By
February 14, 2012
Dear Email,
I fell in love with you at first sight! You opened and whole new world for me. You’re smart, well read and fun to be around. Falling in love with you was easy for me.
Solid (as a rock) ♫
For years our relationship has been solid and you’ve always been there with new ideas and perspectives which have added more value to my life. You’ve helped me plan some of the most important times of my life.
Some Kinda Wonderful ♫
We’ve done some pretty cool things together! Remember that Christmas you helped me shop and got everyone the perfect gift? Or how about that amazing vacation we planned together? You’ve never let me forget a birthday or anniversary and…
Reviewing the six key areas to improve your email marketing
It's hard to plan a route from A to B if you are not clear where you are now and even harder if you're not sure exactly where B is anyway. As a consultant, I will often use an audit or benchmark as an early stage to improve email communications strategy for a company.
I created this email benchmarking spreadsheet in collaboration with Dave Chaffey, to provide a fast and systematic method of evaluating the use of email marketing within a company, to enable answering the question of where is A and B? It provides the key questions that need to be considered within your email marketing strategy, broken down into:
1. Objectives and value
2. Evaluation
3. Email Communications strategy
4. Copy and design
5. Deliverability and permission
6. Governance
The health check is aimed at Marketing Directors,…
Email campaigns we can learn from
“…the eye, tends to be impatient,
craves the novel and is bored by repetition”
W. H. Auden
Effective email marketing engages recipients, ultimately leading to more sales by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
Customers would rather see a beautifully crafted email appear in their inbox than a bad one.
Big brands can have a slightly easier email marketing task than smaller brands - an email from Amazon, Barclays, ASOS, or John Lewis already carries with it an expectation of what you will receive.
So, it's unforgivable for a big brand to take customers for granted.
Abercrombie & Fitch’s Christmas email campaign
Here’s a snap shot of my inbox showing all Abercrombie emails received over December and January:
You will notice the central subject line theme is “The Sale”
From…
Do magic words exist or are they a copywriting myth?
I recently received a copywriting advice email from Yale University describing the ‘the most powerful words in the English Language’. Here they are:
1. You
2. Results
3. Health
4. Guarantee
5. Discover
6. Love
7. Proven
8. Safety
9. Save
10. New
Although I agree that these are powerful words, I doubt Yale really conducted any rigorous research – and if they did, it’s certainly not something that the University chooses to share on its official website.
What is interesting is how long these types of list have been "doing the rounds". It taps into the insatiable demand for instant solutions. Human nature finds the notion very appealing that all you need do is sprinkle a few magic words into your writing like fairy dust and, Hey Presto, an instant increase in sales pops out of the hat.
Using magic words in the right place in your copy and in the right order…
Email campaigns we like to learn from
I recently reviewed how ASOS does a great job of engaging their audience both through email and social media marketing. Here, I'm going to review one example of an email campaign I like, calling out what I think works well and not so well.
In the second part of 2011, ASOS seemed to make quite a few creative refinements to its email designs and this winter style campaign is a good example of the new approach.
Getting the creative balance right
Effective email design for a brand like ASOS needs to get the balance right between the visual appeal the brand offers with clear calls-to-action and offer. I think this creative gets this balance right:
Let's now go into some of the details:
The pre-header
Pre-headers are widely used in the US, but are not adopted so widely in the UK. This one is fairly…
My ideas on how to deal with unpredictability in email marketing in the year ahead
As your local Greek philosopher never tires of telling you, the only constant is change.
Many industry experts devote the occasional post or two in January to predicting how email marketing will develop this year.
Instead, I'd like to look at what we might do to better exploit or cope with the dynamic nature of the email and online marketing environment in 2012. Because change isn't always as predictable as we'd like it to be.
Please chime in with your own ideas!
1. Revisit the basics
Like every year, vendors and the media will regale us in 2012 with all sorts of clever things you can do with your email marketing. Clever things that can bring great results, such as shopping cart abandonment emails that pull in £250 in sales for each £1 invested.
Not everyone can access the necessary tools,…
5 actions to minimise the impact of an address change
In my last post I summarized 9 common headaches to watch for when you change email service provider. This time I'm drilling down into the first of these, guidance to manage changing your from email address.
This guidance is valid too for other occasions when you change your from email address. Such as a change in branding, company mergers and acquisitions, moving transaction emails from your eCommerce system to your marketing system, or simply sorting out some historical oddities in your identity.
Your from email details are made up of the from display name and from address, such as 'Acme Offer <
[email protected]>'. The display name is 'Acme Offer' and from email address
[email protected].
In this post I'm concentrating on deliverability issues connected with change of email address, rather than consideration of what makes effective from email information, as this is a subject…
By
January 5, 2012
6 personal resolutions that apply to all online marketers
Just before the New Year, I had the pleasure of participating in a Focus.com webinar with Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive and Stefan Eyram of ClickMail, regarding email marketing trends for 2012. Below are five resolutions for the coming year which either came directly from that webinar or were inspired by it. Thanks to Stefan and Andrew for the insight and inspiration for this post!
1 Stop talking like a rocket scientist
We keep telling people social media marketing isn’t rocket science and then we use words like “integration” which sounds exactly like what a rocket scientist would say! It’s not that the words or terms are inherently bad, it’s just that we assume people actually know what they mean.
What we should be focusing on is putting online marketing (regardless of the channel) into context for people. This means using a little more…
A simple way to compare the engagement of customers on email and social networks
In 2009, Dave Chaffey wrote a blog post on Smart Insights in which he introduced the concept of the EFT Ratio.
EFT stands for Email: Facebook: Twitter Ratio and, as an example, he used ASOS. Dave was explaining that, at the time, it showed how email gave a capacity to reach many more customers with tailored messages. It also showed how ASOS used Email for a combination of engagement and driving sales as shown by their current email signup page:
ASOS EFT ratio
I thought it would be interesting to see how this looked today since ASOS has been very active in social media marketing. This is how it looks:
2009 ASOS EFT was 100 Email : 8 Facebook : 1 Twitter
This was calculated from a total of two million…
Latest statistics reveal the importance of the primary inbox
We talk a lot about getting delivered into THE inbox. But the days of "one person one inbox" are long gone.
If you make it into my Gmail account, you join the 2,432 unopened mails filtered automatically into the bulk folder:
If you make it into my work account, however, it has only one other unopened email competing for attention:
Gulp.
So is the real challenge with email response about getting delivered to the right inbox?
Fact is, multiple email accounts are the norm. An April 2011 UK consumer survey revealed 65% using more than one email account.
There are several questions we need to ask here to get better email engagement:
Does it really matter which email address you get?
If it does, how do you make sure you get the right one?
Does it make sense to block certain…
