As email recipients quickly scan their inboxes, seeing the right offer or incentive can lead them to pause just long enough to give your message a chance at being successful. It may seem strange to think about, but that split-second pause is a tremendous victory for your campaign.
The content most likely to catch recipients’ interests is the subject line, which is obviously why marketers place so much emphasis on trying to craft the most appealing subject lines possible. However, emails I’ve recently received from Horchow illustrated what can happen when a sender falls in to a “subject line rut.”
Over a span of less than 10 days, I saw the following Horchow subject lines in my inbox:
10/19: FURNITURE & RUG SALE with FREE SHIPPING
10/20: LAST DAY: for FREE SHIPPING on FURNITURE and Rug Sale…
10/22: FREE SHIPPING TODAY ONLY + save on Marcus bed & bath
10/22: Time’s almost up for FREE SHIPPING
10/26: FREE SHIPPING on almost everything, 2 days only
10/27: LAST DAY FOR FREE SHIPPING
There are a few things about this strategy that I don’t like. For one, that’s a lot of email over 10 days. But beyond that, how much incentive is FREE SHIPPING at this point? Horchow tries to make the recipient think that free shipping is for a limited time, but it’s obvious that the offer is nearly always on the table. So, by consistently recycling this same offer in their subject lines, Horchow is doing nothing more than limiting the amount of characters they can use in their subject lines to promote actual products.
A great subject line can cause your subscribers to take that split-second pause where they consider whether or not to engage further with your message; re-hashing the same subject lines and tired offers is a good way to make that decision for them.
I received a great email from the National Wildlife Federation looking to arrange a symbolic “adoption” of endangered animals by buying a collection of stuffed animals as gifts for kids. At the same time you’re making a donation to a very worthy charity.
With a clear “From Name” (“National Wildlife Federation”) and an intriguing subject line (“Adopt an Animal Today”), I felt like this was my chance to get a glimpse into Brad and Angelina’s world. I too could be honorable and socially conscious by adopting! I opened the email and then saw some snippet text summarizing the message and consistent with the subject line, “National Wildlife: Protect America’s precious wildlife by adopting an animal today!”. Based on who they were, the subject line and the snippet text, I was encouraged to view images to see the message.
Overall the visual layout was clean and colorful and images crisp and enticing. However, as with so many emails I see, the image usage was just too much. Literally everything is an image from top to bottom.
They did do a lot of things correct, they included:
• Snippet text at the top which is useful for email clients that show the initial text in an email (and mobile devices that don’t display full HTML)
• A web link to an HTML copy of the message to view in a browser
• Alt tags behind the images
• A lot of great links to their site as a navigation row
• Their URL and a contact phone
• Typical email marketing/legal best practices (opt-out link, add to safe sender info, privacy policy link, postal address, etc.)
However, they could have had an even greater impact by using HTML text instead of embedding all the text of the email in images. Readers shouldn’t have to take action to see your message or take action.
Throughout the message, the text at the top right, the navigation links, the main message/call-to-action, the names of the collections and the extra gift section have multiple opportunities to utilize text. Why is that so valuable? If someone doesn’t enable images (and most email clients have them off by default), they would only be looking at snippet text and alt tags (and keep in mind that not every email client displays them). Do you really want to risk someone not being enticed to view images and see your message?
In addition, the call-to-action could very well be below the preview pane “fold” in addition to being an image. So it’s forcing people to scroll down and take extra actions instead of just having a link ready to click. Also the text of the links, including the navigation buttons and the “Adopt Now” button, should all be underlined to reinforce visually that they are in fact hyperlinks.
It’s a good email supporting a great cause. However, the email marketing worker bee that I am just wants to reach out and grab the message and redo it so it really maximizes their efforts. With very small reworking, this email could look nearly identical with images on/off and ensure the maximum number of people view (and hopefully take) the desired action.
Being all image and low text content, they also increase the risk of spam filtering as it might look like this email was designed to avoid “word/phrase” filters. In addition, the balance between the HTML and text-only versions won’t be possible since there’s almost no text in the HTML version (something else that looks spammy to filters).
Hopefully someone at NWF will appreciate my humble words of advice and certainly with a full COMPASS report by our team, they (or anyone else) could have a full review of an email with extensive analysis of all the various components of an email. Given the cause and their heart being in the right place, I’m going to go ahead and order one of the collections…for my nephews… no really for my nephews.
I recently received an email from the The Cheesecake Factory. The “From Name” seemed to be more appropriate for a welcome message, “Cheesecake Factory Greetings”. It was confusing in particular because Gmail truncated it so I only saw “Cheesecake Factory Greet.” As I’ve been on their list for some time, the “Greetings” comment made me pause-why not just have “Cheesecake Factory”?
The subject line also left me a little cold, “Announcing More Small Plates & Snacks”. What’s a “small plate”? I see there are more of them now! And oh boy…more snacks. Perhaps the snippet text would provide further insight and make me want to open the email? Here’s what I saw “To ensure you continue to receive email from THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY® , please add …” Yep…I’m drooling now…
Joking aside this illustrates the growing importance of snippet text (aka preview text). Increasingly, email clients are adding this feature after the subject line as a third means for a recipient to decide whether to open an email. At this point I know who wrote me, but unsure why they’re sending “Greetings”, the subject line is vague and there’s not really any snippet text driving me to open the email. I probably wouldn’t normally have opened it to be honest.
But for the sake of a full review of the message I pushed on.
If you take pride in your email marketing, you wouldn’t think your messages would contain elements found in some of the most Spam-tastic emails out there, right? Well, you might be surprised. To illustrate, I’ll be using a collection of the SPAM-iest emails I’ve received lately. If these characteristics sound familiar, it’d be a good idea to make some changes to your messages—the less you have in common with these bottom-feeders the better.
What’s the problem: (click to enlarge the sample message The absence of a “To” address or any type of personalization leads me to believe that I did not actually win $2.5M dollars from Asia Power Ball Online Lottery Promo. This is also commonly found in emails sent by organizations who do all of their email marketing in-house, and often enter an entire mailing list of addresses entered into the “Bcc” field. The risk of accidentally using the “Cc” field instead of “Bcc” field is one possibly embarrassing reason to avoid this practice. Another is that seeing a blank “To” field can make recipients immediately suspicious as to the validity of your message, regardless of how legitimate you may think it is.
Using generic subject lines is another bad practice. You may not have content as enticing as a multi-million dollar prize, but it’s your responsibility to make it as enticing and informative as possible. And take care to avoid too much fine print or legal copy at the bottom of your messages—it can give recipients the impression that things aren’t what they appear, or that some “catch” is involved. If extensive Terms & Conditions apply, list them on a web page and link to it the way you would your Privacy Policy.
As email recipients quickly scan their inboxes, seeing the right offer or incentive can lead them to pause just long enough to give your message a chance at being successful. It may seem strange to think about, but that split-second pause is a tremendous victory for your campaign.
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