The Email Experience
Despite the low cost and high return that email marketing
provides businesses, even the savviest Web
marketers struggle to find their way through email’s
complicated digital maze and reach the rewards
that lay beyond. From getting messages into the
inbox (or out of the spam folder) to getting recipients
to read, click and take other measurable action —
today’s email experience deserves greater attention.
The problem today is that the obstacles within the email
channel are continually increasing (and expanding) —
from more stringent rules at the ISP level to changing
consumer behaviors and preferences. Fortunately, there
are as many answers and solutions emerging as there are
existing opportunities.
End-Users & Email
Email recipients, the customers or clients (and
prospects) that in great part drive the success of enterprises,
still rely heavily on email and will likely continue
to do so — despite frequent misuse or overuse by email
marketers. In fact, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to
receive marketing via email and, here’s the part that may
surprise you, there’s no close second place.
ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey — the
14th report in the company’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers
series — asked almost 1,500 U.S. online consumers
(age 15 and up) about how they prefer to get permissionbased
marketing messages. A stunning 77 percent indicated
email, which is far more than all other channels in
the survey. Social media, despite its hype, barely even
makes an appearance, indicating that even as consumers
Like and Follow brands on Facebook and Twitter, it’s definitely
not how or where they want to be contacted. In
fact, only 4 percent of respondents said Facebook is their
preferred way to receive promotional messages and only 1
percent said Twitter (see sidebar image from ExactTarget).
Investing in Email
Email has worked in the past, it works now and it will work in the future. In fact, many marketing departments are fine-tuning their strategies to accommodate their email hungry users. The “2012 Marketing Trends” study from StrongMail found that 60 percent of respondents planned to increase their email marketing budgets this year. This is far from solely a North American trend. According to an e-marketing outlook for 2012, called “Gearing up for Growth” and conducted by Octane Marketing, as many as 35 percent of those interviewed in India wanted to increase their email marketing.
Email is the Answer
To accommodate marketers increasing interest in, and use
of this channel, email marketing service providers (ESPs)
are innovating at a feverish pace, adopting the most sophisticated
technologies and integrating with third-party
platforms that provide businesses with more meaningful
insights and features. Yet despite all these useful technology
developments in the past 24-36 months, marketing
through this channel can still be difficult to master.
In this edition of Website Magazine, explore how focusing
on mobile-email design, enhancing campaigns
with software integrations and leveraging analytics provide
a viable shortcut to navigate the email marketing
experience maze.
A Mobile Mindset/h3>
From the dinner table and the nightstand to cars and
trains, our mobile devices are always within reach and
can always be used to access email, text messages, social
media networks and more. So, it’s not surprising that a
study by ReturnPath shows that year-over-year (March
2011 – March 2012) email opens on mobile devices grew
82.4 percent and are on track to surpass both desktop and
webmail email views.
This makes the inbox, literally, a moving target. To hit
it, marketers must adjust their tactics, both in design and
in content (see The Golden Rules sidebar), accordingly.
“This is especially important today when we have to
fight for every second of attention from our subscribers
who probably read emails on the go,” said Magdalena
Pietras, GetResponse’s online marketing manager. “If
they can’t read them, it’s highly unlikely they will check
back later when they’re at their computer.”
Companies like GetReponse, an email marketing
service, have recognized the importance of mobile and
have developed a number of functionalities to help their
clients optimize their email marketing campaigns for mobile
devices. Two prominent features are GetResponse’s
Inbox Preview and Mobile Ready Templates feature.
“Inbox Preview helps our clients preview the designs
of their emails in various email [channels] before they
hit send,” said Pietras. “This means that our clients can
now see what their newsletters will look like, not only on
Web and desktop, but also on smartphones and tablets
(iPhone, Android phones and iPad 2). With Inbox Preview,
our customers can be sure that their emails display
correctly and are readable [across channels].”
The company’s second feature, aforementioned, is its
Mobile Ready Templates.
“Our customers can now use mobile-ready templates,
so they can send fully optimized email campaigns quickly
and without any need for mobile optimization training,”
said Pietras. “They can make any template one-off and
unique; adjust every photo and image to best expose its quality with the ultimate drag-and-drop editor and its limitless
options.”
For those not using these features, consider design
best practices that Website Magazine uses, as well. Our
long-time senior designer, Jesse Erbach, helps our cause
by thinking mobile first.
“Basically, when designing for mobile, keep everything
percentile based, that way it resizes by screen size,” said Erbach.
“Also, make sure you have a grid with columns that
facilitate the design, meaning that you have to start your design
small and then work out from there. It’s easier to start
small, and the grid system allows you do that. Section off a
particular piece of content and decide where it falls.”
Like in most design, a designer needs to determine
where they want their user to go, but in mobile, the lack
of screen real estate can make it difficult. Using appropriate
colors and page structure can help, as can attention-
grabbing call-to-action buttons.
“A call-to-action should always stand out, but on the
mobile device it’s important to translate what the user is
going to do in a limited space,” said Erbach. “You should explain
what it is you want the user to do, but not in a way that
takes up the viewable space on their device. One way is to
use icons that explain the action, instead of using copy, that
way they get to convey an idea in a small amount of space.”
Mobile optimized emails also need to consider color
and font use.
“Font size should be relative in your design,” said Erbach.
“Meaning the font size is dependent on the screen
size. As far as what relation to use, obviously you don’t
want your users to strain, but there is no catch all for particular
font size.”
Color usage must also be considered. When it comes to
colors, most designers use color theory as a way of determining
what a user might see, a way of color psychology.
For example, many fast food chains pair red and yellow
together, because this combination is said to stimulate
hunger.
“Never use colors that are so strong that it’s going to
blind a user,” said Erbach. “[Additionally,] certain color
combos can destroy someone’s eye site like saturated blue
on saturated red, but that’s not mobile specific.”
Whether it's mobile or desktop, businesses want the
most bang for its buck. Plenty of email service providers
are turning to integrations to meet this demand.
Enhancing Email with Integrations
Email service providers give marketers and businesses a
solid foundation that they can use to run their email
campaigns, but simply using these services as a standalone
product means they’re probably not being used to
their full potential.
Even today, email is one of, if not the biggest drivers of
traffic and conversions for the majority of Web businesses.
The best way for marketers to capitalize on this is to integrate
an email marketing service with the other products
or applications they use to collect and manage data.
Businesses should look at where they are getting data
about customers from and how these customers are interacting
with the company.
“The more of that data that can be put into an email
marketing service, the more opportunities you have to
trigger campaigns, use it to personalize information in
campaigns or create whole new campaigns,” said Paul
Turnbull, product marketing manager at Campaigner.
Thus, the most obvious place to start looking to integrate
an email marketing service is with a customer relationship
management (CRM) solution, which is a
natural fit with email marketing services, as it can provide
(presumably) up-to-date information about customers
and leads. Once email and CRM data are
combined, businesses can begin to deduce patterns in its
customer base, such as significant geographic groups.
Then, this information can be used to develop and create
campaigns, segment more useful lists and improve
targeting. In reality, email marketing is often the most
cost-effective way to use CRM data.
“There would be a lot of advantages to synchronizing
[your CRM] with an email marketing management platform,”
said Turnbull, whose company, along with many
others, integrates with Salesforce.com, one of the most
popular CRMs available. “An email marketing product
can even inherently get better deliverability sometimes
when sent through a generic CRM or hosting solution.
So, you benefit from the reputational gains, and you’re
going to get the tracking stats back and see who is reading
emails, which you wouldn’t get if you just started
blasting it out manually.”
Of course, email marketing services can be integrated
into a number of different solutions beyond just a company’s CRM tool. One popular method is for retailers to
merge their email service with their e-commerce software,
such as Magento, 3dcart, Volusion, Listrak, DemandWare
and more. However, there are many other options for a variety
of businesses, not just online retailers.
“Really, anything that can get you data,” Turnbull explains.
“So, if you’re using survey sites or you have online
forms that you’re capturing information from, those
can either directly or indirectly feed into your email marketing
product.”
This can include email deliverability services like Return
Path, gamification and rewards platforms like Fanplayr,
online form creators like Wufoo, payment
processors like Amazon Payments and even content management
systems like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.
But since it is data that these Web professionals are
after, they need to look no further than good old-fashioned
analytics platforms. Tools like Google Analytics or
Hubspot allow marketers to put tracking codes in their
email campaign links to get an accurate idea of how
many visits, conversions and sales their campaigns generate.
These statistics can be accessed from the analytics
dashboards or in the email service providers’ campaign
reports, so that customers can see campaign results and
check their return on investment (ROI) from within the
email application. That is, as long as they know what to
look for.
Email Analytics
The only way to measure the ROI of an email marketing
campaign is to monitor performance down to the individual
message level. Email analytics, as with any other
channel, provide marketers with valuable insights into
the successes and failures of their campaign creative or
subscriber list (in addition to the sending mechanics of
the optimal hour or day). This is why it is important to
understand how each metric can be leveraged to better
optimize everything from subject lines to sender lists.
For professionals who have recently started testing out
the email marketing waters, there are a few metrics that
they should undoubtedly be aware of
— with the most important one being
open rate. An email’s open rate measures
the number of emails opened
against the number of emails that were
delivered. A high open rate is a good
sign because it shows that a message
was not only delivered to the intended
recipients, but that the email’s subject
line was also enticing enough to
receive an open. That being said, marketers should keep in mind that an opened email doesn’t necessarily
mean that the recipient engaged with the message.
As such, open rates are really just the tip of the iceberg in
terms of metrics that marketers should be paying attention
to, according to Turnbull.
Actually, other metrics, such as click-through rates
and conversion rates, can be a much better indicator of
an email campaign’s success. While click-through rates
measure the percentage of people that click on a link
within a message, conversion rates track the percentage
of people who complete a specific action that was requested
from the sender, such as purchasing a product or
downloading a whitepaper. These metrics are especially
valuable when marketers set up A/B tests to see which
message performs better. For example, a marketer could
create two messages to test if a red call-to-action button
garners more conversions than a blue button, or if a free
shipping promotion drives more click-throughs than a
15 percent off coupon.
Once a marketer has a firm grasp on the most important
email metrics (for a Master List of Email Metrics
to Monitor, visit https://wsm.co/SS5hlK), they
should take their campaigns a step further by segmenting
their sender lists with RFM (recency, frequency and
monetary value) metrics. RFM measures the recency of
customers (when was the last time they made a purchase),
the frequency of customers (how often they
make purchases) and the monetary value of customers
(how much they spend). Marketers can apply RFM
metrics to their email campaigns in order to segment
subscribers based on engagement and purchase history.
By targeting customers based on this data, marketers
can launch campaigns to reward customers that have a
higher lifetime value with promotional or VIP messages,
while also reaching out to inactive subscribers
through re-engagement campaigns.
Regardless of the metric, marketers should make it a
priority to analyze email data so that they can optimize
their messages for better performance and inevitably a
better ROI. And at the end of the day, email is still the
king of marketing, and with every message comes a metric,
a design, a survey — you name it — that can certainly
be improved upon.
Enjoy the Email Experience
There are many dead ends that Web workers can reach in the email marketing maze. Fortunately, there are even a greater number of ground-breaking solutions to turn to. But to truly find success, marketers must actively participate in this channel by monitoring and reacting to trends, analytics and integrations.


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