Archive for the ‘Email Marketing Strategy’ Category
Posted by John Reynolds on March 22nd, 2012
Do you watch Mad Men? The 1950s, 60s and 70s were a great time to be an Ad man. Many modern day marketing and advertising principles were created long before I was born. One of the very best resources I have is the short 1900 word advertisement written by David Ogilvy. He ran How to create advertising that sells in the newspapers while he was working at the agency Ogilvy & Mather.
Download a copy of it here (PDF). You can read it and file it away for a rainy day. Or, print it out and display it proudly – like me.
Posted by Dave McCue on March 14th, 2012
What is your initial reaction to this stock photo?
- I trust him, he’s confident
- I don’t trust him, he’s arrogant
- Someone should punch him
Cast your vote |
The Stock Photography Conundrum
Almost anyone who works in design or marketing has faced the challenge of selecting effective stock photography to use as part of print or online materials. On occasion, it is possible to find the perfect image to complement your message, but all too often the result is a cliché or simply doesn’t add much value.
Something Different
For marketers who don’t have a tangible product, this can be a real challenge. How do you graphically represent “consulting services” without resorting to one of the usual “business people conducting business” images that are out there?
One strategy to avoid the same old is to be less literal with the images. Rather than showing pretend business people pretending to consult, look for an image that conveys the transfer of creativity, such as a paintbrush against a canvas. It’s difficult to make definitive statements around this topic because the audience of different verticals (or even different brands within the same vertical) can be very different in the way they interact with content, but it can be safely said that you’re missing an opportunity when the same stock image used to convey the value of your services is being used by another company offering the same services.
Adding Value to Emails
The limited real estate of an email message is no place for extraneous images. One of the most important benefits that images provide is a higher degree of scanability when it comes to email messages. Often, they can be used to separate unrelated elements of a message (product promotions, upcoming events, latest news) to make it clear to the reader/scanner that there is something else to see if they aren’t immediately drawn in by the first lines of text. Even in these instances where the images serve as a component of message layout, they should be carefully considered.
Ideas for Testing
Searching around the web can turn up various studies related to web users’ response to different types of images. As noted above, however, such findings are not necessarily relevant to your business or your audience. Instead, use these ideas to guide a test (or series of tests) on your emails, landing pages, etc. Do your emails drive more clicks with stock photography, custom graphics, or no graphics at all? What impact do different images have on your landing page, and are you seeing an effect on conversion rate? Lastly, ask colleagues or (preferably) people outside of your organization how they feel about the stock images you plan to use, and take their feedback to heart. You might find that “young-businessman.jpg” doesn’t just sound generic, but he rings hollow with message recipients as well.
Posted by Dave McCue on February 6th, 2012
Are you sticking to your email marketing resolutions for 2012? Heading into a fresh new year is a good time to evaluate the wins and losses of the previous year and identify opportunities to improve. Here are a few things to think about as you look to optimize your 2012 program.
Better User Experience
Taking steps to increase the scannability of messages can drastically improve the experience for recipients and increase engagement. When testing, adopt the mindset of a typical recipient who is short on time and, in many cases, multi-tasking. How much of an impact do your messages have “at a glance?” Don’t assume recipients who open your messages are reading every word—make it easy for recipients to find the most important content.
Effective Welcome Messages
New subscriber welcome messages are known to receive some of the highest engagement metrics of any type of campaign, but since these messages are typically automated they are often set up initially and then forgotten about, even as changes to the email program are implemented. If it’s been awhile, go back and review your welcome message to make sure proper expectations are still being set for new subscribers as far as the type of messages they should expect and the frequency at which to expect them.
Try New Things
Don’t be afraid to try something new, even if only to a test sample of recipients. Maybe that’s a new template design, sending at a different time of the day, including social media sharing tools in messages, animated graphics, etc. Not everything you try is going to work, but it’s worth the effort to see how your audience responds to variations on your typical communications. On a related note, let us know if you like the new Digital Spin News design!
As always, don’t hesitate to contact SubscriberMail for any of your strategic email marketing needs. Have a terrific 2012!
Posted by Nic Winters on January 16th, 2012
If you have taken the step of including personalization in your email campaigns (even if this is limited to including the recipient’s first name, their sales rep, etc.), your goal was likely to make your emails take on a more personal tone. An additional step that may be the right fit for your email marketing strategy is personalizing the landing pages you link to within your emails.
These personalized pages could be limited to a handful of different versions of your landing page that include slightly different offers or a page that utilizes merge tokens to pull the recipient’s email address or other information into form fields.
When you go to incorporate these personalized URLs (PURLs) into your emails, you can achieve this goal using the same approach used to insert recipient first names and/or other data fields into your emails. With the personalization tokens provided within your SubscriberMail account for each data field you can personalize the URL for a hyperlink as well (inserting the token at the point within the URL where differentiation occurs to make the content of a particular data field related to the PURL pull into the link).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can incorporate PURLs in your email messages.
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.
