Category Archive: Email usability tips
Open rates, simplified
Practical advice for boosting your email opens, just in time for the holidays
If I had a nickel for every time I was asked, “How can I improve my open rate?” I’d probably have all my holiday shopping done by now (okay, that’s wishful thinking). But it’s a question on all of our minds as we put valuable time and resources toward creating and sending email campaigns. And while many variables play into the open rate of an email (time of day, time of year, even the weather), I’ve got some practical tips for boosting opens you can apply to your own email strategy today.
A 40% open rate? Not too shabby.
Brand your from name, from email address and your subject line
These are the first things that folks see when they receive your emails, so your “from name” and email address should be instantly recognizable and branded. Unless you’re Mark Zuckerburg, it might make sense for you to send emails from a more brand-specific email address like, info@yourcompany.com with your company’s name listed as the “from name.” Not sure if changing your sending details will help or hurt your brand? This Mark Brownlow article will walk you through a little self-analysis.
Next, let’s talk subject lines. Here’s a simple subject line axiom: They should be concise and feature your most important or most interesting information. Don’t forget to add your brand voice and personality in there, either. Oh, and by all means, steer clear of the ever-so-boring “December Newsletter,” and be sure to check out Molly’s post on holiday subject lines that work.
Segment your audience and send relevant information to the right people.
The art of segmenting and sending targeted messages will determine the fate of your open rate. While the old “batch and blast” approach may work for some companies, segmenting is key to getting the most out of your email marketing. Here are two ways to try segmenting.
1. By demographic data
- Location. If you’re collecting postal code during signup, you can find members who are closest to your brick and mortar location. Send these folks a campaign that highlights an in-store event or promotion.
- Age. If you’re collecting the birthdays for your new audience members, you can easily segment them by age and target a specific age range with your new product.
- Gender. If you have separate product lines for men and women, have new subscribers choose their gender on your signup form. Send targeted messages by dividing those guys and gals into separate groups.
- Customer status. The types of messages you send prospects should be different from those you send to established customers. Track where audience members are in the customer lifecycle as a custom member field so you can send prospects more promotional messages and send existing customers a feedback survey or event invitation.
2. By response information
Divide your subscribers along activity lines. Audience activity is a good representation of how engaged your subscribers are, and you can treat your most engaged subscribers a bit differently. Since engagement is monitored in the response section through opens and clicks, you can create segments based on those numbers.
The benefit of response-based segmenting is that you can connect with your more engaged groups more regularly, or with special VIP offers. It also highlights which audience members are less engaged, and you can decide whether it’s time to drop them from your regular mailings or attempt a re-engagement campaign to get them back in your good graces.
Keep in mind that each year up to one-third of email addresses become inactive or turn over due to job changes and deleted email accounts. Emfluence Insights has some handy tips for reconnecting with subscribers who hard bounce, but try not to take it too personally if audience members don’t re-engage. You’re better off reserving your marketing efforts for those who already care about who you are and what you’re doing. Check out Mary’s series on engagement for more advice.
Want to share your own secret to great open rates? Comment here and let us know your success story.
This is part two in our holiday series where we answer email marketing questions provided by our customers. To see part one, click here.
+++++
Request a holiday design from Emma’s design team before December 12th to avoid the rush.
Trick-or-treat, email marketing style
With Halloween around the corner, here are a few sweet moves to try & a few sticky situations to avoid when it comes to your emails
With Halloween just three days away, the holiday season is officially upon us, and we’re kicking things off with an email-friendly set of tricks and treats. As you prepare your fall- and winter-themed campaigns, consider implementing the three treats below — and avoiding the three tricks. Your campaigns will bewitch your subscribers (in a good way).
And, remember, if you’re looking for some design inspiration, you can request a $25 Readymade holiday design from our design team all season long.
TREAT: Birthday triggers that turn a profit
If you’re capturing your subscribers’ birth dates, consider sending birthday coupons by way of an email trigger — it’ll increase engagement and profits, especially in the months leading up to Christmas. And it may have unexpected bonuses. Take this, for example: I recently received a birthday email with a coupon for a free breakfast sandwich from Star Bagel, a bagel shop here in Nashville. It’s one of my favorite places so I was thrilled about the email. While I was busy running a few holiday errands (I’m starting early this year!), I redeemed my birthday coupon, and then I ended up purchasing more. (Nice work, Star Bagel.)
Read more from Clickz about birthday triggers bringing in the business.
TRICK: Not taking advantage of social media
Are you interacting with fans and followers on social media sites? If not, you could be missing out on an opportunity to boost customer loyalty and increase customer spending by 20%- 40%. Starting conversations on Facebook and Twitter is likely to increase the engagement of folks who may not engage with you in other ways (on the phone, for example), and as the become more engaged, they’re likelier to turn to you for your expertise. (Engaged customers also spend more. See that bit about me and the bagel shop.)
Check out a solid 12-step social media plan by MarketingProfs here. And if you need a hand getting your email and social media working together, stop by to ask us on Twitter and Facebook, or send a note to our friendly support team.
TREAT: Using video to mix things up a bit
We recently posted a video blog, and we recorded and produced the whole thing with just a laptop and iMovie. Have your own computer camera or smartphone handy? Give video a try. It’s a great way to add a human touch to your posts. And there are lots of helpful how-to’s out there. Our friend, Tom Martin, shares 8 tips over on Social Fresh for creating a video with an iPhone alone.
Read how one online floral retailer boosted response metrics and conversions just by adding video to email campaigns.
TRICK: Forgetting your images’ alt text or creating image-only campaigns
I recently got an email in my inbox with the enticing subject line “Get Dressed.” I clicked to open, and to my surprise, I landed on a blank white page. If your campaigns are filled with images, make sure to include some alt text. (If you fill out all of the fields when adding your image to an Emma layout, alt text will be automatically generated.) Alt text ensures that you’re providing some context to readers who don’t have images displayed by default. It’s much better for them to see “Click here to view our gallery of outfits,” than nothing at all.
And make sure you’re designing your campaigns to render beautifully without relying solely on images. Marketing Sherpa found that click-throughs increased over 83% when tables were used to add color and design to emails that had images blocked.
TREAT: Enable Social Sharing to grow your audience list
This might just be the easiest treat of all. With a simple click of the Add Social Sharing button atop your email campaign (in edit mode), you can add the ability for your subscribers to share your email on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Oh, and in doing so, you could be increasing your campaign’s click-through rate by 30-55%. Not too shabby.
Want a refresher on how to enable your subscribers to share the love? Grab our Social Sharing how-to here.
TRICK: Sending your campaign to your audience without testing
Giving your campaign the once over and clicking a link here or there in preview mode might seem like sufficient testing when you’re pressed for time, but it’s not enough if you want to ensure a solid delivery. Your emails will render a bit differently in the major email programs, and it’s a good idea to test all links from the inbox. Plus, getting another set of eyes on your email’s content and formatting will help you spot typos and formatting inconsistencies. Emma makes comprehensive testing easy by way of your free Test Group. Store up to 10 addresses there — try to represent a mix of different email programs — and send unlimited campaigns without affecting your monthly sending total.
If you need a hand getting your Test Group set up, visit our Help Guide.
+++++
I hope these treats and tricks have sparked a few ideas of your own. Please share your tips with our community in the comments here. And if you’d like to show off your holiday-themed campaign, share the link, too. We’re ready to see the spooky and the spectacular. We may just feature yours in an upcoming post!
Advanced email analytics with Litmus
Using Litmus and Emma to preview your email in various email clients and study engagement
Benjamin Franklin once said that the only certainties in life are death, taxes and the fact that various email programs display HTML differently. Well, he may not have been familiar with that last one. But as email marketers know, it’s a truth that adds a level of difficulty to designing for email.
Thankfully, we’ve got tools for that kind of thing. Litmus is a program that gives marketers a firsthand look at how newsletters render across the major email programs, and it also shows which ones your recipients are using. Last month, Emma took a Litmus for different kind of test drive. We’ve been using the system for quite a while now, but trying some of their more advanced features this time around gave us some fascinating insights.
Let me introduce two of the Litmus features that we found useful, as well as the results from our own newsletters.
Email previews
Because of the plethora of email clients out there, making campaigns look good everywhere is an uphill battle. Emma’s designers are stars at making your stationery display consistently, but once you add images and text to your campaign, you can bet that it won’t look exactly the same. And don’t even get me started on Outlook. (Here’s an example of Emma’s old newsletter in Outlook 2007.) To make matters more complicated, email clients span across three environments: desktop software (like Outlook and MacMail), web software (like Hotmail and Gmail) and mobile. For the purposes of this post, that’s all you need to know. But if you’re curious about rendering engines, which actually perform the task of displaying HTML, you can learn more here.
With a basic Litmus account, you send your email to a test Litmus address to see how your email looks on all major email clients in an instant. From there, you can browse through the clients, scroll on the mobile phones and even turn preview panes on and off to see all preference configurations. It really takes the guesswork out of it.
If you decide to go with a plus or premium account, you’ll actually see what emails clients are represented in your audience, and by what percentages. With this data, you can get a sense of just how mobile your subscribers are and how much your campaigns are affected by Outlook’s quirks.
Litmus allows you to preview campaigns in all major email clients.
Engagement
If you’re using Emma, you’re already getting a good idea of your reader engagement through the response section. Litmus gives you even deeper analytics, at their plus and premium levels. The report tells you exactly how many seconds your audience spends with your emails and categorizes the whole group into “read,” “skimmed” and “glanced or deleted.” It’s even organized by email client.
The results: Litmus in action
We used Litmus for two of Emma’s newsletters, our August Roundup (a newsletter sent to our entire community) and our Agency Insider (sent to our agency partners). (To subscribe to either or both of these, go right ahead here.)
Litmus’ email previews allowed us to test our campaigns before their send-offs. Then after sending, we dove into the engagement and email client details. We learned a few things along the way, including…
- The audiences for our community-wide newsletter and agency-specific newsletter are not that different. At over 80% for each test, desktop email clients are still king. Our general community has a higher percentage of Outlook users, while our agencies prefer Mac Mail; those were the #1 and #2 email clients for both.
- Our mobile readers, despite being a significant minority, were extremely engaged. Over half of mobile recipients fell into the “read” category, spending the most time with our emails. Maybe it simply takes longer to read and digest an email on mobile. Or, maybe folks who make time to check email on-the-go really want to receive the message.
- Our readers are environmentally friendly. Fewer than 10 readers chose to print out the newsletter.
Pretty interesting, right? You may find that you know your audience better than you expect — perhaps your assumptions are right on the money. Or, you may find that more readers than you realize are using mobile devices and that your mobile strategy needs a tune-up.
Even if the results don’t lead to major changes right away — we’re pretty pleased with how Emma’s data stacked up, for example — it’s useful to document the data as a benchmark. Gradual changes to your reports over time will indicate an evolving audience, and it’ll allow you to keep your content and formatting fresh. Got anything interesting to share about your own email testing? Please share any insights in the comments. We’d love to hear about it.
And for the record, we don’t have any special relationship with Litmus — we just think it’s a handy tool, so we wanted to share it with you.
Behind-the-scenes of an Emma split test
Testing subject lines in our monthly newsletter
As the oldest of three girls, my childhood was evenly divided among three categories: eating, sleeping and Barbies. While my sisters acted out elaborate dramas (shocking revelations on the red carpet! a scandalous elopement!) and crafted decorations for our Barbie condos, I generally busied myself sorting, categorizing and organizing Barbie outfits and accessories. In fact, I became a lifelong sorter.
It’s served me well at Emma, where we do our best to practice what we preach, and that includes audience list segmentation. Sure, you can send a monthly blast to all the folks who have ever given you their email addresses, and some of our customers do just fine with this approach. But if you can target audience segments based on their interests, preferences or history with your brand, you’ll create a unique, personal relationship that may just result in brand evangelists.
We’ve got some big plans in the works for better engaging our current customers with variable content, based on their behavior within their accounts. And we send periodic, targeted content to different types of subscribers. At the most basic level, we segment our monthly newsletter list into current customers versus all other subscribers. Just tracking the response differential is really eye-opening. We use our CRM, Salesforce, to identify all of our current customers, then utilize the search and segment feature in Emma to sort out all the newsletter subscribers who aren’t in the Current Customers group — and we put them in a different audience group. Generally speaking, we see an increase in open rates when we’ve identified a reader as an Emma user; moreover, we see an average 10% increase in open rates with readers who are actively using their Emma accounts.
For our July newsletter, we took our response analysis one step further. In addition to splitting our campaigns up between Current Customers and Everybody Else, we did A/B/C testing to see how different subject lines played out. Take a look at the subject lines:
- Version A > An easier way to send campaigns, an email success story and more in Emma’s July Roundup
- Version B > Emma’s July Roundup: An easier way to send campaigns, an email success story and more
- Version C > Click-throughs 10 times the average? How one company did it + much more in Emma’s July Roundup
Before I reveal the results, can you guess which subject line performed the best?
Emma’s handy compare mailings feature made it easy to line up our various versions and see subscriber behavior. Interestingly (or bafflingly, depending on how you look at it), the results weren’t consistent between the two groups. Version A tested higher with our general subscribers, while version C got a better response from our customers. Version B, which was the closest to the standard format of our newsletter subject lines for the last several months, tested the worst with both groups. Perhaps our readers are trying to tell us to mix things up more often?
The only verifiable trend we saw was the one we were already expecting: current Emma users had much higher opens, click-throughs and shares. One version of the campaign showed a whopping 44% open rate. Our active customers were also interested in learning more; an average of 19% clicked through for additional content.
As a lifelong sorter, let me assure you: data and analysis are your (marketing) friends. Use your response statistics and adjust your communications to suit your readers’ interests. Test out different approaches and see how your subscribers respond. And pat yourself on the back when you see your response numbers improve because of segmentation and targeted messaging — that extra works pays off.
Coming soon, we’ll be excited to reveal split testing as a feature right in your Emma account. It’ll make A/B/C subject line testing even easier. Stay tuned for more info on the Emma website and here on the blog. And if you’re just dying to hear more about my childhood adventures in Barbie organization, you’ll have to track me down.
+++++
New to Emma? Give us a try for free.
Surveys (and leaps) we like to take
Using Emma's free feature to request customer feedback and take your business to new heights
I love a good challenge, so when I saw the opportunity to go skydiving *and* meet some Emma customers in person, I couldn’t resist. Located in rural Chester, South Carolina, they are the Carolinas’ premier drop zone and consistently draw adrenaline junkies from far and wide (even design consultants from Nashville, Tennessee!). I recently caught up with James LaBarrie, the general manager of Skydive Carolina, to discuss the experience I had using their service and an Emma feature he has found quite beneficial.
Kelley en route to earth. Also pictured: just another day at the office for her tandem, Chuck, from Skydive Carolina.
Skydive Carolina regularly uses the Emma survey feature that’s free with every account because it’s a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of their customers. James is passionate about the company’s commitment to building relationships with clients and providing superior customer service.
“We aren’t only hoping to please our customers,” he says. “We are hoping to amaze them. But when we fail, I see it as an opportunity to create a raving fan.”
Of course, an important element of the service experience is the customer’s ability to easily provide feedback and the company’s willingness to listen. With a role that is mostly behind the scenes, James does not get the opportunity to interact with each customer who visits. For him, it is often the survey alone that provides the valuable feedback they need.
“The survey is a great way to know when we’re falling short and when all is well,” he adds. And in those rare instances that a customer does not have the best experience possible, James has been known to follow up with them personally.
The Skydive Carolina survey inquires about everything from how easy it was to find the location to how much the client liked the photo taken during the jump; each bit of information helps James make educated decisions about the business. But it’s not just about asking the right questions — James is also very intentional about asking at the right time as well. Jumpers receive a trigger email the day immediately following their dive, when the experience is still fresh enough to recall details.
Survey says: Everyone's gotta try this.
It’s amazing how much information is available if you simply request it. When thinking about your own business, consider the difference that customer feedback could make for you and follow Skydive Carolina’s lead. Heck, you may also like to follow their lead right out of a plane — you definitely wouldn’t regret it!
Here’s to surveyed customers, empowered email marketing and thrilling jumps.
Beefing up your email link tracking
Get more mileage out of your URLs with Google Analytics
We email marketers love open rates and click-through rates. They tell us the quantity of attention we’ve won and show us opportunities to win more, whether we’re out to increase alumni engagement or to hawk Corvettes.
But what do your readers do beyond the click, when they leave your email campaign to visit your website?
Add web analytics software like Google Analytics to your email marketing campaigns, and you’ll be able to see what your email subscribers end up doing on your website. It’ll give you invaluable data about conversions and site traffic patterns, and it’ll help you plan even better marketing campaigns. I’ll walk you through it.
Getting started
If you don’t have an Analytics account, set one up here. Google’s installation guide explains how to place tracking code in the appropriate files on your site.
Why email + web analytics matters
With Google Analytics, your email campaigns and website exchange click-based crib
notes to score conversions, pageviews and other metrics. By adding specialized code to each URL — called “tagging” — you’ll have a system that not only shows which links generate the most traffic but also ranks the effectiveness of email marketing alongside paid search, print and more.
How to do it
To incorporate Analytics in your next email campaign, start by using Google’s URL Builder to turn your simple link into a tagged URL. Each Google parameter helps you categorize the source:
Set these parameters so they’ll make sense in your analytics report. And don’t feel like you have to fill in every blank; according to Google’s tagging tips, don’t bother unless you need to drill down to the nitty gritty.
Here’s an example from May’s Agency Insider, a newsletter series we send to creative firms who resell our email marketing service. In the bottom right section, you’ll see an image of a stupendously fancy chair. It’s linked to a blog post called “Building a slice and dice campaign.” Here’s how we defined the parameters for the fancy chair image:
- Campaign Source: Agency-Insider
- Campaign Medium: Emma-Email
- Campaign Content: SliceDice-Blog-Image
- Campaign Name: May-Edition
Here is the original URL: http://myemma.com/blog/2011/06/01/send-big-image
And here is the finished product: http://myemma.com/blog/2011/06/01/send-big-image/?utm_source=AgencyInsider&utm_medium=emmaemail&utm_content=SliceDice-Blog-image&utm_campaign=May-Edition
It’s a whopper, I know. Do this for each link that goes back to your site, and then add the tagged links to your Emma campaign just as you would any other link. Send a test to check that every link from your inbox lands in the right place. When everything is ready, set that heat-seeker loose on your audience.
Understanding the results
After Emma records the opens, clicks and other inbox activity, she’ll pass the baton to Google to follow the clicks to your site. Allow about 48 hours to get a clear picture of your results.
When the clicks roll to a stop in your Analytics account, you’ll have a full road report of what each visitor did and saw on your landing page. To find the report in Google Analytics, log in and select “Traffic Sources” in the dashboard. You can choose to “View Full Report” or just display the “Top Traffic Sources.”
Find the Campaign Source you tagged your links with in the URL Builder (in my earlier example, that’s “Agency-Insider”). Google ranks the popularity of your links and shows you the average number of pageviews, how long people spent on each page, the percentage of new visitors and the bounce rate.
Knowing what’s next
With Google Analytics riding shotgun on your Emma campaigns, you’ll have a heat map to guide your marketing plan. You’ll be able to learn what calls to action resonate most with each segment of your audience and how they arrive at the shopping cart. The various promotional channels that make up your marketing spend will be tuned to the same stat-o-matic Google frequency.
And along the way you’re bound to develop stickier content that keeps visitors on your site longer and engages them in your service. Here’s hoping there’s heavy traffic ahead. Jersey Turnpike or bust!
+++++
Want to learn more about becoming an Emma agency? Inquire here.
Stylishly formatted email campaigns
How customers are making the most of Emma's layouts
We’re big fans of design, and it’s one of the reasons why our design team handcrafts email stationery for our customers. A stylishly branded stationery — one that fits your aesthetic and is unlike any other email stationery out there — is quite a start, but you’ve still got to fill your email with content. Staring at a blank campaign can be downright daunting, and we hope that our Oh-Blather-I’m-Stuck List of 12 quick content ideas is helpful.
But what if you’ve got a different challenge? Maybe you’ve got plenty of content but not enough inspiration about how to lay it out in an email. This kind of problem can be just as daunting, and we’re always on the lookout for customers who are finding creative ways to display their content.
Let’s take a look at five customers who are using Emma’s simple, newsletter and advanced layouts in lovely ways — and what you can learn from them.
Mocha Club | Layout: Newsletter 12
Click the campaign example to see the full version.
The Newsletter 12 layout combines alternating text and image boxes and works best if you’ve got several separate updates or stories. And don’t forget to make use of the image caption placeholders.
Why it works:
- Mocha Club keeps each story section short ‘n’ sweet, linking to story continuations on their website and blog.
- Alternating images are the same size across the campaign, and there’s a nice balance of graphics and text.
The Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) | Layout: Advanced 14
Click the campaign example to see the full version.
The Advanced 14 layout is similar to a few of the newsletter layouts and includes a sidebar along the right side that you can use for recurring stories, ads or special promotions.
Why it works:
- Like Mocha Club, SoDA uses small — and equally sized — images, appropriate for an email environment. No over-powering, slow-to-load images here.
- The sidebar is well-utilized, with a stand-alone blurb about sponsorship.
Denver Museum of Nature & Science | Layout: Simple 5
Click the campaign example to see the full version.
The Simple 5 layout — with an image slot on the right and wrapping text box on the left — is perfect for shorter emails and announcements.
Why it works:
- The height of the image matches the length of the text, creating visual balance.
- If the campaign winds up in an inbox that doesn’t display images by default, its message won’t be lost.
Gray Photography | Layout: Simple 8
Click the campaign example to see the full version.
The Simple 8 layout includes a series of centered image slots separated by text boxes. It’s ideal for sharing larger images with your audience. (We recommend images of 480 x 480 pixels or smaller.)
Why it works:
- The prominent wedding picture immediately gives context — this email is all about wedding photography workshops.
- No need to over-stuff your email. Here, Gray Photography makes their point using two image slots and two text boxes. They’ve left the other placeholders blank, and those unused image and text boxes simply auto-hide.
Pigeon Toe Ceramics | Layout: Advanced 4
Click the campaign example to see the full version.
The Advanced 4 layout is a good choice if you have a set of products to display (just keep images to around 120 x 120 pixels).
Why it works:
- Pigeon Toe uploads small, equally sized images so that alignment is consistent across the campaign.
- The images are more or less in the same color family so they work together, rather than creating visual clutter.
I hope these stylish campaigns give you some ideas for your own. And the next time you create a beauty of a campaign, we’d love to see it. Share its online URL in the comments below, and you may find yourself featured in a future blog post. Happy formatting!
Why you shouldn’t send one big image — and what you can do instead
Building a slice and dice campaign
Here's an example of a large image getting smaller slices applied to it.
But hang on. You’re playing with email fire. Servers are more likely to filter emails with large images, meaning the campaign will end up in junk folders rather than your recipients’ inboxes. Moreover, large images take a long time to load, and your recipients may move on to the next email in their inbox without viewing yours. And for email programs like Gmail and Outlook that block images by default, your campaign has no text to anchor it, and it’ll look like an empty or broken email. Not good.
If that’s not enough to deter you, there’s another limitation to image-only campaigns worth mentioning. One image can only link to one URL, limiting your ability to include links to multiple articles or landing pages — and your ability to track your audience members’ response activity.
So, do you have to scrap your large image entirely? The good news is that you can repurpose one large image into smaller, sliced images. We call it a slice and dice campaign, and it’s something that our design team has been offering to our customers since we expanded our set of design options.
And now we’ve created a downloadable guide so you can build a slice and dice on your own. Armed with this guide and a bit of HTML know-how, you’re able to slice your large image into more digestible pieces, link those pieces to any number of URLs you desire and safely send to your audience. You’ll enjoy better delivery rates, and your campaign will properly render in all of the major email programs. Now that’s good for you and good for your audience.
Download Emma’s Guide to Building a Slice and Dice Campaign here. (There’s a lot of juicy content in there, so give it time to download.)
If you’d rather request a slice and dice campaign from our design team, fill out our online design form, and a design consultant will reach out with a quote and turnaround time.
Behind the scenes of our January newsletter
How we created a plan full of emails, link triggers, surveys and rewards to help our customers with their own marketing strategies.
During a brainstorming session for our newsletter content last year, a group of Emma staffers tossed around the idea of incorporating a New Year’s resolution theme into January’s mailing. It’s kind of a no-brainer, right? The new year lends itself to setting goals and checking off to-dos, so we decided to use our January newsletter to get the Emma community thinking about taking their email strategy up a notch. We provided a menu of resolution-worthy goals related to using a more advanced Emma feature or re-imagining their approach to email marketing.
We knew we had an arsenal of helpful content built into our in-account Help Guide, blog and Ask Emma library, so we created a plan to provide a mash-up of that content for our newsletter subscribers. And when we faced the question of *how* to deliver that ever-so-helpful content, we found an answer in the Emma application. Link-based triggers would allow us to send follow-up emails full of advice, each one tailored to the resolution the reader had clicked on. We think email marketing should be fun and rewarding, so we opted to dream up a “cereal box-worthy prize” for folks who clicked on a link and participated in a follow-up survey letting us know how it went.
Since design is such an important part of who we are, our brainstorming meeting also included a fun discussion about the look and feel of the newsletter and its accompanying emails. Creative director Allison Davis and designer Elizabeth Williams put their heads together and decided to not only create a bold, fresh design fitting for a new year, but also to stage an Amy Sedaris-esque photo shoot featuring our own delivery specialist and newsletter model (it’s a working title), Claire Burns. What resulted was a stand-out design that was reminiscent of our Getting Started Guide. As Elizabeth says, “I wanted the design to be comfortably familiar but delightfully fresh — with a heavy-handed dash of ‘It’s the new year people, let’s get empowered!’”
Click to see the whole January series.
About those link triggers
Because Emma’s link-based trigger feature allows you to send a follow-up campaign automatically when someone clicks on a link, we knew the tips related to the resolution would arrive when the recipient was most interested to read it. We created six emails total, the January newsletter plus five more detailed campaigns to cover each resolution:
- Survey tips and tricks
- Advice for segmenting your audience & getting new subscribers
- Expertise for creating stylish, stand-out campaigns
- Ideas for personalizing campaigns and send-times
- Suggestions for incorporating triggers into an email marketing strategy
Just click on the slide show to the right to see all of the campaigns (and all of Claire’s poses). Once we completed and tested each campaign, it was time to set up the triggers. We followed these steps and sat back to watch the opens and clicks on the response page.
About the survey, landing page & rewards
A week or so after the January newsletter send-off, we started working on the follow-up campaign inviting those who clicked a resolution to give us a little update on how they were faring. Since Emma’s response page gave us all the details on who clicked which link, we took the time to personalize the message in each follow-up email. We sent one version to folks who clicked to embrace the power of surveys, another for those who wanted to finally master the steps to creating a trigger email and so on. Of course, we wanted to create a special follow-up message for the ambitious folks who clicked more than one resolution — that ended up being the largest group of recipients for our segmented follow-up.
We also created the survey embedded in each follow-up email in Emma. It was a simple, three-question form asking folks if they’d accomplished the goal and how it changed their marketing plan. As promised, we offered a reward: After submitting their survey response, the survey-taker landed on a page chock-full of downloadable buttons — and we also created that landing page entirely inside our Emma account, following the steps in this article.
Our team of designers had fun creating the buttons, and our hope is that the buttons will encourage our customers to follow the tips we outlined in our follow-up emails and become email marketing superstars.
Our results so far
With so many mailings and a corresponding survey to boot, we had gobs of response details to look through and analyze. But we were most eager to see which resolution got the most clicks (it was the one about style, if you’re curious), how many link-clickers wanted to receive more than just one of our follow-up emails full of advice and tips (that was a whopping 43% of the link-clickers, believe it or not), and what folks were saying in their survey responses.
While we were pleased that 85% of the survey-takers had already taken a more strategic approach to their email marketing with Emma’s help, we were even more pleased with the long-answer comments they left. We expected to hear more details on how these strategies were applied, but instead we received a healthy mix of success stories and requests for more help. This is our audience talking back to us, telling us what they need. Thanks to that unexpected result, we now have a natural next step: connect our support team with these customers for dedicated help and training.
More resources
Want to get in on the resolutionary fun? Sign up for our January newsletter so you can click on the links and get helpful follow-up emails. We won’t make you take a survey in order to get the prize, either — we just uploaded the buttons on our Facebook page. And best of luck to you in your own resolutionary efforts!
Is your baby’s button ugly?
Another way effective email design can make your campaigns more effective: Get all your buttons to look just right.
I know the feeling. You’ve crafted what feels like the perfect email. The photo totally complements the concise and appealing description of your new service. The label for your call to action is clear. You just know people are going to click it and take that next step. Everything’s ready. You take a deep breath, and send your baby out into the world. You’ve worked hard, and you’re proud of that baby of yours. You wait for good things. And you wait. And you wait some more. But nothing happens.
What went wrong? Why aren’t people clicking your call to action? Well, it’s time to get honest with yourself. Your baby’s button may be ugly. The label is fine. But that button design isn’t going to win her any ribbons at the county fair. You see, that button doesn’t have enough perceived affordances. Don Norman is credited with introducing this term to the design world, and it refers to “those action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor.” In other words, there are certain qualities of an object, in your case a button, that help people understand what they can do with it.
Let’s take a closer look at a button. Maybe you’re creating a campaign to announce your new lunch menu (because your new paninis are quite tasty). Besides showcasing a great photo of said panini, you really want your customers to click that button so they can check out the new menu on your website.
The first question to ask yourself is whether it looks like a button. Not really. It looks more like a rectangle with a border. Second question, does it look clickable? Maybe. It’s pretty flat, but it is different than the photo and the text. Of course, no one wants to settle for maybe – fortunately, it’s easy to add perceived affordances and make that button more effective.
This revised button looks more clickable than the old one. (The fancier way of saying this is that it demonstrates a higher level of affordance.) I know it’s tempting to be totally unique from a design perspective — and you can be if you keep affordance in mind — but it’s often more effective to use a design convention that’s already out there instead of dreaming up something new.
Sure, your button might look similar to another one, but who cares? Your audience members know that it’s a button, and they know what usually happens when they click one. They don’t have to figure that out. It’s one less thing for them to think about. Using a button with more affordance eliminates a barrier. And let’s face it, you’re competing with a lot of other noise out there (digital and physical). Why not help your subscribers get to your content – and to those delicious paninis – more easily?
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
Copyright © 2003 - 2012 Emma. All rights reserved.