Make full use of social media links in your emails to encourage click-throughs, says Guy Hanson, director of interactive services for DBG and member of the DMA’s email marketing council
Initial impressions
Good points: The email has an engaging design, with sharp branding and a good ratio of text to images. An attempt has been made to personalise the email, which can help to build trust.
Bad points: The use of images is too heavy at the top. It would be better to move more of the text to the top half of the email to get a better balance. Personalisation is poor in the web hosted example where the recipient’s name has no capitals or spacing. It looks unprofessional and could potentially negate any trust-building positives.
Content
Good points: There’s a nice friendly tone to this communication with clear instructions. It’s a clever concept, trying to make use of the potential power of Facebook and social media to grow contacts and reach.
Bad points: The email misses a big trick because it hasn’t used the Facebook icon, making the call-to-action slightly ambiguous and potentially weakening the push-to-click. Ironically (as this is all about sharing), it also hasn’t made it easy to share the email by offering a ‘forward to a friend’ link at the top. It should ‘belt-and-braces’ this call-to-action by following current convention and adding social media links at the bottom of the email, where people are used to finding them. Research published recently by Mashable said that by including two social media links, click-throughs were increased by 30 per cent and with three links, the uplift was over 50 per cent.
Finally, because this is essentially a bid to reach new customers, it should give a bit of information about what Videojug is so that friends of existing contacts can quickly work out what it offers.
Technical aspects
Good points: The unsubscribe link is prominent and the page it takes you to offers the opportunity to follow them via social media instead. This is great, because though you might lose one communication channel, you could get them back via another. There’s also a link to the brand’s privacy policy at the bottom, which is important to provide reassurance that the sender will not misuse personal information and it has further boosted confidence with links to the sender and how they can be contacted.
Bad points: There should be an option at the top for the recipient to add the company to its safe senders list, increasing the chance of safe delivery in the future.
Summary
Although the impact of this email is strong with powerful visuals and an attractive incentive to engage the recipient, technically it misses a number of important tricks and ignores a lot of basic best practice. This makes the company seem slightly unprofessional, which weakens confidence. My guess is if the message opens correctly in a recipient’s inbox, they’ll certainly give it some attention, but the imperative to click-throughs could well be lost along the way.
3 out of 5 stars
