A Quick Lesson in Email Marketing
Email marketing, done properly, is an unbelievable tool. Effective and cheap.
Email marketing, done properly, can have a huge Return on Investment. Take for example, an email/fax campaign I was recently involved in. Last year, the company spent about $5,000 on a direct mail blitz that netted them (from what I heard) just about nothing.
This year, they ditched the snail mail and sent out only email and fax pieces. From what I understand, the email side alone of the campaign brought in around $28,000 in business (don’t hold me to that number, it was done on a calculator in a meeting). Not too shabby, considering the only costs were the design of the piece, time to scrub the list and the pennies per email to send.
Not too shabby.
However
However! Email Marketing is very much like web design/development. There are constraints to be aware of and best practices to follow.
When your designer is simply unaware or willfully ignorant of these, you get a very ineffective product.
Hi Five to You!
Aces! Your fancy-pants newsletter looks great in your maximized window in Outlook on your fast computer running Windows XP with a 20” monitor and your email address whitelisted so the images download & display automatically over your T1 broadband connection.
But unless your subscriber is sitting on your lap in your office, she may not have such a pleasant experience and be dazzled by your technical wizardry.
You may not be able to test every platform, but at the very least, test the popular ones you know some of your subscribers will be using.
If you don’t, you run the risk of a subscriber seeing something like, oh, say this:
Exhibit A:
(Clicky image for larger view)
Yep, all the content is about 800 pixels below the viewport.
If I didn’t know who sent that, I’d be clicking on “Report Spam“ faster than Brad Dielman on his way to free food.
Take a Minute
Really, take the extra 30 seconds to add email addresses to your test list that go to the major free clients. Gmail. Yahoo!. Hotmail LiveMail. Someone in your office (maybe even you!) is sure to have an account.
You may just save yourself some unsubscribers.
37signals posted something recently about the email they send out to their customers, it’s all text and no longer than a paragraph.
I know it’s not an email campaign, but in campaigns I’ve worked with too often clients become relient on images. And like you said, that’s all fine and well when you can support it, but so many people can’t, or just don’t want to download all those images.
Additionally, too many companies sign up every person who ever emailed them. Just because I asked you about support on a product doesn’t mean I want to get your spam!
→ beth · 03/10/07 06:58 AM · #
Brendan,
Excellent advice. This is only touching the surface of things you need to look for when designing an email campaign. So many decisions to be made, programatically and design wise.
You should do a series of designing for email campaigns.
That photo of Brad brought a smile to my face. ha. That’s hilarious.
→ Nate Klaiber · 03/10/07 07:04 AM · #
@beth
I think some people are trained to NOT use images for fear of spamming. Spammers use images to their advantage to confirm a users email address (after all, the image does have to be requested from their server). IT departments seem to suggest turning them off , along with the preview pane, for a safer email experience.
People designing emails don’t often think about these things (Even though they practice the same constraints) – they are thinking flashy and images. It’s sad – their message gets inhibited by a poor decision of an email design.
And, I get a bad taste on my tongue when people email me other crap without my permission. Why do they even try and be sneaky? It’s obvious I am going to unsubscribe and blacklist them, what did they think was going to happen?
Anyway, I have more thoughts…but I have already taken up too much comment space.
→ Nate Klaiber · 03/10/07 07:08 AM · #
Brendan,
While it does only take a few seconds to add email addresses to your test list, that opens up the need for hours of work restructuring the email template.
That Outlookified happy emailer you described in your article is in for a world of pain when trying to make the messages play nice in hotma…er window live mail, yahoo (old and new) mail and of course gmail. Ugh.
Also, in case you are not aware, the folks at Campaign Monitor are trying to get baseline standards support across email clients.
I believe that is a worthy cause.
→ Bridget Stewart · 03/10/07 07:18 AM · #
Great article, Brendan. And timely. One of the partners here just asked me to set up an email campaign.
I’m trying to hold my ground and make sure that it gets done the right way, but ultimately the decision is out of my hands.
As for the picture…
Viva la free food!
→ Brad Dielman · 03/10/07 07:46 AM · #
@beth — Clients becoming reliant on images is something we’re always going to be battling, unfortunately. The problem is that with email, images are turned off by default. No matter how many times you repeat or show this, they just try to think of a different way to ask the question instead of accepting it.
And I’m actually all for an (almost) all text email, structured semantically with some color (font tags!). Given the choice, I always select text-only when subscribing to a list. Article for another day I think…
And I’m not going to get into proper list management, today anyway :)
@Nate — Thanks, and I tried to keep it short since I have a tendency to ramble on and lose my point. I think I’m going to try to write some more on email marketing and list management, as I’m struggling to keep from writing more in this very comment
★ brendan · 03/10/07 08:09 AM · #
@Bridget — Cop out! For shame! :) That’s exactly the same as developing a website only for Internet Explorer 6 because that’s what everyone uses anyway and it’s too hard to make it display correctly cross-platform.
Email marketing is even more about the message than a website! You’re shoving it right into the readers face instead of shouting from across the street.
If your template breaks that badly on a different client, you’re trying to do way too much! Are you designing for your user or for yourself?
I read Campaign Monitor as well, and what they’re doing is great. Absolutely a worthy cause. But realistically, years away from ever happening.
★ brendan · 03/10/07 08:21 AM · #
@Brad — Good luck, the pushback from the suits is usually even worse with email. They have to see it fail a few times before they (maybe) let you do it the right way.
Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to lose a battle to win the war!
★ brendan · 03/10/07 08:36 AM · #
Sorry if I came off as coping out. That wasn’t my point at all. I was “ugh-ing” over the amount of work I end up doing just to get html email to work. It’s even more difficult than trying to get web pages to display well in various browsers.
My bigger problem is trying to get my boss to care about how BADLY it will look if I don’t take the time to test it across multiple platforms.
Your Outlookified happy emailer is likely to be completely oblivious to that amount of work designing HTML emails takes. It’s a shame.
Dude, I’m totally on your side here. Honest, I am! :-)
No matter how far off standards for email support is, I still believe it’s worthwhile cause. Making designer’s work this hard just to do something (cough) simple (cough) like make an email campaign is wrong.
→ Bridget Stewart · 03/10/07 01:33 PM · #
Haha I know what you were (are) saying, I just used your post as a chance to hop on my soapbox.
I would never say “for shame” in seriousness. :)
★ brendan · 03/10/07 07:12 PM · #
Oh, if that’s your game…
I love me a good soap box!
→ Bridget Stewart · 04/10/07 06:43 AM · #
Yes, if I could grow a decent moustache I’d be twirling it forebodingly…
★ brendan · 04/10/07 07:44 AM · #