With February being my birthday month, I’ve received a ton of notes to wish me well on my special day. This seemed like a good opportunity to talk about these feel-good emails that any business can send.

Step 1 to sending these is collecting the necessary information. Adding the birthday field to your sign-up form will solve that problem.

The next is to decide the objective for your birthday email program. Do you want the messages to be a branding initiative or are they to be a means for adding incremental sales? There’s no reason you can make both of these a goal for your happy birthday emails. Keep this in mind as you design the email’s template.

If you’re using these as an opportunity to merely have a favorable brand impression, your message doesn’t need to have a sales incentive, but the content should be strong enough to have a positive impact. If you also want to increase offline or online sales from the message, include an incentive, such as a special birthday discount, to drive purchases.

Here are some birthday message tips:

• Make the email pretty – keep your brand colors and look intact, but this is an opportunity to do something playful as well.
• Give people time to redeem the offer – Your contacts receive lots of birthday emails. Give them a chance to make use of your promotion.
• Test your campaign – this message can be used all year long. Keep an eye on what offers are performing best and which subject lines have the highest open rates. Adjust as needed.
• Send a targeted offer – use past purchase behavior or other information collected at sign-up to send a relevant offer.

As was expected, I received numerous emails to wish me well on my birthday. Here are some notes about a couple that stood out:

Atlanta Magazine:
What I liked: I’ve been a regular reader of the print version for several years, but their message included a discount to subscribe to the digital version of the magazine. In all, the message was short and sweet.
The offer: In addition to giving a discount on the digital version, a local museum also offered a discount on tickets to visit. This is one that I’ll definitely be using, especially since the offer is valid for four months – plenty of time to visit.

The Counter
This burger restaurant is a favorite of my family’s, but I’ve never ordered a shake after a meal there. The email itself looked pretty, but left me with more questions than answers. The message didn’t include any details about the offer (What size shake? When does the offer expire?) or even what types of shakes do they offer. When I clicked to learn more, I was taken to a web page with offer details written in tiny print. It’s nice that they wanted to wish me well, but I’d have had a much more enjoyable experience if I could’ve just printed the email (or shown it on my smartphone) to get my free shake. Is abuse of the offer really that rampant?!

Here are some other links that discuss birthday emails:
Silverpop: Your Blueprint for Building a Birthday Email Program

Marketing Profs: Birthday, Anniversary Emails Generate More Revenue

If a birthday wish is buzzworthy, your customers can become brand ambassadors. Be sure to include a sharing mechanism if you want to extend the “birthday party.”

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.

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.

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.

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.