Some practical tips for email and web copywriting
Chunking is breaking your copy up into easily scannable paragraphs. Chunking is more effective for your online readers, here’s why…
This is how non-chunked copy looks to your readers
It’s a mountain to climb…
This is how chunked copy looks
I can manage this!
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote the definitive study showing that most users don’t read online, they scan. Until recently you had to read his classic 1997! study, but now these sketches give better proof.
Thanks, to Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports for saying we could share the sketches from his original copywriting tip on Smart Insights.
More chunking tips
To add to Mark's original, some tips that I’d add to make your chunking in email marketing more effective are that:
The first 2-3 words matter most. As a user scans a web page or…
Can email marketers learn from how social media marketing is evaluated?
In a recent article on evaluating social media, Jay Baer argues that our obsession with high-visibility numbers like "Followers" or "Likes" leads us to make false assumptions and wrong marketing moves.
At this point, some email marketers might feel the urge to smirk and point fingers at the supposed superficiality of their social media colleagues. But those same colleagues would silence the laughter with two words: open rates.
The metrics debate would then get out of hand, forcing the email marketer to pull out the big one: R-O-I.
Any self-respecting article on "why do email marketing?" doesn't take long to mention surveys showing the estimated ROI of email as somewhere north of 4000%.
This focus on profits and costs is admirable. But does our ROI obsession properly reflect email's value? And does it also lead to less-than-ideal decisions?
I believe the answers are…
Four tips to get better quality copywriting for less
There are certain things in life that we think of as free even if they aren’t.
Water – turn on a tap and out it comes
Motorways – drive as far as you like whenever you feel like it
Web content –it doesn’t take long to bash a few words out
Yet the fact is, that every piece of copy you commission is a cost that comes straight out of the bottom line.
There are seen and unseen costs. The seen cost is what you pay your copywriter to create the words and the web developer to upload it. The unseen cost is your management time of briefing it out and approving it. Every revision costs more time and money. Cut that time and you’ll cut the expense.
Take a look at this example of a typical retail site...
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5 areas of B2B email marketing to review
Email is in decline with the next generation of business professionals more likely to rely on SMS and social network messaging. Yet, most B2B companies still use email-based newsletters as a primary way of attempting to communicate with and engaging customers and prospects.
Email statistics
A recent Forrester report titled ‘How US Marketer’s use email’ heaped further concern on business use of email by summarizing:
6 in 10 B2B companies are keeping their marketing spend flat in 2011
71% use email to communicate with customers and prospects on a regular basis
33 % don’t routinely remove bad email addresses from databases
43% of B2B marketers think email will become more important to their marketing activity
(more…)…
Part 2 in Tim Watson's Email Delivery improvement series
You might think your delivery rate is a measure of deliverability... That would be a reasonable assumption, when you see the measure in your reports. Confusing, yes?! So, in this, part 2 of my three part series, I will show how you can monitor your deliverability. In Part 1, I covered the criteria ISPs use to filter email.
The delivery rate as provided by email marketing tools is the percentage of emails that didn't bounce. If you are emailing at least weekly to each email address on your customer base and you have good list hygiene practices in place then your delivery rate should be over 98%, that is less than 2% of emails sent are bounced.
But delivery rate isn't the same as inbox delivery, ReturnPath have recently reported an average inbox placement as low 88%, even when the mailer has a…
How to approach content production for your emails
Last time out, I suggested four reasons why you might add content elements to your traditional, "promotional" (retail) emails.
The trouble with this kind of advice is it sounds great in theory, but what about the "how" part, where can we find this content is the challenge for most?
How do you produce content that is useful, engaging and/or entertaining? And how do you do that when budgets are tight and your time is limited?
Let's start with four general guidelines, before looking at some specific ideas.
Producing content: four broad guidelines
1. Recycle
Many people are intimidated by the prospect of producing copious quantities of new content...but you don't have to.
(more…)…
A reminder to dive deeper into your email testing results
Split testing of email campaigns is a great way to learn and improve your results. Testing works by changing particular campaign elements, sending both the orignal (control) and new version (treatment) and then measuring the difference in results.
However test results can be ruined when there are additional factors that impact one test cell's results but not the other test cells. When this happens you can pick the wrong winner and end up decreasing campaign performance and revenue.
I was recently running a test and was hit by an external factor that without correction would have meant wrong conclusions were reached.
When diving into the results of one test cell I observed that one email address had clicked five times on every single link in the email. Upon investigation it turned out these clicks were not clicks from a human but clicks by a…
For the past couple of years I've enjoyed checking out the annual Email Marketing Look book from Chad White of the Retail Email Marketing blog. This year it's part of Responsys, but still looks great and I think will inspire email marketers at different levels, for example, how to use Email marketing to...
Build a brand and develop relationships
Personalise through contextual or behavioural emails
Support different devices and platforms - support for mobile and tablet devices are to the fore in this years examples - important given the evidence of the increased importance of mobile email reading/scanning.
The only disappointment was examples of social media integration were a bit thin.
You can download the LookBook for the full-set, here is my selection of what inspired me most:
Nike UK Enewsletter which gets the Sell-Inform-Entertain balance right
Volvo UK email with responsive design…
Mobile email marketing popularity statistics
Thanks to Mark Brownlow to alerting us to this via Twitter. As Mark says "However you measure it, mobile email is growing fast". I thought I'd share the chart since it persuasively makes the case that your email design should work on mobile and you should think about what you're trying achieve through the communications - creating awareness and encouraging later action become more important.
% Emails opened on different access platforms 2011
The source of the data is Sydney-based Email Service provider Campaign Monitor - it's based on 3 billion emails delivered for it's clients in 2011.
% Emails opened on different mobile platforms
The Campaign Monitor data also shows data for different mobile platforms:
There's a clear message here - iOS dominates, so ensure your…
Part 1 How content can help you succeed in the inbox
A lot of retailers are pretty good at "doing email marketing right".
A nice subject line, nice offer, nice call to action, nice numbers in your campaign reports.
The problem is that an awful lot of other people are competing for the reader's attention. And a lot of them are also "doing things right".
Some senders are lucky to have the right kind of brand, loyalty and pricing structure to glibly ignore such competitive worries.
Many do not.
And the problem with "functional optimization" is it can be replicated.
As competitive pressures rise, a common response is to discount more, shout louder and shout more often as we seek to grab as much attention as we can in the inbox gold rush.
It's tough going.
There are various alternative solutions to this problem, not least the switch to behavior-based, trigger emails, but one option is to look…
