Email marketing best practice - 4 Smart techniques to resend to your non-openers for your email campaigns
If at first you don’t succeed – try and try again. It’s a message that’s been drilled into us since childhood, but how well does it stack up against improving your email marketing?
For a long time it has been argued that resending emails to recipients that didn’t open the first time around could do more harm than good, but there is also a lot of evidence to suggest it can be an effective way to re-engage with your subscribers so long as you proceed with caution. Here are 4 simple, practical techniques that we have found effective.
1. Only resend the most important email campaigns
Suppose that every time a subscriber left one of your emails unopened, you resent it. Imagine how annoyed your subscriber would get. It probably wouldn’t be too long until they unsubscribed from all of your…
What are your recommended Email Marketing techniques?
That’s the question we posed in our recent email marketing tips competition. Thanks if you contributed a tip or shared the suggestions!
We had lots of great suggestions, so it’s a pity we don’t have a prize for all, but we have now selected 3 winners and there are 3 “highly commended” tips.
I asked our judges Chad White who offered up 3 copies of his new book Email Marketing Rules and Tim Watson, Email consultant at Zettasphere and regular Expert commentator on Smart Insights to each choose 3 tips and explain why they liked them. I then decided on a winning three based on the depth of the contributor’s insight and those who gave a specific example of a test.
Three winning Email marketing tips
Here are the “lucky winners”:
1. Alan Moir on Personalisation.
In one…
Understanding the pros and cons of Retina screens in email design
Children of the (higher) resolution - Every time I see an article or advert about Apple’s Retina Display, I have to force myself not to dismiss it as marketing guff and consider the relevancy. Let me explain.
As an email designer, devices with a Retina display are a pain. When I open an email I have lovingly crafted they make my pin-sharp graphics look a touch blurry, and that’s guaranteed to upset any designer.
In this article I look specifically at email design for retina displays, register for the free webinar with my colleague Darren for more insight on mobile design for Email.
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Dispelling some email marketing 'best practices'
In our email marketing campaigns, we are always looking to boost our open and clickthrough rates and the business outcomes we're looking to achieve. Following best practices can help here to avoid dumb mistakes like not having compelling headlines or clear calls-to-action. However, this contrarian infographic from Alchemyworx suggests many rules-of-thumb for email marketing are really just myths have developed and could be damaging our campaigns.
For example, it questions whether we should we send our emails every Thursday, Should we stop contacting inactive subscribers after six months or if we send too many emails then they are ignored?
'Actually, sending 4 emails per month rather than one doubles the likelihood of one email being opened"
'Though we know, it has to be targeted and personalised etc.
We like this classic infographic since…
The Top 10 world ranking email clients
If you're an email marketing specialist you'll almost certainly know Litmus for their awesome email analytics tool and great insights. We've featured them several times before, including this great infographic showing trends of Email client share. Here is the latest update from their Email client market share site which they update each month.
We would probably expect Apple to be dominating due to the surge of iOS mobile devices and growing popularity of Apple devices, though it's interesting to see that Outlook is still popular and it reminds us of the importance of testing the effectiveness of designs for Gmail on different clients. When interpreting these results, we need to bear in mind variation across desktop and mobile usage and demographics which Litmus have in their…
28 point pre-email send checklist
We are sure that you will already know many of these email marketing best practices, so let's collectively build it up to 40!
We shouldn't give our emails that six or 12 month car service, or cut corners as we send out emails all of the time. Email Monks, email marketing designers, have saved us some time writing that important check list before we 'press the send button' , breaking it into four sections - client compatiblity, email delivery setup, inbox preview and html open preview.
So let's avoid those simple email blunders that can be avoidable by reading their tips and it would be great to build this up!
…
An interview with Retail email specialist Dan Jak
There is a LOT written about best practices for email marketing, especially around creative and copy. Mark Brownlow has contributed many great posts to Smart Insights covering subject lines, email pre-headers and Email CTAs to name but 3. But there is far less written specifically about best practices for email marketing in retail ecommerce. The obvious exception is Chad White's Retail Email blog although Chad has diversified into more general email marketing advice with his new Email Marketing Rules book - we have a competition to win 3 copies running at the moment.
So, when I got chatting to Dan Jak in our LinkedIn group and discovered his experience on Email marketing I was keen to learn and share more. So in this interview we look at some retail-specific email marketing challenges, many of which apply more…
Surprisingly plain text often out performs HTML Emails
When it comes to email marketing, there’s only a few metrics that marketers really focus on: open rates and clickthroughs. Without positive levels of these, marketers often feel like they have wasted time and effort creating an email that no one has seen or interacted with, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
This is why marketers are constantly trying to find ways to improve on their email marketing campaigns in the hope that something – be it a subject line, content piece, image choice or header wording – will make a difference.
But something that marketers generally don’t seem to change is the format of their email. Comfortable in the flashy world of HTML email design, marketers may be missing one very important point – the plain-text email usually performs better.
Which has better deliverability?
The plain-text vs. HTML debate is one that has been underway…
The latest tactics showing why Email marketing is "alive and well"
If you think about innovation, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t marketing, probably you are thinking of the latest gadgets, self-driving cars and drones. But in the quickly-evolving marketing world a lot has changed in the way brands and consumers communicate. With a trusted and solid channel like email marketing, where does the real innovation takes place?
Email is mature, but not outgrown
Email marketing is known to be a trusted and versatile marketing channel. In the Gartner Digital Marketing Hype cycle published last July places it has moved beyond 'the slope of Enlightenment' and on emerged onto the 'Plateau of productivity'.
Connected marketing concepts that we also find in this graph are still being hyped, meaning that it will take at least 2 – 5 years before marketers realistically will be getting the most out of these channels, if they…
A review comparing different technical solutions for Ecommerce integration with behavioural email marketing
Triggered messaging is a rapidly growing part of marketing with extremely good ROI. It's about delivering business messages that are personalized and near-real time, resulting in very good engagement. All email marketers should be doing this if they're not already!
My previous post in this series explained when triggered messages were effective, for example for cart abandonment and onboarding sequences. This follow-up is a brief summary of the three main implementation strategies for triggered emails, using:
1. Just your E-commerce system.
2. Just your ESP.
3. A real-time marketing system (RTMS).
Using just your Ecommerce system
Many Ecommerce systems can send a few types of triggered messages, for example 'purchase complete' and 'cart abandonment, either natively or using third-party plug-ins. (There are lots of these, for example Abandon Carts Alert Pro for Magento and EDD Abandon…
