The Whitelist

Email Marketing Remains ROI King

A recent article by Ken Magill confirms what we at ClickMail Marketing have been preaching (ah, sweet confirmation): that is, that email marketing is “returning vastly more for every dollar spent on it this year than every other marketing channel,” according to the Direct Marketing Association’s just-released Power of Direct economic impact study.

Specifically, email marketing is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it this year, according to the DMA. When compared to other marketing channels, the ROI of email marketing is unsurpassed. Direct mail catalogs have a ROI of just $7.30, while internet channels see quite a bit more, but not as much as email: internet search has a return of $22.24, Internet display advertising sees a return of $19.72 and mobile returns just a bit more than direct mail: $10.51.

For those of us in email marketing, it’s not a surprise to read the DMA’s report that internet marketing will greatly surpass direct mail in 2016, by over $250 billion of conversions. It’s predicted that internet marketing will result in $970.3 billion of sales in 2016 compared to direct mail’s $724.1 billion.

Even though some portend the downfall of email, largely due to a decrease from its ROI high in 2006, an estimated $52.23 for every dollar, it’s still a very viable marketing channel, especially when email’s reach is expanded to include mobile.  As more users convert to smartphones and tablets, and utilize corresponding mobile applications to check email and perform transactions, mobile ROI is only going to climb.

As we see the rise in mobile marketing, it’s important to get a jump on the trend and ensure that your emails are optimized for the mobile landscape. For even more information on how to “mobilize” your emails, see our recent blog post on making your emails mobile.

Experiment with Mobile Testing for Increased Email Deliverability

Revisiting a Marketing Profs article from this past summer reminded me that as an email marketer, you have a wealth of email deliverability data at your fingertips. But are you looking at it?

As mobile usage increases, your email marketing best practices should include knowing the demographic makeup of your customer, how your customers interact with your brand, and what devices they use to browse your website.  Are your emails “mobilized” for optimized for mobile viewing? For more on making your emails mobilized, see our recent blog post.

Another data point to examine is email-deliverability patterns on mobile devices. By viewing deliverability through the “mobile lens,” email marketers can start to target ideal dates to launch campaigns, and deliver emails during the time of day with the highest level of mobile usage. Examining this data and using it effectively can ensure high mobile email engagement and high deliverability.

The Marketing Profs article compares delivery data by day with mobile usage over the span of three months and found that Sunday had the highest consistent mobile usage. Their findings also show potentially surprisingly strong mobile engagement starting at 3:00 AM (from the insomniacs?) with an increase and ultimate peak at 8:00 AM.

Though mobile usage remains relatively high from the 8:00 AM peak throughout the day, the overall volume of email campaigns declines, so this daytime period could be ripe for email marketing and email deliverability. When considering factors that contribute to email deliverability, consider experimenting with different times and days (particularly Sundays). Let us know your results!

Mobilizing your Emails via a Mobile Mentality

As email marketers, we know you strategize your content across a variety of platforms, and you mobilize your resources to do the most with what you have. But today, though we’re talking about mobilizing, we don’t mean “to assemble or organize, to prepare, as for readiness,” which is our current dictionary’s definition of the term. Trust us, in five years, there will be another entry in Miriam-Webster’s, or at least the email marketing bible. And it will read something like the following:

Mobilize: To create a streamlined or otherwise mobile-friendly version of your email, website, or other internet content, so that your smartphone-users can see your content the way it’s meant to be viewed.

If you haven’t thought about making your content mobile yet, now is the time. If your emails don’t render effectively on a smartphone, you run the risk of not only having a bad user experience and ignored email, but damaging your brand as well.

If a specific template for mobile versions isn’t enabled in your ESP, create a mobile-friendly HTML template to ensure it’s still viewable on a desktop computer, a tablet device (e.g., an iPad or Android tablet) or smartphone.

In addition to general appearance, you also should think about what you’re asking from your customers in your email marketing messages. Many emails promote or require a clickthrough to a landing page. This leads to yet another call for mobilization: in this case, landing pages optimized for mobile devices. But to take a step back, maybe it means rethinking your email call to action: Should it change to be effective for a mobile audience? Maybe an effective mobilized email campaign shouldn’t involve complicated clickthroughs or multiple links.

Another way to start thinking about mobile integration with your email campaign is to use SMS to gain subscribers. People are texting more than ever: it’s quick, simple, short, and on-the-go in a way that email and even social sharing isn’t. Allowing subscribers to opt-in to receive text updates from you and to subscribe to email updates using SMS is yet another way to make your email marketing campaign visible and available to prospects. Just be sure to set expectations on the maximum number of texts they’ll receive from you per week or month, since many people still don’t have unlimited text plans, and too many texts will quickly become unwelcome. With that in mind, use your text message marketing strategy judiciously.

Giving your customers more, as well as easy ways to sign up, will allow for more email opt-ins. For more on making your emails mobile, see the June 2011 edition of the ClickMail Marketer. It covers why ignoring the appearance of mobile email is bad for your brand, and considers the effect mobile viewing has on conversion rates.

Email Design Includes Landing Pages for the Mobile Device

As a follow up to our June article on making emails mobile, we asked two of our in-house technical whizzes to give us the lowdown on carrying that mobility through to the landing page. After all, if your email marketing best practices are ensuring your emails render correctly on the small screens of smart phones and tablet PCs, shouldn’t that same mobile experience carry through to your landing pages too?

Lucky for us, the team behind the scenes at ClickMail has been paying attention and they were ready to answer all of our questions about mobile landing page design. The July issue of the ClickMail Marketer email marketing newsletter offers their tried-and-true tips for rethinking-and redesigning-your landing pages. Doing so will streamline engagement for your recipients and just might give you a leg up over your competitors who may still be sending mobile users to a clunky, computer-centric landing page.

From coding to copy, fingers to forms, this brief newsletter article covers all the basics you need to know to implement email marketing best practices around serving a mobile audience…even where they land.

Make Your Email Mobile

You’ve lost control. If you’re an email marketer, you’re now at the mercy of your subscribers in a way you’ve never been before. Not only are you contending with multiple email clients ranging from Gmail to Outlook to Yahoo. Now you’ve got a new challenge: the third screen. The mobile device. The little PDA that could be your email marketing program’s best friend…or worst enemy.

If your approach to mobile marketing is a shoulder shrug, if you think it doesn’t matter where and how someone sees your email, only that you make it to the inbox, then check out the newest issue of the ClickMail Marketer email marketing newsletter. Right now. We need to change your thinking. In fact, we’re adding “have a mobile mentality” to the list of email marketing best practices we recommend.

The June ClickMail Marketer explains why it’s so important to know how your emails are rendering in mobile devices, how you must modify your calls to action, and why ignoring the appearance of mobile email is bad for your brand. And to really get you thinking, the email newsletter introduces the tablet issue: how many people are seeing your emails on their iPad or tablet PC? What effect does that have on rendering and conversion?

Make sure you’re ready to maximize your mobile emails by checking out the June ClickMail Marketer today.

Tips for Mobile Email Design

Have a cell phone? I bet you do. As do your spouse, your kids and your parents. Usage of cell phones and smart phones is at an all-time high and will only continue to climb. That means you must be monitoring the usage of your teenage daughter who has a tendency to go over her texting limit each month. And it means you’re now responsible for ensuring your company’s email marketing best practices include designing for these mobile devices, as more people use smart phones to read email.

Some email service providers (ESPs) are creating tools for mobile optimization so it could be you will be able to simply leverage what they’re offering rather than creating new templates in-house. Still, it’s smart to be educated about email design best practices for mobile.

A comprehensive StrongMail article titled “The Rapidly Shifting Mobile Landscape” gives plenty of specific advice on designing for mobile. Definitely take a look at it if this is something you’re tackling-or might have to tackle in the future.

You can also turn to ClickMail for help with email design for smart phones. It’s one of the add-on services unique to us as email marketing vendors.

Most important, however, is the testing of how these emails render, both on computers and smart phones. If you design for mobile alone and sacrifice effective rendering on a computer as a result-while most of your audience is still reading your email on a computer-you’re working against your email marketing ROI. Email marketing best practices should include designing for the majority, and allowing for the minority. That means email design that works on a smart phone without email design that looks nonsensical on a computer or laptop screen.

At ClickMail, we’re big proponents of testing. Based on years of experience serving email marketing clients just like you, we encourage you to consider using PivotalVeracity for testing the rendering of your email designs as part of your email marketing best practices. You can use the PivotalVeracity service as a ClickMail client, and at the same time, get our expertise in email marketing best practices…for effective email marketing on any kind of device, PC or Mac.

Whether it’s a Droid or a Dell, a Motorola or a Mac, an iPhone or an IBM, make sure your email design is right–and right on–every time by testing.

Designing Emails for Mobile: the Secret!

The online edition of BtoB magazine recently ran an article on email marketing secrets and lies about mobile marketing. OK, really there was only one secret and one lie.

The biggest takeaway for me was the secret: that you can easily code your emails to render properly no matter which mobile device your recipient has, an iPhone, BlackBerry or Droid. According to the article, coding can make the email appear correctly no matter the smartphone by “automatically adjust the magnification of the design for the appropriate width of the end user’s viewing device.”

And making emails render right no matter the device definitely falls into the realm of email marketing best practices!

Is that a capability you’d like to have? ClickMail can help! As an email marketing vendor, we have the technical capabilities and customize coding for our email marketing customers all the time. If you’d like to discuss coding your email marketing for mobile, let us know.

The lie? The article claims linking a cell phone number to an email address is easy to do by asking for both pieces of information. (And linking them is important so you know who’s on your email list and also on your SMS list.) Not five minutes before reading this article, I registered for a webinar and submitted both my phone number and email address as part of the registration process…and didn’t even think about it. Could it really be that easy?

Email Marketing Best Practices: Make Mobile Leave Them Wanting More?

Is mobile email the equivalent of the executive summary of a whitepaper?

Mobile is a growing market. And you have to be addressing it! But don’t throw the email baby out with the bathwater. You have to redesign for mobile but keep in mind that just because someone sees your email on their smartphone first doesn’t mean they won’t see it on their laptop later.  

Also remember that your mobile email still has to convince someone to take action. If you’re not driving conversions, you’re forgetting the whole reason for email marketing best practices.

Sometimes we’re getting so caught up in making our emails work for mobile, we’re forgetting to make our emails work for our bottom line.  

As an email marketing vendor, we ran into this a few months ago when a client redesigned their email template to be optimized for mobile…but it had a negative impact on the template’s appearance in a regular email client. And since the mobile audience was considerably smaller, they had shortchanged the majority for the sake of the minority. 

Maybe we should try to think of mobile as the executive summary you might include with a whitepaper. When you provide such a summary, you give the potential reader a chance at a preview so they can decide whether or not they want to read the whole thing. Written well, an executive summary will entice the reader to move past the first page and delve on into your content. A summary can’t be the whitepaper!

Same with mobile. You can’t really deliver the whole, rich email experience you want to deliver to a smartphone. Instead, think of your mobile email as the executive summary. Work it to make the recipient want more. Then have it linked to a killer landing page (the equivalent of your whitepaper).

We do have to make our email design and email copywriting work for mobile, but we can’t forget mobile emails have a job beyond fitting on the screen of a PDA: They still have to drive someone to take some kind of action.

It’s email marketing best practices…on a much smaller screen.

Email Marketing Best Practice for Mobile: Test Your Design

Day 6 of our take on the takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ’11 in Las Vegas… 

 Today’s takeaway: Mobile email is on the rise

 This Email Summit ’11 takeaway focuses on how your emails render on mobile devices, with tips for designing for mobile:

• Avoid large images
• Avoid tables and columns
• Shorter messages are better
• Use formatted text

As an email marketing vendor and email deliverability consultant, we’d like to add to that takeaway our own two cents worth on mobile marketing:

1) Remember to design for the majority, not minority.  Don’t lose one large audience for the sake of a newer one.

 2) Know how people interact with emails on their smartphones. People might see or read your email on their phone, but they might not act on it until later.

Email marketing best practices for mobile? Know your market. Test your designs.