Dynamite! Dynamic Design Is Your Next Email Marketing Best Practice

You’ve heard of dynamic content, but what about dynamic design? To keep up with email marketing best practices, you’d better add dynamic design to your list! We’ll tell you why in the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer.

If your demographic is aged, your creative is tired, or you’re noticing signs of list fatigue, definitely think about a redesign. This article on dynamic design will help get you started, with tips for making sure it’s a dynamic design, one that will enable more one-to-one marketing, and will move your forward, not keep you stuck in the same old way of doing things.

Read the article on dynamic email design, and be ready to add that toolset to your email marketing best practices.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Be Targeted and Specific in Every Little Detail

You’ve seen countless references to being relevant and targeted as an email marketing best practice. Do we always know what that means?

When I talk to clients about being targeted and specific in their messaging to their prospects and customers, I use this favorite example: If I tell you to picture a car, you could picture any type and color of car. I have no idea what you’re picturing. But if I tell you to picture a red convertible, I have a pretty good idea what you’re envisioning.

When we are telling our story via email marketing, our messaging needs to be specific and targeted, in order to get the result we want. The more vague we are, the less focused the message we try to give to our audience.

This is true for every element of your email campaign or newsletter, not just the words. This applies to your links and graphics too. For example, see this ExactTarget blog on the placement of social media icons within an email newsletter.

When they tested having the ShareThis link at the top of the newsletter vs. right after an article, they found they had a 42% increase in click throughs with the latter. That makes sense. That is targeted. Here’s how:

The ShareThis link at the top of the newsletter is essentially saying “share this email newsletter.” But the recipient hasn’t even seen the content yet, so how do they know they want to share it? And sharing the whole newsletter isn’t very targeted. Plus, by the time they’ve scrolled down to see the content, they’re not likely to even remember seeing the ShareThis link, nor to scroll back up to use it.

But placing the ShareThis link just after the article makes sense. Then you’re asking them to share this specific content, and because they just read it, they are more likely to act on it.

This is a little thing but a big thing at the same time. Where you place your buttons and linked text is every bit as important as what they say, the colors you choose, and what you link to. Like this example listed above, you must test to find out. But you can refine your testing if you think targeted first, and if you think like the recipient, not like the marketer.

Would you like a review of your current email marketing template to ensure you’re adhering to email marketing best practices? We’d be glad to take a look and give you feedback. Simply contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

Get some email design peace of mind! Download email solutions provider ExactTarget’s new email design checklist and make sure your email design works on screen, in the inbox, and no matter the email client. From brand to engagement to response, it’s a handy one pager you can review while designing and then refining your next email campaign.

Plus there’s a quick little reminder about the order in which someone views your email and tips for improving each component:

1.    From name
2.    Subject line
3.    Preview pane
4.    Opened email
5.    Full email

Download the one-age email design checklist from email solutions provider ExactTarget here and feel free to contact us if you want some input on your email design at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

…including email design.

With a list like that, you can see why we as an email marketing vendor keep talking about all the moving parts. Even your email design has loads of parts to pay attention to and modify for best email marketing results. The challenge is, marketers are often at the mercy of their designers to do the email design, and it might look great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work great, i.e. translate into email marketing ROI.

Now Lyris has a guide that can help. The paper called “Email Design No-No’s Guide for Non-Designers” includes the top 10 things both you and your designer need to know about email design. Don’t worry, it’s not complicated information. It will help you and your designer avoid the all-too-common trap of approaching email design like print design.

And don’t think it’s going to be blue works better than green. This guide goes into just enough depth to help you get what you need from your designer, and even gives you some input into the parts you control, like the email address and From line.

Download this guide to email best practices in design.

My brain has defrosted just enough to impart the following observations:

An recurring theme here in Miami is how to best reduce the anxiety and friction caused by asking people for information.  Ask a web visitor for their email address or other details and they get their back up.  So the zillion yen question is, how to build the ideal email and landing page?  

An email or landing page that reduces the (often reasonable) concerns that people have when they give out information over the internet is what is needed.  While there is no magic bullet to solve this problem, there are many things one can do.

As an example,  if your landing page says ‘I won’t sell or share your information’ right next to the area where you’re asking for information, a whopping 66% of your visitors will be more likely to share their contact details.

More on this important topic later.

Another day at the Email Summit and another great certification course led by the dynamic Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. Today was the Email Messaging Optimization Professional Certification and as if I didn’t have enough to do as a result of what we covered in yesterday’s course, I now have more insight into how to optimize the ‘email capture to landing page conversion’ process. The idea of looking at email marketing as a science is not new but having someone like Dr McGlaughlin and the rest of the MarketingExperiments group provide these types of programs can really open even the most seasoned veteran’s eyes. Throughout the day there were many little tidbits of information, any of which alone could make a big difference in your email marketing ROI.

Today’s course was broken into three areas:

1)      Optimizing Email Capture

2)      Optimizing Open Rate and Clickthrough

3)      Optimizing Landing Pages

And although they are each extremely important (the chain is as strong as the weakest link), the formula presented today states:

Email capture < Open Rate < Click Through < Landing Page

Again, this is skimming the surface and, like yesterday, I strongly urge anyone involved in email marketing to take this course as well: you  won’t regret it.

Just as emails render differently in different email clients (which our next issue of the ClickMail Marketer will touch on), they look different depending on the mobile device too.

Email marketing is no longer about delivering emails just to the desktop or laptop. Now it’s imperative to consider the handheld too. Your audience won’t necessarily read everything on their mobile device, but they will make a decision about whether or not they want to read it later when back in front of their computer.

Other things they will want to read while out and about. For example, I read text only email newsletters on my mobile phone while waiting in line or for a meeting to start, but I save the html email newsletters to read on my laptop because they’re essentially impossible to read with all the messy code that shows up on that little screen.

Email design and email copywriting for mobile isn’t any more straightforward than email design for multiple email clients: There’s a lot to know, and your best bet is to figure out your audience’s preferences, the common ground you can find between the different devices, and test, test, test. Trust me, if you could find one simple answer by Googling this topic, I’d tell you about it. Instead, we offer up some resources to help get you started on figuring this out:

1. Email Marketing Reports offers 19 links to articles and blog posts about email design and email copywriting for mobile.

2. Pivotal Veracity released a mobile solution in January, 2008 that lets you see how email renders for over 85% of the global mobile market, with and without images, and on different size screens. They also offer best practice webinars on mobile email.

3. ClickMail Marketing is a Pivotal Veracity partner, and an email marketing company committed to staying on top of all the moving pieces of email marketing. Feel free to reach out to us at with questions about email design and email copywriting for mobile.

You can maintain your email marketing ROI and make money with mobile. What you can’t do is ignore mobile any longer.

A fascinating bit of information on email image blocking can be found on page six of MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide:

“In the version with blocked images, we see a higher percentage reading the entire headline instead of scanning and skipping down, which appears to be related to the pull of the image below. When that image is removed, people spend a bit more time reading. That underscores the power and danger of compelling images – they can engage and attract the user’s attention, but they may be stealing it from a key piece of content.”

Wow: who would have thought that image blocking could actually be a good thing!

It all comes down to content. In the end, what does it take to get a user to open your email, click through, and buy? An image can engage, yes, but you still need a message to drive an action.

Most email viewers have images suppressed by default; and users don’t bother to change the setting. That means all that time spent deliberating over which picture to use, all the money spent on that cool stock photo from Getty Images, all the care that went into that stellar product shot of your newest doohickey could well be for naught.

A 14-page excerpt from the MarketingSherpa guide is available for download here.

The article is easy to read with plenty of samples to illustrate his points. It’s a little scary too, I confess. Even as a seasoned email marketer, I’m constantly amazed at how different results can be in different email clients! This article illustrates that point really well.

It’s also yet another reminder that the only way to ensure your emails look and act the way you intend them to once you send your email marketing campaign is to test, test and test.

Think of it this way: If you don’t test, you don’t need to worry about your email marketing ROI, because there won’t be any to speak of or point to when it’s time to argue for next year’s budget!

It is a truism that for many companies, the email marketing department is either under-staffed or under-trained. Email marketing therefore tends to be a job that people fall into rather than train for and seek out.

But part of our task as an email marketing service provider is to educate. Hence this blog, and our newly launched email newsletter. And our recent whitepaper.  After the jump, an excerpt from the whitepaper on avoiding tags that invite disaster…

Below is a snippet from the whitepaper, illustrating a critical and often overlooked aspect of email marketing and design: email html is not the same as the html you use for a Web site. If your email marketing design is built as if it’s a Web page, be careful.

For example, there are several tags you want to avoid in your email design because they don’t function in all email clients. Some will even get your email flagged as spam or kept out by an ISP. These tags can affect rendering, but really your first goal is to get your email delivered, so just don’t use them. The risky tags are:

• <Body> elements meaning background color on a page or setting page margins because it’s ripped out in Web clients: the open and close body tags are ripped out
• Page margins “0″
• Background images, whether for the page, a table, a cell; none of these are supported. You can use background colors for tables and cells but not images
• Layers are a fun way to control some functionality as well as layout, but they don’t work in email, so don’t use them
• Rollovers, at mouse state; these don’t work because they’re dictated with JavaScript, which you’re not using in your email, remember?
• Forms <form method=”get || post” action://…….>; if you have a post or even a get form method, it won’t work

For more email marketing and design information, download the whitepaper.