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.

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.

Think multi-channel
Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” featuring Clint Eastwood caused a big stir among viewers, but why stop there? Shortly after the commercial aired, Chrysler deployed an email message with a link to view the commercial. Not only did this strategy help Chrysler get in front of potential non-football fans, it also provided the commercial in an easily share-able format, helping expand the potential reach of the campaign into the social media space.

Familiar, or stale?
Nobody was surprised to see the Budweiser clydesdales, the Coca-Cola polar bears or GoDaddy’s latest “web content unrated” teaser, but at what point does the familiar begin to become background noise? It’s an important point of discussion for email marketers as well. If response rates aren’t where you would like them to be, it could be a case of recipients tuning your messages out. Try something new to get their attention.

Listen to your audience
Doritos’ “Man’s Best Friend” and Chevy’s “Happy Grad” both received high marks in the various audience polls conducted after the game, and both were user-generated contest entries. Does the audience understand brands better than brands understand themselves? Not likely, but from an email standpoint your audience can offer valuable insight into what “works” and what doesn’t in relation to your communications. See what they have to say, you might be surprised.

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!

Gmail will automatically clip a message if the total size exceeds 102 kilobytes. Users will see a [Message Clipped] View Entire Message link in order to download the rest of your message (see screenshot below).  In Gmail’s smart phone and tablet apps, the same rules generally apply.

To fix this situation, keep your HTML code short by removing extra returns, comments and unnecessary attributes and styles. Applications like Outlook and Apple Mail will show you the size of your message if you’re looking for ways to test. You can also check your file size from an original HTML text file.

Aside from the HTML code, it is also recommended that you save your images in an optimized format. Recipients should not have to wait for the images to render on their desktop or smart phone.

Continue to test how your messages render.  It is critical that your message renders properly in Gmail to avoid losing the unsubscribe link, tracking image for Opens/Renders , and any content that is displayed after 102 kilobytes.

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.

• 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.

I have been amazed at how many email marketing pieces I regularly receive that don’t offer the option to change your email address. One after the other offered an unsubscribe link and in some cases, a link for someone to opt-in (if the email had been forwarded to me from a friend) to receive future emails.

In those cases, I would have to opt-out and back in with my other email address. I suppose in the end it’s not too many extra steps, but it seems so unnecessary. Why make it hard for someone to change addresses (which happens so often)? What if they get interrupted or irritated and don’t opt back in?

When setting up the footer area of emails (often called the “mousetype”), your marketing should include:
• A valid postal address (for CAN SPAM compliance)
• A functioning opt-out link which lets the subscriber opt out without having to give any more information than their email address (CAN SPAM again)
• Any pertinent legal wording, trademark/copyright references
• A link to your current privacy policy
• A link to subscribe if the email has been forwarded to you from a friend
• The email address it was sent to
• Any footnote references related to the body of the email (such as links to sweepstakes rules or further rebate program clarification)

Let your readers feel they are managing their subscription to whatever email address they prefer. Otherwise, you risk losing them completely.

Ultimately, I will mark such unsolicited messages as Spam, and therein lies the point. Sending unsolicited messages is a surefire way to receive Spam complaints, because by definition that’s exactly what you’re sending. I remember talking to a prospect who once said “…but once they realize how valuable the content is, they’ll be glad we sent it…” which sounds like it could be a soundbite from the old Saturday Night Live “Bad Idea Jeans” sketch:



Assuming that recipients will see the same value in your content that you do—especially those who don’t have an existing relationship with your brand—is a bad idea. Your reputation as an email sender is not unlike your reputation as a person. Sending to a list of purchased email addresses is a bit like being “that guy” at the office Christmas party — even if it’s an isolated incident, such a misstep can inflict long-lasting damage on your reputation.

But is an A/B test all you can or should do?  If you have only a few thousand or fewer emails to work with, an A/B test may be all you can do to ensure statistically reliable results.  However, if your list is too small, an A/B test might not make any sense.  For example, if you only have a few hundred email addresses, splitting and conducting one test will literally tell you nothing (statistically) other than directionally relevant information.  Instead you may need to try to replicate the test over time, to aggregate the results and to analyze your collective data over a longer period.

The first consideration is to quantify how many email addresses you need to test to ensure you have a representative sample and more importantly, to ensure the results are reliable.  There is a lot of math and science behind this topic, and fortunately a lot of math/science/statistics sites have free online tools such as this one.

You must set up the test(s) correctly (with sufficient sample sizes and assumed response rates) on the front end to ensure that results on the back end are reliable, meaning with a confidence level that you’re comfortable with (we recommend a 95% confidence level if it’s possible).  Again, there are resources online to assist such as this one.  The key is to avoid the common mistake of merely looking at results and assuming winners/losers based on seemingly different response rates.

Before testing, you have to identify the goal or the question you’re trying to answer. We recommend that you actually write these down and then, as briefly and concisely as possible, describe the various yardsticks you will use to determine your winner. As form follows function, the goals/objectives of the test coupled with the means to measure results should help drive copy, graphics, and/or layout to ensure the messages are properly structured and focused on whatever question you’re trying to answer..

Let’s say your goal is a higher click rate and after an A/B test you find “A” has a 2.7% CTR and “B” has 2.85%.  It is a common mistake to use subtraction and declare that “B” was the winner or that “B” was only 0.15% higher and that could lead you down the path of thinking it wasn’t a significant result (i.e. a virtual “tie”).  Or maybe you routinely just pick the higher percentage as the winner and run with that.  Using proper percent increase/decrease calculations, we find that this is actually a  5.56% increase from “A” to “B.”

That however may or may not be statistically significant, but as you can see it’s a much larger increase than originally assumed.  In order to determine if the results are statistically significant, use one of the calculators, plug in each version’s list size and the click percentage (or open percentage, or conversion rate, etc. depending on the key metric you’re analyzing) and it will instantly tell you whether this difference is enough to be reliable (with a 95% confidence level).

In this example, let’s pretend I sent “A” and “B” to a random 2,000 people each.  The calculations indicate that this would not be enough of a difference to be statistically reliable.  In fact, the “B” cell’s click rate would have to have been at least 3.81% in order for the difference to be reliably significant.  However, if you didn’t analyze the results properly you wouldn’t know this.

The other way to ensure you’re maximizing your results is to avoid doing a full scale A/B test. If your database for an email marketing campaign is large enough (again calculate minimum sample size), you can do a different kind of split test. First, split your list 10%/90% (ensuring it’s random). Then split the 10% group in half so you have two small splits and the remaining 90%.

Deploy your test to the 10% splits, give as much time as possible for activity to occur (twenty-four hours if possible), analyze the results and then deploy the winner to the remaining 90%. That way you’ve done your best to maximize the campaign’s results without going “all in” on a typical full file A/B split.

As with gambling, learn the rules, do the math, analyze the data and place your bets.  Do it right, and the odds will swing in your favor.