In email marketing, king of the buzz words is ‘deliverability’. The battle to get your message in front of its intended audience is complex and success is not just down to programming code. Even if your data is verified and your reputation spotless, there are other factors that can make your email communications end up in deleted items or worse, the spam bin.
Any decent Email Service Provider (ESP) will tell you the future for email marketing lies in greater opening and click-rates through intelligent marketing, behavioural targeting, dynamic delivery engines that trigger multiple messages to multiple destinations and building detailed profiles. But before all of this clever stuff, you need to address the fundamental principle of creative.
Creative thinking
Your in-house or agency creatives may well have won countless awards for both visuals and copy and know exactly what buttons to press with your audience. But what works everywhere else might be a disaster in an email; even excellent web designers might not be a natural fit for email campaigns.
Here are some email-specific creative issues to be aware of:
1. Test your templates. Working in email means you need CSS support. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are the way text and background images are formatted to hang together on the screen. But to complicate matters, your audience will open emails on a variety of platforms, such as Outlook 2007/2003, Entourage, Firefox, Apple Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Thunderbird, and Yahoo; and the email you design may appear different on one of these from another. Your design must therefore be tested across all platforms before it can be dispatched.
2. First impressions. Before you get carried away with visuals, don’t forget some platforms such as Outlook 2007 automatically disable images and don’t show them in preview panes unless the recipient actively clicks to view. Of paramount importance therefore is the subject line.
This too is a minefield, because if you’re not careful with language you can end up sending a legitimate marketing message that ends up incorrectly identified as spam. Spam filters detect and block certain words and phrases (see box). The subject field is the place for an enticing message, which should induce the recipient to read further. The challenge is to define the one best reason why your audience might want to read your message, and distil it as concisely as possible. Messages that include the brand in the subject line are proven to achieve significantly higher open rates – as much as a 12 per cent increase.
3. Personalise. To make it even more enticing, personalisation is a great trick. If your ESP is in tune with your CRM system then you should be able to get more from customer data. If you know not only your customer’s name but what their buying patterns have been, or what they’ve been particularly interested in in the past, why not put this to good use by tailoring your emails to them accordingly? Of course, the mechanics of this would be another masterclass in itself, but many seem to overlook the mere fact that it can be done.
4. Entice your readers. Next comes the body of the email, and here too there are common-sense dos and don’ts. The top of your emails should have at least a two-to-three inch preview pane header area that is HTML and text-only (no images). This header area should include only copy such as personalisation, article teasers, key offers or ‘In this issue’ information to enable the recipient to determine whether to read further and/or open the email. Design your email templates so both content blocks and ads can be viewed entirely within two-to-three inch window as readers scroll through an email and minimise the use of images unless necessary. Avoid using images that are more than two to three inches tall. Instead use HTML fonts, colours, and backgrounds when possible to liven up the email.
Look at the preview pane for unnecessary information that can be relocated elsewhere, such as an administrative footer at the bottom of the email.
Do however, consider including text links for key actions such as ‘View web version’ and ‘Update profile’ at the bottom of the preview pane. The bottom of the ‘page’ that the reader sees in the preview pane is called a fold, and it has been shown that emails with the call to action above this can achieve click rates 58 per cent higher than those with the call-to-action positioned below it.
5. Use images to drive interaction. Finally, when designing to maximise click-throughs, bear in mind that text-style links tend to average nearly a three per cent greater click rate than image-style links, and navigation bars show much higher click-rates if they are positioned down the left side of the email rather than anywhere else.
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DATA: Emarketing- marketers folly or dream solution? – 15-10-2008
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