Hot Email Topics Heading Into 2012
Posted by Dave McCue on December 20th, 2011
At the recent Email Insider’s Summit there were several topics that sparked quite a bit of discussion among attendees, and we thought this information could hold a great deal of value to readers of Digital Spin. Heading into 2012, here is a quick summary of what the email industry is talking about:
- Engagement Outside of the Inbox
One point of emphasis was not to look at email engagement in a vacuum. When you send a promotional campaign via email, monitor all of your online channels – your website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to effectively gauge the results. A frequent anecdote told by marketers and ESPs focused on seeing same day/next day spikes in web site traffic following an email promotional campaign. Recipients who appear to be inactive due to lack of renders/clicks in email reports may, in fact, be engaging with brands outside of the inbox as a direct result of email campaigns. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that while suppressing inactive recipients may boost your message metrics, you could potentially be suppressing people who would have engaged with your brand outside of the inbox. - Mobile Experience
The use of mobile by consumers continues to grow. So, as an advertiser, what do you do first? Optimize your website for mobile or optimize your emails for mobile? There was spirited discussion around this question and one common theme embraced by the attendees was to first optimize your emails for mobile. Why? If your optimized emails are generating desirable performance metrics, then you’ll know that you need to optimize your website for mobile devices; however, if you aren’t seeing desirable opens and clicks from mobile-optimized emails, then hold off on assigning resources to optimizing your websites for mobile viewing. - Email and Social
Many email marketers are leveraging the inherent strengths of sites such as Facebook and applications such as Twitter to strengthen their email programs. They’re getting customers and prospects to sign up for email newsletters from Facebook and cross-promoting newsletter content on Twitter. - Getting Beyond “It Depends”
Email strategy is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, given the number of variables that make email programs so unique from one another. Too often, however, the conversation around strategy ends with “it depends.” For instance, marketers are often told “it depends” when they ask what day/time they should be sending their emails. Rather than ending the conversation there, take it a step further by testing and analyzing email and website metrics to see when your audience tends to engage with your brand.
