Re: Inventing Email Marketing
To Whom It May Concern,
Our inboxes are inundated with over 306 billion professional, promotional, and personal messages every day, sometimes in the middle of the night (more on that later). How can email marketers cut through the clutter and contend for coveted consumer attention?
Find methods that flip the script on traditional email newsletters and avoid getting tossed in the junk folder. In a medium that, at its core, relies on text, the key to engaging modern readers is a well-considered balance of refreshing design, useful content, and interactive features.
Design
As consumers, we increasingly rely on visuals to signal the tone and authority of a brand. If your email design hasn’t been updated in a couple of years or more, it’s likely time to rethink your layout. Simple lines, optimized web fonts, and cleaner visual content can help you gain your audience’s loyalty and trust.
59% of Millennials and 67% of Generation Z use their smartphone to scan their inbox on a daily basis. With over half of users checking emails on their mobile devices, optimizing your emails for mobile platforms, using single-column layouts and larger text sizes for comfortable reading, is sure to increase future open rates.
Subscribers want to see loads of visual content, rather than imposing, dense chunks of text. Balance your email’s layout by adding videos, images, and accessible infographics. (Integrating video boosts your click rates exponentially.)
Content
Perhaps the most foundational aspect of email marketing, your content should be relevant and functional for your audience. Deliver helpful tools and templates to your readers’ inboxes without charging a subscription fee or asking for any personal information in exchange. Occasionally abandoning the sales-first approach will foster a sense of dependability and genuine interest.
Personalizing emails isn’t exactly an innovation, but we now have the opportunity to go far beyond [FIRST NAME, LAST NAME]. Birthday promotions, post-purchase thank you’s, and early access invites can make your emails more personable without overstepping.
Incentive programs also boost click-through rates, as Timelapse has seen with Stanford Research Park, a business and technology center in Palo Alto. When readers were offered the chance to win a gift card or rack up donations for charity, they clicked through for additional info at impressive rates.
Collaborating with other brands can tap into untouched audiences. When Bikes Make Life Better works with Stanford Research Park to cross-promote biking webinars and workshops catering to commuters who bike, the increased impressions are a win-win. Introducing new products or services through collaboration with another trusted company consistently proves mutually beneficial.
If your email strategy is still feeling stale, there’s always the option to supplement with SMS Marketing. Send short blasts straight to subscribers’ notifications, but use them sparingly — consumers won’t want to receive promotions at the same rate as emails.
Interactivity
Flip the script on passive, no-reply emails to engage subscribers directly from their inbox. Adding animated buttons that change color on roll-over and relevant GIFs can automatically create visual interest, but avoid distracting, rapidly changing images.
Including easily shareable content (think, Instagram-worthy infographics, or a curated Tweet of the Day) in your emails is good. Social media integration is even better. Subscribers should be able to share content seamlessly with a click.
Invite your readers to respond directly to your messages, if such a tactic fits the scale and purpose of your brand. In Timelapse’s email blasts for Hart Wright Architects, we encouraged readers to share their thoughts on a recently developed project and start a conversation with Eliza Hart, one of the firm’s founders. Help your audience feel more directly involved in your brand.
Timing is Everything
Mapping out your audience’s daily email routine can help you optimize your content scheduling. For example, people often check their emails repeatedly after work hours, so it’s worth looking into sending late-night attention grabbers. 8 p.m. to midnight is a severely undercapitalized window, and open rates are consistently higher during this timeframe.
Of course, not all content is suitable for late-night sends. Test various times of day on different days of the week to determine which schedule is best for your brand. Match your timing to the type of information you’re delivering — if you’re sharing business-centric content, 10 a.m. — 2 p.m. might be your best window.
With Stanford Research Park, we tested a 9 a.m. send and an 11 a.m. send, and the 11 a.m. send repeatedly proved more effective by a decent margin. Perhaps, when users open their email first thing in the morning, cultural enrichment content and webinars are a lower priority than they would be at 11 a.m., around the midday lull.
Ask yourself the following questions when deciding when to blast your email: when is my target recipient’s inbox the least full? At what point in their day are they the most receptive or responsive? Is the content we’ve prepared tailored to a specific time of day or week?
Most consumers are pros at filtering out non-critical emails. If the messaging doesn’t directly benefit them or offer some incentive, they’ll likely ignore it altogether. Considering email is still the primary communication channel between businesses and consumers, it’s critical to push the e-envelope and reevaluate what email marketing can accomplish. At Timelapse, we’ve helped dozens of brands make the most of their marketing strategy, email, social, and beyond. Start with our five-minute marketing performance assessment and see exactly where we can help your brand shine.
