Posts Tagged ‘Email best practices’
Posted by Dave McCue on November 16th, 2009
Evidence is the difference between theory and fact, and—as it relates to email—between saying email marketing is valuable and proving it. Any organization using email marketing is going to want to see evidence that results are being produced, and if you are the individual in charge of producing those results, your best friend in such situations is your data. If that word strikes fear into your heart, don’t worry, a term as all-encompassing as “data” can be intimidating in the big picture. But if you break it down, attaining the data you’re after is as simple as answering three questions:
1) What do I want to measure?
2) How am I going to measure it?
3) How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
What do I want to measure?
Answering the first question is a good exercise, because it requires you to step back and define exactly what sort of results you need to see in order to consider your email program a success. Are you using email as a way to drive sales? If so, you’ll want to track visitors who arrive at your site via email to see what percentage of that traffic results in conversions. If your emails function mainly as a vehicle to sell advertising, keep close tabs on any factors that could contribute to higher/lower response to those ads—day of week, ad format, newsletter content, time of day, etc—and adjust accordingly to drive the results that will keep advertisers coming back.
How am I going to measure it?
How you measure your data is largely dependent on the resources available to you. Using an email service provider such as SubscriberMail will provide you with a reporting toolset that makes it easy to track and organize your email performance data. However, the data provided by your ESP can only tell the story up until a recipient clicks one of the links within your email. From that point, you’ll need to rely on your web analytics platform (whether a paid platform or a free service such as Google Analytics) to track visitors’ activity on your website. By adding the proper parameters to the links within your emails, you can make sure email traffic is tracked separately from regular web traffic in your web analytics platform. Once both of these systems are in place, and working in tandem, you’ll be able to create a variety of filters and funnels that make it easy to track the data that is most important to measuring the success of your program.
How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
There are a few things you can do to make sure you have data to measure. First of all, don’t be so excited about the idea of running reports and seeing the results of your hard work that you forget to spend the necessary time on the “nuts ‘n bolts” beforehand. Assuming you are using both an ESP and a web analytics platform, take time to double-check (and test!) that the steps have been taken to enable proper tracking. Are the right parameters being added to all links within your emails that you want to track? Do all pages of your site have the appropriate web analytics tracking code installed (including any sub-domains)?
Once you are sure that data from your campaigns will be tracked the way you would like, optimize your emails to give recipients a “nudge” in the most important direction. If your goal is for recipients to fill out a registration form on a page of your site, make sure an enticing link to that page is the main call-to-action of your message. Include a link to the page in your pre-header. Some recipients will have your images blocked, so use ALT text behind images to persuade these recipients to visit your page as well. Point email links directly to the page with the registration form (i.e. not your homepage), and try to design the landing page in such a way that it is easy for visitors to take the next desired action—why add a hurdle so close to the finish line? Lastly, be sure to set up some sort of confirmation/thank you page that displays once visitors submit the registration form—it’s this confirmation page that represents the point of conversion you’ll want to measure in your analytics platform. Give your “goal” the best chance to be realized by making the conversion process as quick and easy as possible for visitors.
Check back for Part 2 in the coming days, where I’ll look at different types of email data.
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Posted by Rob Ropars on November 12th, 2009
I recently received an email from wine.com, and it was one of the best email marketing emails I’ve seen in some time. They managed to incorporate the vast majority of email marketing best practices, had a simple clean layout and detailed information about their products/offer.
The “from name” clearly identified the sender (“Wine.com”-though they seem to use “Wine.com” and “wine.com” interchangeably) and the subject line detailed the special offer and its limited-time availability, “2 days only – up to 30% off select Geyser Peak wines”.
Opening the email I saw one of the best “images off” layouts in a long time. No “all image” email here! Right from the top they get so many things refreshingly right.
They have preheader/snippet text, “Two phenomenal wines in limited supply” reinforcing the subject line and available for mobile devices and email snippet preview in the inbox. That is immediately followed by a link to a web copy and their white listing/safe sender info. The header area has a small logo with an alt tag so I can clearly see it’s from “Wine.com” and it’s not taking up a lot of preview pane real estate.
There are a few images to its right that are so small I can’t see what they are at least in Yahoo’s images off rendering and then a forward to a friend link for viral promotion. Right below that is a site navigation row with links (as text-awesome) to key parts of their site (“wine shop,” “fine wine,” etc.).
That’s always a great addition in case I want to look around your site and do/buy something else if the featured offer isn’t of interest. Right below that is an extra section with an intriguing pitch for free shipping for a full year followed by a personalized greeting (Dear Robert…”), and a summary of the offer with links to learn more about each wine featured.
All of the above should fit in most preview panes and provides everything I could want and know more. I cannot stress enough how utterly fantastic work that is all around! About the only thing I’m puzzled about is the two or three small images top center next to the forward, but that’s obviously something small and hopefully not critical.
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Posted by Dave McCue on October 28th, 2009
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.
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Posted by Rob Ropars on October 19th, 2009
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.
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Posted by Rob Ropars on October 7th, 2009
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.
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