From Freshview - our favourite e-mail software company, comes this presentation about the future of e-mail design (and marketing).
And a quote from the notes that I will be using in my next few meetings:
Email isn’t dead, it’s just a bit fat.
There is much talk at the moment about e-mail formats for e-shots. If you are in the game creating them, the different ways e-mail clients read e-mails makes the job very difficult to create a standard.
Dave at Campaign Monitor, our e-mail tool of choice, has a call-to-arms regarding e-mail standards.
I for one am considering changing our e-mail newsletters to pure text, with more links to articles and the blog. At the moment, as you can see, 30% of the e-newsletters we sent in September were opened as HTML. A high percentage of the unopened ones must get read as text, otherwise surely people would unsubscribe? Out of those 339, only five people looked at the HTML version link on the website.
E-Consultancy has a small article about declining e-marketing read rates. The article indicates that it is the way people read your e-mails rather than whether they do or not, which is having the impact, with many people choosing to not show images in HTML (the key to measuring read rates).
Many people are shocked when I first show them what can actually be measured with an e-mail campaign where the HTML versions are being read. That said, the situation is the same as with web statistics. They are purely there to guide you to make a better e-shot - testing and adapting the way that you send them. (more…)
A surefire way of getting on someones nerves (especially mine) is to keep trying to sell (or market) to them when they don’t want to be sold (or marketed) to.
Bleedin’ common sense, isn’t it.
So, when I get an e-shot (again) from a company I (a) don’t want; and (b) have already unsubscribed from, it ticks me off.
(more…)
An article on Campaign Monitor - How Far Does Permission Stretch? - got me thinking about e-mail newsletters and how many companies waste new prospects by not following up.
I mean, have you ever subscribed to an e-mail newsletter on a website promising you articles or free tips and heard nothing for months, if at all?
If you have a website and you have bought into the whole permission marketing approach; if you promise something, you need to deliver, especially something as simple as a newsletter.
You have done the hard work encouraging someone to subscribe to your newsletter - yes, that’s the hard bit, getting someone to trust you up front. So, not delivering something you promised is not only very wasteful, it will lose you that trust pretty much straightaway. It’s like letting someone walking out of your shop without even talking to them.
I see, even now, subscriber lists growing on some websites that sit… waiting… waiting for that first e-mail. It’s like having a ready made list of sales prospects sitting on your desk becoming more and more irrelevant with every day that passes.
Would your Sales Director let you get away with that? I think not.
That’s according to new research from Emailcenter UK as found via E-Consultancy.
E-mail marketing campaigns sent out on a Wednesday are more successful than those sent on other days of the week.. although most British electronic marketers (almost 25%) deliver e-mails on Thursdays.
The data, posted on the Emailcenter Blog, does seem to miss out the weekend though.
Rubbish I know, but I read once that Sunday is best day for actual purchase click-throughs in the B2C market. I’d love to substantiate that but it was a long time ago…. sorry.
More slightly depressing reading (via Retail Bulletin) when it comes to people’s privacy on the web:
A study has revealed that 37% of Retailers are not complying with the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, more than 3 years after it became law in the UK in December 2003.
Perhaps these guys think that if they keep trying to sell their messages AT people, they will surrender into buying something?
This reminds way of using e-mail reminds me of Mrs. Doyle From Father Ted:
Ya will, ya will, ya will, won’t ya?
Prefer me a bit of Permission Marketing and Campaign Monitor!
Campaign Monitor have a great article about the de-construction and re-construction of an e-mail newsletter.
I have seen some shockers recently that don’t seem to be built for the user or for the potential way a user will end up seeing it.
Like this one for red nose day that I got through my Yahoo Email Account.
There is no way (apart form the ‘From’ and ‘Subject’) that I could know what this e-mail was. The header completely relied on imagery that didn’t display.
When it comes to e-mail marketing the only thing you can control is the flexibility of your design and the way you actually send it to account for the hundreds of different ways a user might end up seeing it.
A man has won a spam case in the UK reports Out-law.com (via. E-Consultancy).
Gordon Dick won a damages award of £750 plus expenses
against Transcom Internet Services after suing the ISP for sending
him a single email.
He took action under the Privacy and Electronic Communications
Regulations 2003, which allow private individuals to sue if they have
received damages as a result of a failure to comply with anti-spam
regulations.
He is also an electronic marketer and
non-executive Nominet director, so he knows his onions. He is only the second individual in
the UK to win in such a course of action, although it never actually went to trial.
He has launched his own website with anti-spam advice - Scotch Spam!
Another story on the out-law website from January quotes a study of the UK’s largest companies that found 31% of them
breaking anti-spam laws by sending marketing emails without either
prior consent or an existing customer relationship.
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got - that is unless people are getting bored with you.
It’s good to send expected e-mails as part of your marketing but there is also nothing wrong with sending in a cracking e-mail that is different but well worth opening. Some very special offer for example!
As Seth says,
Rotating your offers and your interactions maintains interest, surprise and makes your core offers more appealing.