all meaning to them. It’s imperative to know, for example, that Outlook won’t support your animated GIF and will freeze it on the first frame. Or that Gmail won’t display emojis in your subject line and show them as little boxes instead. Make sure you do your research and find out what will and won’t work, before you get creative.

 

4. Managing your data correctly

  • You can’t have good email without good data
    Understanding what you can do with your data is every bit as important as keeping up with the latest front end coding trends. You can segment your data by age, region, gender or anything you know about them – all you need is the right tools to collect that data and the right tools to use it to code a great email. Never miss an opportunity for data capture and always employ the Pokémon tag line ‘Gotta catch ‘em all’. (‘em all being the bits of data).

  • Know what to do with that data within an email.
    Personalisation is key but get it right – no one wants to see ‘Hi First Name’ at the start of an email. There’s no point personalising if your data isn’t correct. I’ve seen brands put the wrong merge code into an email so the policy renewal ID was swapped with the recipient first name. This gave the effect that the company was referring to one of its customers as a number, not a name.

  • Be creative
    You’d be surprised how many people actually miss this out of campaigns. It seems like common sense, until you sit down in front of a computer and start trying to plan, at which point your brain might give you… nothing. So how do we get around those creative email mind blocks? First work out what you are trying to achieve. Do you want people to buy from your site?Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to encourage people to enter a competition or play a game or simply visit your site?

 

Once you’ve worked this out you can start working out how you’re going to achieve it. Don’t be scared of doing some competitor research to get you started. Most importantly, have fun – email is great, you should be enjoying yourself!

Is email a dying channel?

In short, no! Email has been around since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent the first one on the ARPANET system. It was the first system that was able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPANET. Since then we have seen the evolution of email as a channel to the point where many of the functionalities mirror what you can do with websites – which is remarkable when you think about it. Considering everything you code into email has to sit within tables… within tables – the amount it has and continues to achieve is outstanding.

Think about how many other internet based fads email has remained a constant throughout. Email saw the birth of MSN, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Mobile apps… and it’s still going, still developing, still adapting. There are conferences all around the world dedicated purely to email and how we can keep developing email.

Online sales have skyrocketed in the last few years and now remain at a consistent high. A huge part of what drives these online sales is email. Email drives people to websites. Email makes sales. Email is awesome.

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Top tips for using rich media in your email marketing

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Email marketing must be engaging. While you can achieve this through great copywriting, you can also enhance your email campaigns with attention-grabbing and interactive visuals. This is worth doing – as long as you get it right.

Often, companies make the mistake of putting rich media content into their emails with very little idea about how it will display on different email clients. Each email client has its own quirks and it’s important to understand these before sending out emails that only half your list will be able to appreciate.

 

Luckily, we’re here to help! Here’s the low down on when and when not to use rich media content in your emails…

GIFS: What are they?

Otherwise known as ‘Graphics Interchange Format’, they’ve been around since the 80’s, but weren’t widely used in email until much later. GIF supports both animated and static images and have been used extensively in email campaigns due to their wide support across browsers and email clients.

Why would you use them?

For starters, animated GIFs add an instant element of delight to any campaign, which typically is not possible with static email designs. They give the user a sense of excitement and can be useful to inject humour and showcase products. One brand who does this really well is Buzzfeed. They have embraced the use of GIF in their emails, especially in recent years. I receive a weekly email about cats from them which always features a funny cat GIF – I open it every single week and usually end up clicking through to the site as a result.

Another example is Sprout Social, who used an animated GIF to show off their latest functionality and interaction with their redesigned iPhone app. West Elm also used a clever GIF to display a selection of lamps; they used each frame to display a lamp turning on and off, it was really eyecatching.

How do they work?

GIFs operate on a frame-by-frame basis. To make one, you need to provide all the frames of your animation. Each frame is its own bitmap image, this means that the file size can get very large, very quickly which will cause loading problems in many email clients. With GIFs, the best thing to do is to use as few frames as possible to convey your message.

How do you create one?

There are many online gif creators, but if you want a slightly more technical approach, you can edit your images further in a programme like Adobe Photoshop and then create your frames through their timeline option.

Are there any limitations?

With anything technical, there are going to be limitations. Some email clients do not support GIF – for example, Outlook will freeze a GIF on its first frame upon arrivals in your inbox. The way to get around this is to make sure the first frame of your GIF is one you’re happy for your clients to see, or you could use dynamic content and segment your data into what clients they are using. This way, you could send your fancy GIFs to everyone using an email client that supports them and send a different static GIF/JPG/PNG to everyone else who wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate your GIF.

Here’s a handy infographic to show you which email clients support which functionality.

Video
Hosting video in email is a tricky business because two of the main email clients (Gmail and Outlook) don’t support video playback. This isn’t a reason to avoid using it altogether, as long as you are prepared to segment your data accordingly. There are also a number of ways to get around this and still give your customer an interactive experience… without your emails breaking.

1. You can include an image from your video and put a play button over the top so it looks like a video player. When your users click on the image they will be taken to a landing page where the video will play for them. This creates the illusion of video within an email without actually facing the potential breaks. It will save you time as you don’t have to segment your data by email client and you can rest easy that all your users will enjoy your email. It could look something like this (below).

2. Use a GIF. This is my favourite work around for video. It involves taking multiple screenshots of the video you are going to link to, and setting them up frame by frame with a play button over the top. The GIF will then scroll through the different screen shots giving the effect of a video playing. Ideally you would set it to loop so the effect was continuous while your customer viewed the email. Ralph Lauren have done some excellent work with these which you can view here.

Is your content responsive friendly?

Another thing to keep in mind when creating emails with rich media is how it will respond on mobile as well as desktop. With the rise in people opening emails on their mobiles, mobile design is more important than ever. There are a number of things you can do to content to make sure your users get the best experience.

Some brands choose to hide some content on mobile and keep the message as short as possible to avoid users having to scroll down the email. This can allow users to get to the call to action faster and avoid wandering attention spans. Other brands choose to stack images so content and images that were next to each other appear one after the other, as if in a list. Others use shrinking down which can work really well with images containing large text that could not be stacked but resolution will suffer with smaller images on mobile and in many cases it is better to hide these. You can use a combination of all of these things within one email, determined by your CSS (cascading style sheet).

So, for your next campaign why not try some of these methods? It can vastly improve user experience and make your emails the emails your customers look forward to receiving.

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Email marketing: the integration cheat sheet

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Imagine the situation: you’re trying to come up with a campaign to send birthday emails to customers on your database. Rather than just sending an email that says ‘Happy Birthday!’ you want to give them something more – something to remember your brand by. This experience is common to email marketers and it doesn’t just apply to birthday campaigns. Essentially, we’re all asking the same question, ‘what will engage my audience’. Sometimes just writing a message in an email isn’t enough; you need something more to keep them keen. So, what are your options?

1. Games and competitions

The appetite for games is huge at the moment. Using this sort of viral content in your emails can really help increase everything from open rates, click thru rates and email interaction, to brand awareness and overall engagement. It’s also an excellent opportunity to enrich your data. I’ve seen a few companies really nail this concept recently.

The first was Watergate Bay Hotel who ran a winter-themed Christmas campaign over 24 days in December. It was a competition to win prizes by ‘shaking’ a snow globe. The email communication was clean and engaging – you knew exactly what it was when you opened, the call to action was clear and it emphasised the benefits to the customer. Additionally, they were very clever about using the correct social links to promote the game. Often I’ve seen brands throw a load of social media links at the bottom of an email, with no actual consideration of why people would share their email on Tumblr. But Watergate Bay have deliberately picked the social media icons their subscribers are most likely to use; Facebook and Twitter. They’ve also attempted to make the game viral by including a ‘forward to a friend’ option – which incidentally is exactly how I came across this game!

Once you clicked through the email to their website, the engagement continued. Firstly, they used the game as a data capture opportunity. With any form of integration, make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity for enriching your data. The Watergate Bay campaign is a great example of this because they set their data capture form to open before you can play the game. This means that not only will they get returning business, they’ll also have a really strong 24 days for data acquisition.

Another great aspect of their data capture was its simplicity. The fields required were the basic first name, last name, postcode and email, plus they asked you to create a password so you could log in in the future. It took under a minute to fill out and there was no way I was exiting the page before playing the game. One mistake I’ve seen a lot of brands make is trying to capture too much data at once. Two pages of mandatory fields might seem like a great idea – for you, because you get all the data. For your users, having to complete so many fields is unappealing and increases the drop off rate on the page.

The actual game was great for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s interactive – you’re shaking a digital snow globe, the snow actually moves and it makes a jingly noise. Very pleasing. Secondly, they only gave you three attempts a day to win. Part of my concern with this game was that people would play it once, find it time consuming and not come back to play again. But the limit on shakes prevented this and I went back every day, shaking that snow globe. The altering daily prizes also ensured ongoing interest, with something different to win every day. The prizes were relevant to both their target audience and the local area, so they were likely to appeal to their customers – another good way to maintain attention.

Lastly, even if you didn’t win, you were given a discount code for their online store at the end of the game. This is great value-add from the game as the customer feels they’ve won something even if they haven’t actually won the main prize, and hey… there’s always tomorrow to shake again! It’s also a great device to drive people from the game and into the online store in a seamless transition: ‘ok people you’ve seen the show, now into the gift shop…’

Since customers were interested enough in the prizes to give their data, the discount code will almost certainly make them feel like Watergate Bay values their time and is rewarding them for their attentions. This is a great two-way interaction.

2. Survey and re-group

With any email marketing campaign, it’s important to find out what your customers want and what they thought of your engagement with them. One type of integration you can use to do this is a survey tool. Sainsbury’s do this really well. Every few months I get an email which encourages me to fill out a survey and receive Nectar points. It’s heavily personalised; it tells me how many Nectar points I have left and what that equates to in real money. The email tells me how long the survey takes to fill out and that I’m guaranteed the Nectar points on completion. This works well for Sainsbury’s, who are offering something tangible in exchange for your time. But what if you’re a brand who doesn’t have the mystical wonder that is Nectar points?

Alternative methods are to encourage people to complete a survey using competitions, games or by phrasing the content incentive in such a way that makes your customers realise the value of providing you with feedback. I’ve seen a few brands use surveys as a tool to further capture data from subscribers. They do this by initially presenting a first page of a survey which asks for first name, last name and email address (which they probably already have) and then after this warm-up, they slyly ask for a few more bits of information, for example gender, age, or postcode. Clever brands.

3. Polls

One brand I’ve seen sends out weekly funny polls for their users to complete and then uses the information to create a blog post encouraging users onto their website. This is a win-win for them, as they have found a way to produce user generated content, plus keep their customers engaged with their brand. They could then go on to use this content in future campaigns and articles.

When to integrate

Now you have the tools to integrate, you need to consider when and why you would use them in a campaign. One of the main mistakes brands make is trying to put too many of these things into an email. Your campaign needs to have a focused call to action, or it won’t be clear how you want users to interact with your emails. Here’s a handy check list to take a look at before you integrate:

  • Make sure you’re clear about what you’re trying to achieve – once you know this, picking your methods and tools will be easy.

  • Have a focal point to your campaign. If it’s a survey you want completed, make sure the call to action points to it.

  • Don’t overcrowd the email – keep your message clean, clear and clever. Putting too much information in the email can put users off.

  • Make sure your integrated content is interesting – seems simple, but often gets forgotten.

  • Always capture more data where you can, but put a limit on so you don’t turn your customers off.

  • Use the data once you’ve collected it. Don’t let it sit in your system twiddling its thumbs.

  • Make sure the user experience is a good one – try the journey out yourself, from receiving the email, right the way through to the follow up email.

Happy integrating!

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The power of dynamic content in email marketing

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Email is constantly evolving. As email marketers, part of the fun of what we do is exploring new ways to engage audiences with email. It can also be a struggle at times. Email inboxes are increasingly crowded with promotional emails as more and more companies use email to communicate.

To help the end user, organisations like Google have customised their inbox layouts to include the segregation of promotional emails from the primary inbox, social media emails and general updates. These updates make it trickier for your emails to get noticed in subscriber’s inboxes, so it’s important to make your campaign attention-grabbing. One of the best methods we’ve seen over the years is by introducing dynamic content into email campaigns.

Dynamic content is essentially using what you know about your customers to provide them with content that is relevant to them. This can be anything from knowing the gender of your users and using the information to show them female/male specific products, to using birthday information to create a personalised birthday message for them each year. This technique allows you to send highly targeted information to your subscribers, and the best part is you can do it all through one email.

What are the benefits?

Higher levels of engagement
It might seem simple, but it also makes a lot of sense. Why would subscribers be interested in your campaign if it’s not relevant to them? To engage people, you need to provide content they find useful or enjoyable (or hopefully both!).

Saves time
Before dynamic content existed, companies would spend unbelievable amounts of time creating separate emails for the same campaign. It was the only way to do it if you wanted to try and personalise. Now, the only bit which takes any time is the creation of the main email and then positioning your content in a dynamic setting.

Shorter emails
This might seem like an odd one but many users don’t actually scroll all the way down to the end of an email; they scan for a couple of seconds and if they don’t find what they want they close the email. Goodbye to your click thru rates. Dynamic content enables emails to be shorter as you’re not trying to squeeze everything into one email in the hope that everyone on your database will find something interesting.

It’s technically interesting!
One for the front-end nerds out there. Dynamic coding is pretty fun (this is system dependent, of course). We’re very lucky with Enabler because it makes coding really easy to do. Enabler, like some other systems, will allow you to view the email in situ as anyone in your database would. This means no messy test emails, and no time wasting!

How can you get started?

The number one thing you need for dynamic content to work is information about your subscribers. There are lots of types of data you can use to make it work and you can even be inspired by your data:

Behavioural data – what have your users done before? What have they bought or read? When they were last on your website, what caught their eye? This data is incredibly useful when planning your campaigns. It can allow you to distinguish marketing to your leads and to your existing customers. It can influence what call to actions you use, where you use them, and other content placement decisions. It can also be used to influence pre-emptive emails based on previously purchased content.Groupon

Transactional data – what did your customers spend their money on? How often do they do this? Are they abandoning their baskets at checkout? Transactional data gives you incredible insight into the buying potential of your customers. Using this information, you could send reminder emails to customers who have left products in their baskets, remind customers of special offers based on content they’ve viewed, and provide buying recommendation emails based on previous purchases.

Demographic data – what gender or age are your subscribers? Where are they based? Knowing a customer’s gender can be really useful for something like fashion based emails, knowing their location can help with events promotions or deals in shops local to them. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is Groupon:

They send out daily emails which are targeted by region. All the offers in their emails actually contain deals which are near to the post code I provided them with, and the copy reflects this. Check out this ‘Afternoon tea for two’ offer (right). It tells me how far from me it is, what the discount is, mentions the word Londoners and it really pushes the personalisation of the email in the top banner.

If you want to take all of this a step further, once you have completed your dynamic campaign you can also do some reporting on the campaign to find out what worked, then tailor your next campaign based on this information. Remember, with all of these options, testing is key.

The final checklist for dynamic content success

1. Accurate data – there’s no point trying without this. Why use information about your database if it’s not correct?

2. An Email Service Provider that supports dynamic content (if you want more information about Enabler, get in touch)

3. Knowledge of your customer database – what sort of targeting do you think will work on your list? For fashion brands, the key one is gender, for insurance we’re looking at regions and preference based sending, but what will work for your brand?

4. Testing – keep trying new things, A/B test to your hearts content. Never stop testing your email campaigns!

In today’s market, there is no better way to improve results of your campaigns than through dynamic content. Dynamic content is to the email marketing world what Dumbledore is to the wizarding world. Pure brilliance.

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Are you ready for Christmas?

The Christmas email campaigns have been in full swing since November. Fran, one of our email campaign managers, gives us her analysis of the festive emails.

I’ve been berating the early arrival of ‘Christmas’ into our lives for a while now. Not in an Ebenezer Scrooge-esque, bah humbug way but in a ‘this is ludicrously early’ way.

It seems that Halloween is barely over before the Christmas references start creeping into marketing messages. Plus, email – my joie de vivre – has been filling my inbox with uninterestingly designed, completely impersonal content and, most importantly, subject lines that aren’t even a little bit enticing for the festive season. Here are a few of the different areas that demonstrate how people are overthinking the minor details but not engaging the necessary focus – especially when it comes to content.

So, Halloween is over, the fireworks have finished, and now as the days get darker and begin disappearing rapidly without warning, we seem to be propelling ourselves head first into winter. That being said, it would seem that this year it’s beginning to go a little too far, just about everyone and everything has become about Christmas – even the toilet bleach:

Yet, although the decks have been ready for purchase as early as July this year (thanks Selfridge’s), it’s not hard to get confused with the recent mild weather that it might still be September – but alas the shops, the background noise, the lights, and – dare I say it – our email inboxes are a daily reminder that we are getting closer to the big festive day.

Can we honestly say that the world of email is hitting the nail on the head and drawing in those festive consumers? Taking evidence from my own inbox – I think not!

Let’s take a look at two of the key areas that campaigns are still struggling with this year, and a few handy tips for fabulously festive emails that perform.

Most unenticing subject line:

‘Francesca, it’s the season for 25% off 6 bottles of wine’

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love wine. It’s a staple in my fridge so they’ve got my attention. However, ‘season’? Does this rather large high street supermarket chain realise that there are four of them? In my humble opinion, every day (let alone season) should have 25% off 6 bottles of wine.

As an email professional, I highlight this key point for increasing user engagement: your subject line should be the prime area of focus in any campaign, at any time of the year.

As a rule of thumb you shouldn’t use any sales based words such as, ‘offer’, ‘free’, ‘sale’, ‘deals’ or icons like !, ?, £, or % in your subject line, as spam filters are highly likely to pick them up and throw the mail straight into the junk folder (hence I found the above one in my spam folder).

Keep it punchy, make it unique and create intrigue. When writing subject lines, consider the recipient – will it entice them? If there’s any doubt, then you need to rewrite it. Finally, if you’re going for a theme then go all in. The email feels half-hearted when you do it half hearted, and I don’t think you can ever over eggnog the Christmas pudding (sorry – had to).

Here are a few more subject lines that have found their way into my inbox/spam box that are lacking a little bit of get up and go:

  • ‘Shh…Keep this to yourself…’
     

  • ‘Make Christmas Your Own: Personalised Christmas Story Book £2, Santa Cutlery Holder
     

  • Sets, Luxury Santa Sack, LED Candles and More’
     

  • ‘Alert! 3 For £18 Christmas Gifts [3 Hours Only]’
     

  • ‘Is your home ready for the holidays?’ (Received the beginning of November… bit early?!)

Content that’s stuck in the dark ages (and also has no tact):

I don’t even think I need to explain why this spa wins the least personalised, most unresponsive template award and – more importantly – most contradictory Christmas theme of any winter themed email I’ve ever read.  This seems to be more the sort of email you might expect when detox season kicks off in January.

This brings me to my next point: if you manage to entice a reader to click into your email then you need attractive, interesting and relevant email content that’s going to get them reading, clicking through and opening up again next time. In my opinion, there are three main areas:

Personalisation: whether this is personal details or content based on consumer analysis (see Sophie’s blog the other week for hints and tips).
Short copy: less is always more when it comes to words in emails. Short is good.

Beautiful visuals: images should relate to the copy and be high-quality and eye-catching.
Email marketing is still one of the most successful ways to reach your audience, with evidence showing it’s the number one way to reach millennials.

To be successful you need to make sure your campaigns are carefully considered and relevant. There are so many different and wonderful things you can do with content now, yet I regularly receive emails that are stuck in the dark ages.

​​A festive email campaign that really caught my eye this year came from Watergate Bay Hotel, a spa hotel in Cornwall. Their festive email campaign had a simple concept, on-point branding, and excellent integration. They used wintery graphics and a snowshaker concept to create a daily competition with cleverly chosen prizes from local or partnership brands that fit with their brand.

The competition runs through the whole of December with a different prize each day and three chances to win. If you’re not successful after ‘shaking’ the snowglobe three times, you receive a discount code to use in their online shop. This is a nice touch that will encourage users to purchase Christmas gifts from their online store.

Sign up is required to enter the competition, a great method for data capture and for driving users back with follow-up emails (particularly as the prizes change every day, maintaining interest). Watergate Bay also reinforce their brand and persona through the choice of graphics and the companies they have partnered with to offer prizes.

The entire effect gives you a sense of what the hotel is about, it’s festive without being cheesy and also places the hotel in their potential customer’s minds at the right time to be considered for their 2016 holiday.

Watergate Bay hotel have nailed the three areas we highlighted earlier: personalisation, short copy and beautiful visuals – plus they continued their theme throughout every element, from the original email to the landing page.

So, when it comes to creating email campaigns – think outside the box. Don’t just stick to the norm or the drab, do something that will get you noticed. All this takes is having the baubles to commit to the theme and be creative!

Top tips for email campaign success

1.    Commit to your design. If you’re using a theme – use it, don’t only use a tiny bit of it.

2.    Limit content headers/links. That way you shouldn’t have an email that means lots of scrolling – especially on a mobile device.

3.    Have clear calls to action.

4.    Make sure you’re using a mobile responsive template.

5.    Try not to repeat a story/product/event etc, try something new.

6.    Use behavioural data – you have access to all of the data you could ever want. Data analysis is key to creating the most engaging content for your audience.

7.    Testing – always test different things in your emails. Subject lines. Content copy. Images. CTAs. Design… you should never stop testing. There are always new things to try and with it consumer behavioural data to be analysed.

8.    Use beautiful, engaging and relevant images, or create simple and effective infographics.

9.    Be personal.

10.    Make sure you’re branded correctly, effectively and in a memorable way – no matter what you do.

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Black Friday: email marketing round-up

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Special occasions are a fantastic opportunity for keeping your customers engaged. They’re one of the most important times to ensure you have a strong online presence and, although I might be biased, what better way to do that than with email?

The latest opportunity to tap into a theme is Black Friday. Somewhat controversial since Black Friday is traditionally an American concept, tied in to Thanksgiving in the same way we have Boxing Day.

Black Friday has been embraced by UK retailers in recent years and merges with Cyber Monday to offer brands a chance to entice customers with special deals and discounts – read more about this here.

This year, it looks like every brand under the sun has taken the initiative and come up with their own way to engage customers on what is now one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. As Enabler’s in-house email expert, I’ve collated some of the top tips to take away from this year’s Black Friday email marketing.

 

Key to email marketing on this busy day, is of course how to stand out from the competition. Customer’s inboxes are flooded all weekend with deals, so how do you make yours effective?

1.    Try something different

Some companies have realised that it’s not enough to just send an email with an offer in the subject line. VoucherCodes decided to go down the route of emoticons in their emails.

‘★ Dom’s Black Friday Special ★ John Lewis | Argos | Amazon | Selfridges | Debenhams’

While this looked fantastic on my Hotmail account, sadly these pretty stars did not grab my attention in a positive way on Gmail as they were blocked. They did make a clever move by naming some big brands, in the hope of encouraging users to open the email to find out what the offers are.

Tastecard also tried something different – their subject line was:

‘BLACK FRIDAY is here’. 

The risk with this is that your email might be flagged as shady and end up trapped in your customers’ spam filters.

 

2.    Target your emails

This should be something you’re doing anyway but it’s especially important on Black Friday. Why would a customer open an email if it doesn’t contain offers for products they’re interested in? Make sure the offers in your email are customer specific. If they’ve bought tech products before, you know they might be interested in more tech products so don’t send them gardening supplies.

 

3.    Personalise your subject line

eBay had a great personalised subject line on Black Friday.

‘Gregory, stop everything! Black Friday deals you can’t resist.’

Who wouldn’t open that?! It’s incredibly eye catching, and really convinces you to open the email. eBay had also combined tactic two and three of this list, as the content in their email was targeted based on what Gregory had left in his basket recently and previous purchases. Great job eBay!

 

4.    Cross sell

Use a time you know your customers are likely to interact with your emails to cross sell a product. Amazon did this brilliantly this year with this subject line:

‘Black Friday is here: Up to 50% off, plus £10 off for new Prime Now customers’. 

This is very clever wording as it makes you interested in the Black Friday offer as well as curious about what Prime Now is. They have left enough ambiguity about the product, while enticing customers with money off their purchase.

 

5.    Remember the loyal folk

It’s not all about trying to get first time buyers to buy. Showing a bit of love for your existing frequent-buyers can also help to boost your Black Friday sales. Debenhams nailed it this year. Their subject line was:

‘EXTRA 10% OFF for Cardholders this Black Friday’

As an existing card holder, I’d have been all over that. Giving existing customers a boost during the busy times can remind them that you care and help develop the relationship between your customer and your brand. It might even encourage them to buy more out of the busy periods.

 

6.    Get clever with your language

Everyone wants to feel like they’re receiving something tailored to them. This goes beyond sending specific content and instead focuses on how you make your customer feel from the minute your email appears in their inbox. A way to achieve this, even if you don’t have the greatest data in the world, is through the language you use. One example of a brand that did this beautifully this year was LoveLula, with the subject line:

Let’s get this Black Friday week started | See inside for your code!

As someone who received this email, my initial thoughts were ‘MY CODE!’ Sure, the code inside might be a generic code generated for anyone to use within the time frame – but that doesn’t actually matter. What does matter is your customer’s reaction to that wording. It makes it sound like a personally generated offer just for them… thus making them more likely to interact with your email and – more importantly – your discount code!

 

7.    Give it some urgency

For times where your offer is only on for a short period of time, your aim is to convert the highest amount of your click throughs to purchases. One way to do this is by instilling a sense of urgency in your customers. Reminding them how little time they have left to secure items at a cheaper price is a fantastic way of doing this. Several brands picked up on this idea on Black Friday. The first was Photobox, whose subject line was:

‘Black Friday Deals – 1 day only!’

This subject line is to the point, and instils a sense of urgency to the customer.

Second was Great Little Trading Co, who used the subject line:

‘Flash Sale TODAY: up to 30% off‏’. 

This subject line definitely promotes urgency. What’s interesting about this one is that there’s no mention of Black Friday at all. This could be a tactical move on the company’s part. Are they acknowledging that the UK doesn’t actually have a Black Friday and sticking to their guns, yet tapping in to the publicity by having a sale too? Or are they attempting to differentiate themselves from all the other brands emailing by using different wording, and purposefully omitting the name of the sale? Either way, it creates standout.

Overall, brands certainly seemed to have put some thought into their Black Friday emails. Much of the content seemed relevant, on point and useful to their customers. With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, make sure you apply the same rules to your campaigns, and keep your customers engaged with fun, relevant, targeted content. Be clever with your data and Santa will put you on his nice list!

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Email personalisation: are you being clever or creepy?

Using email personalisation to be intuitive, not invasive.

When you think about personalising an email, what springs to mind? Maybe using a merge code to insert a customer’s name into a subject line. ‘Emily, have you seen our new discount?’, or starting an email with ‘Hi James!’ This isn’t the only way to personalise your emails and it often isn’t the best way.

Targeting your customers this way can lead to great results – increased open rates, higher levels of engagement and improvements on ROI, to name a few. However, personalisation only works if you use it in a way that is clever and not creepy.

Think about going into your favourite coffee shop. Let’s say you go in every day and order exactly the same drink, each time giving the barista your name. The next day you come in, and the barista smiles at you and says ‘Hi [your name] will it be a skinny decaf latte with caramel syrup?’ That’s great customer service. Now imagine you walk into a coffee shop you’ve never been into and a barista you’ve never spoken to before says the same thing… creepy.

It’s the same with email. If you’re emailing a customer for the first time and using their name in the communication, it can come across like you’re stalking them. As you can imagine, this isn’t great for customer relationships.

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when you’re trying to personalise.

 

Have you contacted this person before?

If you have contacted a customer previously and asked for information about them, then using their details in an email should come as no surprise to them. Personalisation is all about building up a rapport with your customers. The more communication you’ve had with them, the more personalised content you can use.

If you’ve never contacted them before, why not ease them into the relationship using a ‘we’d like to get to know you better’ email. This will allow you to gain more insight into your customer, while at the same time making them feel at home with your communications.
Is your language mirroring the personalisation?

Personalisation is not just about writing customer’s names in an email or subject line. It’s also about how that personalisation is continued throughout the campaign. Using phrases like ‘you’ and ‘your’ can help continue the personalisation and show the customer how your product or message applies to them.

 

Is your data being used correctly?

You’d be shocked how many examples of badly used personalisation come into inboxes every day. What this demonstrates is that companies are sending emails without understanding their data, even at a basic level. You’ll be able to spot this by looking for the wrong information coming through in a merge code. One company recently pulled their customers last names through in the email rather than their first names.

The really awkward part of this was that the rest of the email was written in a very light hearted, familiar fashion. It was like reading an email about grabbing a drink after work… from your high school headmaster. ‘Hi Chaplin, have you seen these offers you’re going to love?’

Definitely creepy.

The other mistake companies often make with data is attention to detail. Check that the personalisation you’re using is going to work across the whole database. Sure, it’s great that Jamie, Akhil and Vanessa will get lovely personalised messages but what about Woody, whose first name you haven’t collected? Woody gets a ‘Hi __’.  Woody doesn’t deserve to be blanked. Worse, he might even get a ‘Hi First_Name’. He’ll notice your email for all the wrong reasons and either quickly unsubscribe or maybe even share it with his friends or online to point out your error. Help Woody out and protect your brand by checking your data. Double check it. Check it again.

 

Is the personalisation appropriate?

Are you getting in touch using a communication that is person specific? For example, birthday emails. There’s nothing less personal than getting a ‘Happy birthday Sir/Miss’ email. This is a perfect time to use that data you’ve been saving for a special occasion. Birthday emails are a fantastic excuse to show your customer how much you value them. It’s your chance to give them some added value – perhaps with a free offer or a discount code. For Retail companies, a chance to use the “Spoil yourself with a new…” sales approach.

The best example of these emails that I’ve seen is from Pizza Express who sent an email with the subject line ‘Happy Birthday *Name*’ Inside the email was an offer for a free bottle of prosecco with any main meal. They even included a lovely gif of the champagne being poured into the glass – and the little candle also flickered.

Another great time to use this is Christmas: ‘Kate, what do you want for Christmas’? It’s a fantastic time of year to make the jump from ‘brand that occasionally emails you’ to ‘brand who knows you’. Incidentally, it’s also a great time to get more intelligent with your data and find out more about the people you’re emailing. Why not use the sparkly magic of big annual events like Christmas, New year, January sales and Easter to squeeze out some more information and make your data richer for the next email campaign? Apply segmentation to entice them with something that’s relevant to your customer and their purchasing history.

 

Are you missing an opportunity?

Are you holding data about a customer’s purchase history? If you are, this is a great cross sell opportunity. If they’ve already bought something from you, they’ve already interacted with the brand – which gives you a way in. You can approach the cross sell in a friendly manner: ‘Hi Anni, we thought you might like these…” Provide some useful information, such as “these shoes go with this dress…” or “popular picks in knitwear…” and so on. People have busy lives – help them; provide tips they can use to make their lives better/easier/more productive. If you can be of use to your customers they’ll come to rely on you, which builds brand loyalty and keeps them coming back.

Once again, there’s a difference between being clever and creepy in these situations. While it’s okay to refer to an item you think your customer might like, it’s not okay to get too specific. Imagine opening an email to find ‘Hi Anni, we noticed you bought three red medium sized Christmas jumpers last Saturday at 3:30pm on your Android phone, and we thought you’d also like these things’. Creepy!

The best way to win in this situation is to be insightful but casual. ‘We thought you’d like this’ is always the safer option.

 

What do they want?

This is without a doubt the most important thing to remember. Sure, you’re emailing your customers for your benefit; maybe to sell to them, maybe to keep them engaged with your brand – whatever the reason, the number one point to remember is ‘what do they want?’
Preferences are the key. This can range from a simple gender split, to segmenting your data based on what types of communications your users are interested in. The best newsletters that arrive in your inbox are the ones which have content tailored to you. This not only makes the customer feel special but will also mean they’re more likely to interact with that communication.

One brand that does this particularly well is RSA Canada. Their monthly newsletter is segmented by what region their brokers are in, as well as by preference type – and they even have a translated version for their French speakers. This means that each month, each of their brokers receive a newsletter that is completely tailored to them. It’s no wonder that their last newsletter boasted a 28% click thru rate.

When you’re putting together your next email campaign, check your data, check the communication history, run through your personalisation checklist and make sure that you’re being clever and not creepy. If in doubt, apply the party rule. You would never walk up to someone at a party whose name you couldn’t remember and say ‘Hi…First Name’. No, you’d be subtle – you’d go and ask a friend or maybe work your way to that piece of information through another means.

The same applies to your data. If you don’t know their gender, don’t just assume they are a male just because most of your database is. A female colleague of mine recently received a beautiful email from a fashion brand – unfortunately they had sent her the menswear collection of jumpers.

One final tip is to always ask yourself the question; ‘if I applied this in a party or networking situation, would people be running in the opposite direction?’ If the answer is yes then re-think your strategy. Not creepy? Email to your heart’s content.

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Halloween email marketing – spooky sends

Targeting a database on a seasonal basis can be a brilliant way to engage with an audience. Quirks and eye-catchers can encourage users to interact with emails and even re-engage with a brand or product that may have been lost in the sea that is anyone’s inbox.

With the winter season in full swing, Enabler email executive Sophie has put together her Halloween pick of the ‘missed a tricks’ and the spooky treats…

Spooky Treats

New Look

New Look is a brand that always hit the mark with their emails, and their Halloween special is no exception. They’ve done a few things which will really make a difference to their customers:

  • Straight away, they try to lure their customers into buying a spooky outfit with a discount code that’s perfect for the occasion. This works especially well for them as Halloween is notorious for being one of the fancy dress events of the year and they’ve successfully capitalised on this – great strategy.

  • The flicker in the background is a .gif image, giving the impression of lightning. Not only is it on theme with the email but it’s a fantastic attention grabber.

  • The email clearly has gender targeting as well as merge codes that pull in the user’s name.

  • Consistent messaging throughout the email reinforces the call to action and really makes you want to buy something.

  • I didn’t open the email first time round due to being away from the computer, and got another one a few days later. This means New Look are doing resends to everyone on their list who didn’t open the initial email. They’ve even updated the subject line to try and grab attention in a different way.

 

 

Sainsbury’s

Sainsbury’s was definitely top of the supermarket Halloween emailers this year. The theme of the email was well executed: ‘we can make your Halloween great’. They didn’t just rely on one pun for the email, they themed everything about the email around Halloween while still maintaining a strong brand message. Here are a few things that made this email so good:

Personalisation
​They got the user’s name in there without being creepy – this made the email personable and immediately got the user thinking about their Halloween plans.

Relevancy
Immediately after the short and sweet introduction, they threw in some alcohol and party food pictures to continue the ‘have a great night’ theme.

Attractive design
Eye catching, drop-down banner animation in the hero image promoted special offers – all Halloween and party themed, of course.

Responsive

The responsive design looks great on mobile. It’s clean, crisp, and they haven’t sacrificed the desktop design for it.

‘Missed a trick’

In our ‘missed a trick’ section, we have some classic examples of puns-gone-wrong. Quite a few brands took the popular ‘spooktacular’ pun and tried to shoehorn their offer into it. A well-known hotel booking site was one such example, promoting their “shockingly terrific” hotels and inviting the recipient to “view hotels if you dare.” This is a mismatch with their offering; unless you are selling nights in a haunted house, why would anyone choose to stay in a creepy hotel?

The main problem with these puns is that they are not relevant to the product. If you’re not emailing relevant content, you just should not be emailing. The subject line for the email had some cute emoticons in it but unfortunately as a Gmail user, these came up as tiny square blobs in my inbox. What they could have done here was split their send between Gmail and non-Gmail users, keeping the emoticons where users would be able to view them and removing for Gmail to avoid the embarrassing ‘no image display’ block for Gmail users.

A popular homeware brand were another case of a company who appear to have thought ‘Halloween is coming up… we have to do something’. They also pulled out the Halloween book of puns and came up with exactly the same idea as many other companies. Unlike some of the others in this article, however, they did not continue the theme throughout the email. Here are a few things they could have considered when planning this email campaign:

  • Embrace the theme and build it into every level of the content. If you’re going to get in the Halloween spirit, keep it consistent throughout the email.

  • More personalisation – they used the customer number at the top, which is a start, but having their name at the top next to it could work even better. The customer name was shown at the bottom of the email but with such a long email, it would take a really dedicated subscriber to scroll down that far without losing interest.

A national supermarket chain also used the same ‘spooktacular’ pun as the two previous companies. Unlike the homeware brand, they continued the theme throughout the email.  The overall email design wasn’t bad at all – responsive and worked well on mobile. The main issue (apart from the terrible pun) is that none of the links worked. Sadly, this was true throughout the email. Every link clicked through to an error page on their website.

Clearly, this is a problem. The main reason for this email campaign was to drive customers to the Aldi site to make purchases. If something in the email sparks a customer’s attention and they click through to an error page, they are unlikely to remain on the site or buy anything. The customer experience will have been frustrating and the error will reflect on the brand. Avoid this by thoroughly testing all your links and ensuring they are relevant.

Halloween is over for the year but Christmas is fast approaching. Don’t miss out on engaging with your audience and make sure you’re ready with any email communications in time for the busiest shopping time of the year.

If you’re going to theme your emails, think hard about how to make them relevant to both the theme AND the customer. Keep in mind the ‘missed a tricks’ and, more importantly, the treats from our selection above. Get creating and we’ll see you back here for our Christmas email special. And as always, if you want to talk to us about Enabler or our email campaign services give us a call on 020 7099 6370 or email enablermail@pancentric.com

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