ImgMailer: A Powerful Image Engine
Email Marketing is in the heart of marketing strategy for many organizations. A big challenge in today’s business is to stand out and provide relevant content.
ImgMailer will help you address both of these needs through a combination of three different features.
Countdowns
Countdowns are not new in email marketing, though they aren’t yet common place — so early adopters have the upper hand.
ImgMailer provides an easy way for you to setup countdowns. The perfect use for this is to showcase to a certain promotion deadline.
It will spark your customer’s attention to buy your product as soon as possible.
Countdowns are dynamic to the time the email is actually being opened.
As you can see, ImgMailer uses SVG files. This means that your creative team can use the tools they love, like Adobe Illustrator.
A countdown will run for however many frames you set and then show your buy message on the last frame. You can do way more fancy things than the example above.
Remember, we’ll be dealing with emails heavily here, so it’s important to understand that not all clients support animated gifs. Clients that do not support it will show the first frame, which is still extremely applicable.
Your designers will also be able to create all sorts of cool looks for these countdowns — with custom fonts, displays, etc— but remember to KISS.
Dynamic Images
Dynamic images are a great for making your messages stand out. They allow you to customize your images to the individual you are sending your message to — with custom fonts, colors, transformations.
Personalized emails have, on average, 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized mailings.
What if you could take personalization one step further, through the use of graphics and images?
Your designers use the tools they love
Your developers use the tools they love
No more integration headaches with your EMS for one-off needs platforms. ImgMailer will allow you to focus on creating engaging and beautiful messages while allowing you to keep using your favorite EMS platform, whatever that is.
Creating a dynamic image is as easy as filling those few fields.
And my generated image is here on the side.
The best thing of ImgMailer is that it can be integrated with pretty much any EMS platform out there.
Marketo? yes
Bronto? yes
ExactTarget, BlueHornet, … Yep!
Dynamic Images are more powerful than this. They support the Liquid syntax introduced by Shopify, so we can accomplish some pretty fancy things with it.
So… How about a membership card?
Yep, and it’s actually pretty easy!
Best of all, the member level logo is also dynamic! Just a few characters added to your designer’s Illustrator output.
Hopefully by now your mind is spinning with awesome ideas that can easily be achieved with ImgMailer!
Think impactful graphics, cool fonts. Be bold on your designs.
The Best for Last
Or maybe I should say beast… because this feature of ImgMailer makes it extremely powerful.
We covered a lot on how to make an image dynamic — but how far can we take this?
Complex Conditions are your answer to some tougher business needs. A lot of things here there is no way you can achieve with current EMS without involving IT, and the few weeks (or months?)of delay that comes with it.
Complex Conditions are awesome because:
a) They allow you to set multiple rules (that run in the order you specify)
b) You can execute a condition on pretty much anything that was provided by your developer (we’re talking minutes here, not weeks!)
c) You can have different destination URLs for each of your conditions
Complex Conditions do support all the features of dynamic images — but you can build rules simply using fields and regular PNG/JPEG images.
Example 1: The Education Track
Imagine a scenario where we’re emailing a group with the suggested program list for their active track. Wouldn't it be great if the email told your customer what program they already took? Doing this on your EMS would require you to push order information to that system or fall back to transactional emails, which definitely would require a significant time of IT.
So below is a sample content that could be seen in one of our emails:
Now let’s enhance this using ImgMailer.
We’ll set the default image as an empty square.
Once the complex condition was created, we can start to create conditions that operate on the values returned by your developers code.
Notice that all fields added by your programmers automatically show up as Rule options on ImgMailer — so you can create a rule on pretty much anything.
On my sample, I’m just returning one value.
And that’s pretty much it. Let’s see how it looks now:
With just a little bit of work you can end up with something much more personalized and engaging to your customer.
Complex rules are executed in the order you specify, and you can rearrange simply dragging and dropping.
If no rules are matched, the default image will be returned.
Example 2: Personas
Another example: Suppose we’ll be doing an event in Las Vegas. So why not personalize your lead promotion to a certain persona? Persona’s are a great way to plan your marketing efforts.
So, for the sake of the example, let’s say we have two personas we would like to market more efficiently to:
Bob, the Instructional Designer
Male, on his 30s, responsible for creating experiences to make learning more effective.
Jane, the Trainer
Mostly female, on her 40s, responsible to train staff
Our email will lead with a graphic, so why not personalize it using ImgMailer?
Here is how we would go about it.
First, let’s add your default image.
Notice I added a default destination. On this scenario, we can redirect users to the most relevant places on our site as well!
Here is our default creative:
This image should somewhat appeal to anyone. With a sober skyline of Vegas with a “Register” call-to-action. Nothing too special.
Now, let’s add a rule for Jane, we’ll be using the Job Title field, for example, and redirect her to the For-Trainers page once she clicks that graphic.
Our Jane persona creative:
As you can see the background has a faded female group, red/pink colors, with a call-out for hundreds of training sessions, what should appeal to “Jane” more than the default graphic.
Now, let’s setup Bob.
Our “Bob” persona creative:
Notice the bar on the background, darker shades of blue and the call-out for the Hands-On Labs.
And you’re all set! The system is now serving the perfect image for your customers — and fast.
Hopefully by now you’re thinking on tons of cool things that can be done using this tool.
Made with ❤ by @flaviotsf
