Keeping mobile in mind for your email campaigns

You’ve designed a beautiful email, sent it at a time of day when you expect to garner optimal results, but yet there’s something you’re not seeing in the metrics that you’d expected. What’s missing? Did you take into account the segment of your audience who would be reading your email on a mobile device when you devised this campaign?

According to Nov 2010 comScore data for U.S. consumers, some 70 million mobile users accessed email through a mobile device, with 43.5 million doing so on a near-daily basis.  I recently attended a conference at which Justine Jordan of Litmus said that ~9% of all marketing emails sent are opened on a mobile device.

Not all designs are created equal

If you think your results aren’t what they should be, tools like Litmus, Unica or CampaignCog are now available to give some estimates of how many people open your email on a mobile device. If there’s a significant slice of your audience viewing your campaigns on their iPhone, Droid or other mobile device – even iPads, it may be time to think about revamping your template to accommodate those platforms. Think designing for desktop clients was tough? Now email marketers must also take into account rendering on mobile devices while being mindful of how a recipient will interact with the campaigns if viewed on a smartphone. Here’s a link to a blog post by Jordan with a graph that shows mobile email compatibility across a variety of clients.

Finger is the new mouse

If you’ve ever used an iPad, or other mobile device to surf the web or view email, you’ll know how frustrating it can be when you try to click on a micro-sized link only to hit the wrong one. When designing your emails, remember that instead of clicking with a mouse, recipients may be using their finger to respond to your call to action.

Here are some things to think about:

• Are your links big enough to click without expanding the message first? If you have a navbar at the top of your emails to send recipients to various parts of your website, it’s likely that it will be tough for recipients to click on without expanding the message in order to click the right link.
• Font sizes and sentence length: Lengthy sentences written in a small font will be tough to read on a mobile device.
• Include a link to a mobile version of your campaign at the top of the message. This way, recipients can easily click to a text-friendly version of your message.
• Think about your subject line – short and sweet, tell don’t sell. Not all devices have a preview pane to help recipients quickly make an informed “read or delete” decision. Sometimes the only information they have is a subject line and the sender’s name (which should NEVER be “info”).
• Highlight your call to action (CTA): Don’t bury it in the fine print. Make it easy to read and click. Keep it above the fold.
• Keep an even balance of images and text. Make sure the primary CTA is in read-able text even if images are turned off. If a message is one big image, and images are turned off or broken, how is a recipient going to understand your message?
• Time of send: Earlier this year, direct digital marketing firm Knotice announced the results of a study which showed that mobile readers typically view their messages early in the morning or late at night. If you want to catch someone’s attention quickly, lengthy newsletters on a weekend aren’t the way to go since that’s when most folks are just triaging their inbox until a later time when they’re not trying to read their iPhone while pay attention to their kids, friends and the like.

Trick or treat, email-style

In the spirit of Halloween, this month’s installment is about email tricks and treats. No ghosts or goblins here, just a look at the good and bad of email marketing. No guarantees, but if you keep these in mind, you’ll have an increased chance of avoiding the “toilet paper in the trees” equivalent happening to your email program.

Let’s start with email acquisition. Don’t trick people into signing up for your list. Be honest and up front with what you’ll be sending. The treat of this will be a receptive audience who’s more likely to respond to the calls to action in your message. It’s also a treat for your audience to get exactly what they were promised when they were told to expect it. If you said on your sign-up form that you’d be emailing once a week with special offers, don’t send an email once a month with company news.

Not getting your messages to render the way you want? One trick is to use alt tags with your images. This way, when your recipient has them turned off, they’ll still see something that tells them more about what they can’t see. Also, treat your recipients to relevant imagery. Don’t use clip art for the sake of having a picture in your message. Unnecessary images weigh down an email and take up valuable space.

Use landing pages wisely. Don’t trick your recipients into clicking a link for more information if the page you’ve directed them to has nothing to do with the call to action in your message. Treat those who click a link for more information with respect by having the promised information be the main focus of the landing page. Ask someone to hunt for what they’re expecting to be front and center on a web page will cause frustration and you’re sure to do harm to your brand or image.

As always, think of what your recipients would want to read when crafting a campaign. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that what’s important to you is necessarily important to them. Study results from past campaigns to determine future campaign components. Deliver on the promise made when your audience enrolled in your email program and you’ll be treated to an email marketing program that’s living up to expectations.

Transactional emails don’t have to be boring

I just noticed last week that Facebook has switched its friend request emails from plain text messages to a full HTML version. The benefits of HTML email over text are numerous and it’s nice to see Facebook offering its users something of value in these messages.

Here’s a “before” snapshot of the friend request notification:

And here’s the “after”:

Facebook could have gone crazy adding features and links to these messages, but thankfully they kept it simple. In the past, the person’s name wasn’t familiar and you weren’t sure you wanted to accept the request to connect, you had to take a few steps to get more information to make a decision. Now, it’s much easier to make a (superficial) decision based upon their photo.

Twitter also recently switched from a text notification of a new follower to an HTML version. Click the images for a full size version of each.

Old – text	New – HTML

I mention these changes because it’s easy to write-off a transactional email and not give any thought to their design. The updates Facebook and Twitter made added a lot of value for the recipients without going overboard adding bells and whistles just because they could. The basic concepts guiding transactional email design apply to all marketing emails.

With the holiday season coming up and folks doing more online shopping, many companies will be sending emails whose only real point is to say, “Here’s written proof of your order. Thanks for shopping.” Take this opportunity to put some thought into your transactional emails and give them a refresh. But when you do, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does this add value to the consumer? Just because you can add images to HTML emails doesn’t mean you should. And this means including a banner ad. Nobody likes those, other than the guy who designed it. Those will just make the email clunky without adding anything to the user’s experience.
2. Am I over-designing it? Just as you shouldn’t go crazy with adding images, overdoing on fonts isn’t necessary either. Keep the file size small so it’ll load quickly. And keep the coloring easy on the eyes and consistent with your brands.
3. What useful information can I add? Answer this one as if you were the consumer, not as someone trying to sell more products. If your message is confirming a product purchase, try adding a link to a user manual. If you’re sending an email to confirm a dinner reservation, add a link to find directions to the restaurant.

If you think the above doesn’t apply to you because your business doesn’t send transactional emails, think again. These are basic questions that really apply to all marketing emails. I hope you’ll go forth and give a thoughtful approach to your email designs – transactional and otherwise.

E-m-a-i-l: Email, email, email!

No sooner did I write about the importance of combining text with images in email design did I come across this email from the New York Jets:

It’s lovely to look at, but it goes against everything I believe in as far as email design is concerned. I’ll give the team credit for blasting this message at 4 a.m., mere hours after the deal to acquire QB Brett Favre transpired. But I wonder how many Jets fans, before they’ve had their morning coffee, opened up their email to find something that appeared as jibberish to them. This could have been how some even learned that their beloved Gang Green was now home to the former Green Bay signal caller!

I know, more questions than answers here. But another example of how something rushed into the pipeline could have resulted in some missed opportunities.

Email design: The good, bad and ugly

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of HTML-only emails. My settings, like those of most people, have images turned off.

In fact, here’s a quote from a Marketing Sherpa study:

MarketingSherpa data indicates that 59% of consumers and 90% of business email users view some or all of their email with images turned off. This includes people who may view email in their preview panels with images turned off (remember, this is the default for many email clients including Gmail and some versions of Outlook). It also includes people who view their email on a mobile device, such as a BlackBerry.

(This matches past posts here and here about the need to consider viewing email on PDAs.)

With many in planning mode for their Q4 holiday email campaigns, I wanted to show the good, the bad and the ugly of email design. It may have been chic at one time to put form ahead of function, but nowadays, good marketers know that improper planning and design can be costly. Style no longer trumps substance, but they still should complement each other.

Here’s the ugly message that I receive from Fifth Group Restaurants on a weekly basis. (Click the links to view the examples.) With images turn off and images turned on. If I didn’t display the images, I’d have NO idea what their message was trying to convey. (You only get so much from a subject line.)

Here’s a bad example. Images off (as it first appeared in my inbox) and after I turned the images on. There’s some information in the alt-tags, but darned if I get anything meaningful from it. Shame on them for putting the text into image format.

The winner (in my inbox) comes from Upromise. Even with the images turned off, I get the gist of their message. Turning them on complements the text. They still have a top navbar either way.

Here’s a quick and dirty list of things to think about and best practices (it’s by no means complete):

• KISS – Keep it simple, stupid. Don’t pack too many bells and whistles into an HTML email
• Use alt tags and support text around images. If a reader’s setting have turned off images, they’ll still get the essence of your message
• If manually coding your message, lay it out with tables
• If you’re not going the Design DIY route, use an email service provider with existing templates
• Test, test, test

And here’s a list from Feb. 2007 that lists the default setting for images for most of the major email clients.