Apple iPad

A new day, a new platform

The iPad is not a laptop and although many have accused it as simply being an iPhone with elephantiasis, the iPad certainly isn’t a mobile or cell phone either. This is the start of a new platform in which users will consume content in a completely new way. It’s being labeled by some as ‘feet up’ technology’ which says it all really. The iPad is most likely to find itself on the sofa as a casual alternative to the laptop, which means it is likely to be used slightly differently to a laptop. This is where we’ll see the opportunities that this new platform brings us.

Content

We all know that Steve Jobs has refused to support Flash on iPhone or iPad but content opportunities are endless. Sky have already launched a mobile TV iPad application that means users can watch channels such as Sky Sports on their iPad as long as they have a Wifi or 3G connection. The 9.7 inch screen does pave the way for all sorts of great stuff, and although this example isn’t directly related to email marketing,  it does give a flavour of how things are changing and I would not be at all surprised to see video fully supported and working in emails in the next year or two, especially with email clients become more and more open to video content and the new technology that HTML 5 brings.

Email Rendering

If you’re already building your emails 100% to best practice guidelines, you have nothing to worry about. iPad renders emails with the Safari webkit rendering engine and if your emails are already rendering nicely in Safari, they’ll render fine in the ‘mail’ feature of the iPad. On the other hand, you need to test all of your emails and the way they render in all of the top email clients in the Safari browser on the iPad. The best ones to test to ensure that the majority of your audience don’t experience any issues or irregularities in rendering are Yahoo!, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail/Google Mail and AOL. Test these to death now and periodically test to ensure that email client changes and upgrades don’t break your emails. As always, when changes do happen in email clients and you have to amend your code, remember to roll-out the new HTML rules across all of your triggered activity too.

Are there any urgent changes that you need to make?

In short, the answer at the date of writing this is categorically ‘no’. iPad will make preview panes bigger and it will have a bearing on how your emails are interacted with in some scenarios, but you shouldn’t be tempted to make any changes to your creative unless ‘feet up’ devices end up dominating the market, and that will take years to happen, if ever.

The bottom line…

I would encourage all email marketers to get hold of an iPad and start testing. You need to see how your emails look on this new device and make sure that they are rendering correctly. Over the next few years we are going to see a lot of changes that will affect mobile, feet-up and computer-based email, so hold on tight because this really is just the beginning.

Well, if you are already building your emails 100% correctly, then you won’t have noticed any difference. If you haven’t been properly coding styles inline your HTML elements, then take note of the following:

If your image tags usually look something like this:

<img src=”http://www.url.com/images/imagename.jpg” height=”height” width=”width” border=”0″ />

Then you need to make sure they include the appended style in bold below, like this:

<img src=”http://www.url.com/images/imagename.jpg” height=”height” width=”width” border=”0″ style=”display:block” />

This fix prevents Gmail from adding 5 pixels (or so) padding around each image in your HTML. The same issue infamously caused massive problems for email marketers in 2006 when Windows Live Hotmail made changes to how they rendered email, particularly images and resulted in a lot of email developers scratching their heads.  It’s worth noting that you should always place your styles inline to prevent something like this from catching you out again in future.

Well, no. There aren’t actually, and I’m feeling a little bit guilty about teasing you into reading on, but although I’m not going to be revealing something all new, shiny and cutting edge, I do think that the following will help you to improve the performance of your email marketing creative.

Test

That’s it. Test. If you put the right elements of your email design to test, you can see the difference within one campaign. The challenge is in figuring out what to test, and what is likely to deliver the clearest insight and biggest improvement, quickest. I recently spoke about how to challenge your call to action buttons and text links to improve click-through rates for eCircle, and if you are generally happy with your overall design, this is a great place to start testing new ideas.

Layout is another great thing to try and a/b split test with. You don’t even have to have two completely separate layouts – just test the top two or three sections, because this is where you will generally win the most clicks and it’s this area that needs to work the hardest.

Lastly, another quick way to get your audience engaging with your emails a little bit more, is to make subtle image changes based on prospect data. For example, if you know the gender of each subscriber, you can tweak things for them accordingly so they’re likely to be more relevant for that group. So, if you’re promoting high-definition televisions as your main offer, why not have an image on the screen of something like a football match for males, and something else that’s likely to be more appealing for females. I’m not suggesting you stereotype – everyone’s different, and you’ll never capture everyone’s interest like this, but having a stab at what each prospect might be more likely to engage with is worth trying. Test it out, and let me know if you see any changes.

There you go guys, I don’t feel so bad now about the title now.

Currently, some companies are trying to make the most of making their email content, by making is shareable. They do this similarly to how most websites do this, by having a clear list of social networks that the content can be shared on. If you click on the ‘share’ button, you’re taken to your Facebook/Twitter/Digg etc and pre-populates your status-field with a link to the content and usually some text that can be changed before posting. Toys ‘R Us do this well:

Toys R Us Email Creative

Currently, 50% of content sharing on the web happens via email, so people do want to share content via email. If email does not become more shareable, then users will face obstacles, and these interrupt user experiences = users get frustrated and do something else, when they could be telling all their friends about your great new offer or latest product. That’s would be a real shame.

Thinking further ahead, how cool would it be to be able to share specific elements of email content through social networks with the click of a button? Food for thought?

The only aspect of the clients’ calls to action that I could find any real uplift in, was colour. The client made it quite clear that the colour of buttons and text links in their emails was not up for debate. They must remain the same colour as their website, which is red. After numerous tests, with green buttons versus red buttons, the green buttons actually drove over 8% more clicks. Needless to say, when I presented the results back to the client and they tested these in full in a live campaign, I hardly needed to convince them to allow an exception.

I’ve found that finding the right colour CTA’s for your company, varies from industry to industry, business to business. If you find brand & consistency obstacles in your path when testing calls to action, remember that your job is to try and interrupt someone that is reading through their inbox. Your job is more difficult than that of the website because of this, so try to positively challenge any resistance, ask for a small-scale test segment that will still give you a significant result and let the results speak for themselves.

Try it and let me know how you get on.

Example case study:

Let’s continue with the theme that i set in my first post – you work at a popular online electronics retail company. Let’s say your email marketing and CRM team consists of one data planner, a HTML & design resource (probably borrowed for a few hours from E-commerce), and you as the strategist. That’s it. You’re a three man dream team, I promise.

To set a bit more of a scene, you already have an ESP that you use to broadcast your emails and we’re not going to exceed your monthly allowance, so that can remain the same. You have a database of 80,000 e-mailable prospects and customers, with a proportion of lapsed customers that you’re struggling to reactivate. The majority are a mixture of regular openers and clickers, just openers and less engaged prospects. A complete mix of people to captivate. You have a poor open rate that’s around 20% on average, but your click-through rate is not too unhealthy at 5% (that’s 5% of the delivered volume clicking through). On average, 0.5% of that delivered volume convert into a sale. I’ve found that it is this very scenario that stops marketers challenging their email performance. Prospects are opening and clicking, not in their masses, and some are buying, so if it’s not broken, why fix it? If this sounds like your email marketing strategy, it is broken. Let’s work out what we can do with this data, and how we can make the most of it to optimize your email performance without spending a single extra penny.

Identify potential ideas based on current performance

We know what all of our prospects and customers are clicking on, but only to category level, and we know this because our data planner can download these reports from our ESP. We know how long ago they clicked, and what they clicked on. It turns out that approximately 50% of our database have engaged with us in the last eight weeks, so we have a large proportion of fresh engagement data. We can also see whether these clickers went on to buy something. Let’s assume that this is all of the intelligence we have If we can’t afford to be really clever with our targeting through dynamic email, surely we can do something with all of the engagement data we have? You bet we can.

Take a close look at your data and see where your opportunities lay

Sit down with your data planner, and get them to run counts for you, as in-depth as possible, and in this case it is down to category level. Let’s say we end up with something like the following:

• 50% haven’t engaged in the last eight weeks so they’re currently generic prospects we don’t know anything about
• 5% have bought something in the last eight weeks
• 5% have clicked on a generic discount offer banner, but not made a purchase
• 15% have clicked on something in the TV category, but not made a purchase
• 10% have clicked on something in kitchen appliances, but not made a purchase
• 5% have clicked on something in the camera category, but not made a purchase
• 5% have clicked on a sat-nav or in-car product, but not made a purchase
• 5% have clicked on various other categories

Figure out your targeting (the common sense bit)

The 5% of prospects that have clicked on ‘various other categories’, are going to go into the same pot as the non-engagers (50%). This is because at this stage, unraveling 5% of our engagement data is not the best use of our time when we’ve got bigger wins elsewhere. We’ll also put the 5% of prospects that have clicked on a generic offer banner in this pot too because tactical messages have driven them to click through in the past. Those three pots combined makes 60% of our mailable database. We’ll target these prospects with an aggressive, tactical email, with the main offer as the subject line, with bags of urgency. Hopefully this will get many of these users clicking and we’ll be able to classify them into a different category in future. The 5% that have bought something in the past five weeks are going to be rested – we don’t want to potentially re-market the same products that they’re just recently bought. N.B – it’s generally good practice not to mail customers that have purchased recently, but the length of time you rest them for depends on your product and your individual company. This leaves us with 35% of database that we know we can talk to more relevantly, and as we all know, relevance drives revenue.

We have the remaining 35% of prospects already segmented by the category they have clicked on last, so we’re going to send them all exactly the same email layout, populated with products and offers based on the category they last engaged with. For the subject line, we’ll mention their category and get a price or discount in there too, and if you have the technology, get their name in the subject line too. This always increases open rates in itself. Overall, this is our best guess at knowing what each prospect is interested in so we’re going present them with a proposition and products that we think they are genuinely interested in.

Implementation

You will have your email/web designer create one editable HTML template for this campaign. Using this template, he or she will simply change the products in the email to  those that are relevant to the category we have for the prospect. So we’ll end up with 5 HTML files, one tactical and four category-based. We’ll set up the five mailings with our ESP, hooked up to the five segments your data planner produced for you earlier and broadcast. We’ll do this same process every week for four weeks, then measure month-by-month, year-on-year and evaluate.

To conclude

Remember that this trial will cost you nothing but a little bit of time. You do need to give it four weeks or so to really give your prospects a chance to engage, conversion to increase, and for you to be able to report properly and convince marketing heads that this could work long-term. Once you’ve tried something like this in your company and seen the results, you’ll be amazed. Imagine if you could go fully dynamic. Hopefully once you’ve tried this and seen the results it’ll be much more plausible, as you’ll have something of a business case.

Give it a go, and let me know how you get on. Got a question? Use the comments box below and I’ll get back to you as soon as i can. Good luck!

Check that your main proposition is “above the fold”

If your main offer ends more than 250 pixels down the page, this is the first thing you should look to change. You should be aiming to get the header and main proposition in at this height, including your call to action. If you’re already achieving this, then make sure that any banners in this area are built in html, so text and images are separate. This ensures that your main offer appears in text, so that users that are blocking images by default still get to see your main offer.

Review your calls to action

Take a look at all of the links and buttons that you include in your email. You should only ever have one way of linking with text, and a maximum of two types of button. If you have any more than this, users will find it difficult to quickly understand what is clickable, and you’ll lose a lot of clicks. It also helps you pick up extra clicks where prospects very casually gaze over your email and click through, because they don’t have to think about where to click – it’s should be so plain obvious that it’s almost subconscious. Another good test is to gaze at your email creative onscreen so that it looks blurry, and if you can’t immediately identify where to click, fix this and your click-through rates will jump.

Challenge editorial copy and links

I think we all know that as carefully crafted your emails may be, they’re rarely read with the same passion and enthusiasm as you. Most prospects will skim-read and fast scroll, and if they don’t see something engaging in 7 seconds, they’ll go and do something else. That’s why it’s important to make sure that when you get your copy from the editorial or marketing team, you don’t just plonk it into the email. Read it and make sure that everything that you’ve been asked to make a link, is information-rich. The old classic click here isn’t good enough these days. When you skim-read a commercial email, i doubt you’re going to be tempted be click here. For example, let’s say we’re a clothing company, with a great offer to push on all t-shirts, and you are asked to write: “…and for this week only, we’ve got 10% off of all t-shirts“. If you make a slight change to the copy and extend the link, you can make this much stronger, e.g. “…and for this week only, get 10% off of all t-shirts“. In isolation, this seems very obvious, but things like this do get forgotten about when you’re trying to get a campaign out there quickly. A little bit of time goes a long way.

To conclude

If you are responsible for email design and html, it is your responsiblity to make sure that user experience and accessiblity are properly considered, and this does include copy. It’s in your best interest, because you’re likely to be in some way accountable for click-through rates. If you follow the tips about calls to action and hero offer promotion, it will pay off. Let me know how you get on!

For those of you that don’t know me, I’m an email marketing specialist from London, England. I’m also consulting businesses on mobile and online innovation, social media, and how these can be combined with email to produce great campaigns… hence the name, Innovative Email.

In a nutshell, I think in 2010 we will finally see the end of generic, single-minded and poorly targeted email. This is otherwise known as ‘tonnage email’. Marketing Directors are beginning to understand now, that just because email is very quick and low-cost doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable to blast their entire database with a single generic offer. Let’s say we all work at an electronic retailer in the online marketing team, and our MD says “trading is down, and the TV department is way off target. I want you to send an email to everyone with our best TV offer”. We all still hear things like this, but much less frequently, thank God.

What is the use in sending a prospect an email with a TV offer, if they have been clicking on Sat-nav links in your last email? What if that customer bought a TV from you in the last 12 months? Shouldn’t you be trying to cross-sell rather than sell them another TV? Better still, what if they’ve been searching for a camera on your website? Surely it would be better to acknowledge this and use those analytics to yours and your customer’s benefit? Consumers are starting to understand and expect to be contacted personally and with relevance. They expect companies to get to know them as an individual.

I bought an external hard drive from a popular online electronics company in November. They frequently send me email offers, but you would have thought that they would have at least excluded me from this mailing in late December:

Companies that fail to learn about their prospects and customers, and carefully use this priceless information will fall behind in 2010.