How to Make Email Marketing Suck Less
Part Five

We live in a world where people are interacting with email more than ever, where an email address is often the anchor of our customers’ digital identity, when marketers report that email is still one of the most valuable channels, and yet brands continue to destroy the channel campaign after campaign.
It’s time to stop that trend.

Over the last year, I was fortunate to spend time on the road talking with marketers about why email marketing sucks and how we can make it better. 30,000+ views later, and it’s time to put this baby on the shelf.

Rather than let it collect dust, see below. You’ll find the slides, along with how I presented them pretty much verbatim. And, don’t worry, I saved you from the introductory slides because we all know how painful those can be.

In part five of six, we get to the good stuff — how to make email suck less.

Part Five: We suck at email marketing. Now what?

Okay, great. I’ve sold you. We suck at email marketing, but how do we get better?

I’d suggest we start by going back to the P’s.

And, before you lambast me on Twitter, I’m not talking about the original four P’s.

You know…product, price, place, and promotion.

Let’s try some new ones…

The first: Portable.

We need to make email go where the user goes regardless of device, that responds to the demands and nuances of their day, that says we care about where and when you’re reading our email content.

The second: Personal.

We have all this great data and insights on our customers, and yet we continue to send dumb campaigns based on personas rather than personalized content.

The third: Prescriptive.

If you still believe that us and the organizations we work for are in control of the email conversations with our customers, then you are living in a fantasy land.

We must recognize that the ISPs have put users in control and the quicker we embrace that change the more our subscribers will love having us in their Inboxes.

So, let’s dive into each one of these P’s…

…starting with portable.

As I mentioned before, portable is the idea that our emails must be able to go where our subscribers go. If it can’t follow the user through his or her day, it’s no longer relevant.

How do we do this?

Let’s start by tossing out multiple column emails.

We are living in a mobile-first world. That context demands single and straightforward calls to action, not multiple columns that distract our subscribers.

Single-column layouts work best on mobile devices. They’re easier to read, they’re easier to scroll, and if they fall apart, they’ll do so more gracefully.

Room&Board does this so well. They reinforce their website nav, make big, single calls-to-action, and keep emails focused as your scroll down in one singular column.

Next, we must start leveraging mobile design options.

There are a couple options to make this happen, but I’m going to give you two: responsive and mobile aware.

Let’s start with responsive design.

Similar to responsive websites, your emails can be coded to respond to the screen size they are presented in and provide different hierarchies based on that screen size and your choosing. You can see an example of responsive design in British Airways email above .

Responsive email designs use CSS3 @media queries to render different layouts depending on the size of the screen the email is opened on. Those queries can auto-adjust the layout, content, and text size of an email depending on the screen size of the device it is being read on.

In addition, images can be swapped out or completely disabled, images & buttons can be resized, and colors can be changed.

The biggest argument against responsive design is that it doesn’t work everywhere.

Yes, most of the major consumer ISPs — Yahoo, Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail’s web version, and most mobile devices support media queries. But, those marketers dealing with tons of Outlook subscribers would be wise to leverage mobile aware design options.

Mobile aware, also referred to as scalable, makes sure your emails are readable and clickable no matter the environment it is being read in. These designs typically have features such as single-column layouts, larger fonts, and touch friendly buttons. And, they work across devices and platforms.

My best advice is to ensure you understand what your audience is using to read emails and select the design option that works for them. Once you have that data, you can make a decision as to which design option will work well for audience, and it very well may be both.

Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!

For email, it’s fonts and buttons! Oh, my!

Fonts should be at the very, very least 14px. I would suggest 16px, but it’s up to you. iOS renders nothing under 13px. They simply bump it up, so make sure you’re expecting it.

For any of your calls to action, stop using text. Nothing is more unusable than tiny links on touchscreen devices. Instead, use buttons.

What kind of buttons? Simply follow Apple’s Human Interface Principles. Buttons should be no smaller than 44px by 44px.

Why? Well, Apple’s spent enough time and money figuring out the smallest size button for the average human finger to tap on. So, there you go.

If you need to create solid buttons? Just use Campaign Monitor’s button tool at buttons.cm.

Next, get to the point.

All your subscribers have better things to do with their lives than spend time digesting your promotional email. Tell them what you want them to know as quickly and efficiently as possible and get out of their way.

Next, let the images do the talking.

We all have these devices with stunning screens and yet we continue to send text-based emails. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for text, but let’s take advantage of the context available to us and let beautiful images do the talking.

For the love of all things holy, please eliminate the phrase “click here”.

Do we click with our thumbs and fingers? No.

Just make the calls to actions specific.

Leverage some GIFs.

Most of the major ISPs and devices support GIFs. Use them to your advantage — demonstrate your product or service, show off a feature, make it interesting.

Here are two great examples from Bonobos and Jack Spade.

And, GIFs work for B2B too.

Just take a look at these two examples from Evernote and Asana.

Next, make sure you’re leveraging preheaders. What is a preheader, you say?

Think of a preheader as the supporting cast member to your subject line. It’s the short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox. Most mobile, desktop and web email clients provide them to tip you off on what the email contains, before you open it.

Preheaders offer subscribers a little more insight into what your email contains or can be a great way to entice readers to open those emails. Unfortunately, many of us are chocking them full of crap such as “Having trouble viewing this email?” or “View on desktop”.

Give subscribers something more because this is super value real estate.

If you’re wondering about the potential impacts from preheaders, we’ve found that they do a couple of things for subscribers:

Increase clarity of value within the email. That is to say, that they give readers more insights into what they can expect once they open.
Their performance patterns typically match subject line performance.
The gains and losses are tightly connected to the number of mobile readers.

Next up, plain text emails.

You know how we have all neglected our plain-text emails? Well, it’s time to start making sure we are paying a bit more attention to them.

Why? This guy (points at Tim).

Tim Cook and the folks at Apple just launched the Apple Watch, and we know a couple things as it relates to the watch and email.

The Apple Watch usually displays the plain-text version of your HTML email. This happens because the minute the watch sees a remote image in your email it considers it too complicated and defaults to the plain-text version; and,
Thanks to the Limus community, we know that the Watch supports its very own HTML standards. This means we can create specific content for the Watch. Now, it’s pretty simple stuff, so you can’t get uber fancy here, but it’s better than nothing.

Should you need some inspiration from brands that are doing a lot of these things well, just check out reallygoodemails.com. The site has tons of examples of great emails.

Now for some tools to think about as you’re mastering portability…

My favorite is Litmus.

The folks there and the tools they provide are stellar. Their core product allows you to view your email campaigns across 100+ email clients. From Outlook 2003 to the Gmail iOS App to Blackberry, its got you covered.

Litmus also has a great development tool, along with tons of free email marketing resources, insights, and best practices.

Targeted.io is another similar tool.

And, so is EmailonAcid.com.

Moving to the second P: Personal.

The promise of digital marketing was always and will always be its potential for personalization. We have all this great data on our users, so why aren’t we using it for our email campaigns?

We’ve gotta start making emails that cater to the individual needs and desires of every user — and the experience must be unique to each individual.

So, let’s talk about how we do that…

We can do simple things like this Quirky example, where they’ve used their customer’s name to make things feel more personalized and authentic.

Sure. We know this is coming from a machine, but simple personalization techniques can have big impacts on subscriber engagement.

Here’s another example. This one is more B2B.

What’s interesting here, especially for the B2B marketers out there, is that we know personalization can have impacts on getting around enterprise spam blocks. If you’re sales team isn’t leveraging some of these super easy personalization techniques, I’d suggest you work with them to test it and see what those tests yield.

We also have tons of opportunity to leverage social and email.

From super easy things, such as simply adding our social links to our emails to…

Adding dynamic content from social or other channels to make emails feel more real-time and alive versus stale.

Tools like Movable Ink and ContentCtrl can help us do this.

Social also allows us to drive cross-channel opt-ins from places like our Facebook Page to…

…Twitter cards.

All of these places where we are cultivating and engaging our customers provide opportunities to deepen our relationship with them.

We can also leverage all this subscriber data to create triggers that delight our subscribers.

The easiest trigger? The welcome email.

Why aren’t we immediately saying hello when a subscriber gives us access to their Inbox? Data from Experian tell us that welcome emails usually average a 50%+ open rate. That’s huge!

And, we have other data points that we can leverage.

Take for example this email PetSmart. They used my dog’s birthday to send us a coupon for a free treat.

Even, my tiny ophthalmologist in LA does this.

So, why aren’t we?

Beyond explicit data that our customers give us, we can leverage their website behaviors. Now this gets a touch on the creepy side, but it works.

Remember the last time you were shopping for that next Amazon purchase and two days later an email with the exact same product showed up in your Inbox? I do.

We can also ask our subscribers if they forgot something in their cart, such as this example from Bonobos. They take it one step further and note the number of items that customer left within your cart.

And, then they follow it up a few days later, asking if you simply need some help to make the purchase.

Also, we can easily send receipts and order confirmations with way more intriguing content they simply what that customer ordered. I’ll come back this in a second.

And, we can follow up with our subscribers to see what they think about our products, services, or recent orders.

Sophisticated email marketers are even taken advantage of third-party data such as weather.

Take for example these campaigns from JackThreads and Bonobos. Both brands dropped these emails as snow storms swept across specific parts of the country.

And, we can use data points such as gender.

Funny story about Nordstrom. A few years ago, I bought my wife a bag from them. Two days later I was receiving all manner of women’s product emails from Nordstrom. We’ve gotta stop doing that stuff, and it’s good to see they taken steps to do so.

And because we are getting all chummy and personalized, we should always be thinking about what else can we can do to delight subscribers.

I told you I would come back to this example from Bonobos. So, take a look at the third bullet. It says, “While you wait, enjoy a cat who loves boxes.”

Click on that URL and you’ll find this video….

A box and Maru

So, so good.

Now, this has absolutely zero to do with Bonobos and its brand, but you better be damn sure I’m gonna open every email from them to see what nuggets of gold I can find.

If you want to do personalization well, there are a ton of great platforms noted above to help you and the brands you work for leverage data across your marketing channels.

Let’s move onto our final P…

…Prescriptive.

If you still believe that us and the organizations we work for are in control of the email conversations with our customers, then you are living in a fantasy land.

We must recognize that the ISPs have put users in control and the quicker we embrace that change the more our subscribers will love having us in their Inboxes.

So, how do we make our relationships with subscribers more prescriptive?

Let’s start with asking our customers what they want to hear from us.

Take for example an old customer of mine. National Harbor is a 350 acre mixed-use property located on the banks of the Potomac. Rather than send all their subscribers the same email campaign, we started asking them what they wanted to hear from us.

We knew that not everyone wanted to receive information and updates on restaurants or office space or family-orientated activities. So, we allowed users to tell us and leveraged the hero or primary content area to deliver content that was better tailored to their needs.

Next, we need to allow our subscribers to tell us when they want to hear from us.

This example from Nordstrom is great. When you visit their unsubscribe page, you’re presented with this…

Rather than simply unsubscribe, I can tailor what I want to receive from them and when it should hit my Inbox.

Here’s another great example from Bonobos. I love how they layer the brand’s personality into the options. Just look at the last one. It says, “Unsubscribe. “Sniff”. It’s over, Bonobos.”

So, so good, right?☺

We also need to give our subscribers reasons to say hello. Take this great B2B example I recently received.

This was the fourth email in a series from a new SAAS platform. Up until now, all of their emails had been generic and boring, but include a picture of crying Dawson and you better believe I’m gonna at least email this person back.

And, what happens if subscribers stop engaging, let’s see if we can reengage them again.

Here’s a great example from Fab.com…

And, another from Yahoo.

We’ve even included a reengagement flow for you to use as guide back at your office.

BUT (and it’s a big but)

Remember that we talked about how the ISPs measure engagement. Just because a subscriber isn’t engaging with your campaigns doesn’t mean you should stop sending them emails in the future.

There’s been a ton of conversation going on about the value of reengagement campaigns and the impact of sunsetting subscribers if they aren’t engaged. Dela Quist (@DelaQuist), email strategist and CEO of AlchemyWorks, breaks down those conversations and his opinions on how to deal with inactives here.

Next. If subscribers want out, PLEASE. MAKE. IT. EASIER.

Burying the unsubscribe link in the bottom of your email is just dumb. It makes people who legitimately don’t want to hear from you work to figure out how they can stop hearing from you.

And, you know what people do when you make them work for said link in your email? They hit the big giant spam button that is easier to find.

We have to get better at this.

Here’s an ok example from Lululemon. They put it right at the top.

And, another example from Chris Sietsema’s Email Email.

But, what happens when I do press that unsubscribe button? Rather than simply give you the ridiculous opt-out page, we should be giving subscribers reasons to stay.

Look at this genius example from Groupon. When you click on their unsubscribe link, you’re taken to a page with this video.

Take a look…

While I should reach out to Groupon and find out how this effects its unsubscribe rate, I have to believe it has positive impacts. At the very least, they’ve made subscribers giggle just a little.

And last, but certainly not least.

ALL. PURCHASED. LISTS. SHOULD. JUST. DIE.

Why are we wasting our precious marketing dollars buying lists that don’t belong to us? Beyond the fact that it is just wrong, all the research, including this data from MailChimp, tells us that every metric we care about is negatively impacted by the presence of purchased lists.