Whether you’re a new company sending out its first e-mail, trying a new look, or launching your newest campaign: this blog aims to give some tips for designing an effective and engaging template to build on. Mainly, we will discuss Chaffey’s eight critical factors with an aim to back them up or argue when necessary.
Conversation
Interaction with your brand could be encouraged by having a wider dialog with your customers through email. Some methods to encourage interaction with email include polls, ratings, competitions and sharing to social media. Chadwick and Doherty (2011) found that it was important for an email to flow based on 75% of their case studies; from the subject line, into the message headline and the creative copy. The subject line is key to trigger first response from your audience. It’s compiled of sender and subject matter, including the brand and not just the email address is more beneficial to the business and the majority of subject matter included incentives, but all were related to their email message purpose.
Relevance
Response rates for emails are always higher when they target the interests of individual recipients and offer personalised value. This can be completed through traditional targeting options or through sense and response communications, a newer method of delivering contextual emails developed in the US. Sense and response depends on a strategy built around the customer life-cycle with monitoring and follow up. Some ‘Relevance’ suggested methods include using demographics, life-cycle groups, observing multi-channel behaviour and analysing customer personas with psychographics. “You can only target if you have collected sufficient information to profile an individual and really understand their characteristics and interests.” Heinonen (2002) found that relevance is something that is personally perceived, so one persons idea of relevant information can dramatically vary from another’s, making a strong profile for each customer really important. This can make it quite difficult to create relevant marketing communication content that will cover a large audience. The biggest factors that affect perceived relevance are brand loyalty and project involvement.
Incentive
This is where the consumer asks ‘what’s in it for me?’ You can offer something just from interesting/informative text, offer things that are more tangible after following links, or offer certain promotions. It’s important to highlight your incentives within your formatting. Groupon is an obvious brand that demonstrates a lot of incentives. They go heavy with the offers and email quantity, but they know that I am personally partial to an impulse buy so it’s worth sending the many emails I delete for that one email I take action on. You can see here that I have only opened three out of the past fourteen emails from them. This can then be related back again to building a persona that will improve the relevance of the emails they send me.
With the kind of emails that I open more regularly, that don’t include hard sales, incentives that drive me to action more lie mainly in the informative type of email style. If i’m reading the content of an email, i’m much more likely to follow through with something they are offering.
Timing
Engagement with emails increases when you send at personalised times based on when your consumers tend to view their emails. Business-2-Business emails are mostly sent during work hours or midweek. SPAM is often sent in the morning so you can stand out a bit more by sending later in the day. The time of day may also determine how your audience will interact with the content – open rate, open and click through, and responding. Entrepreneur blog (2012), backed up by Blue Fountain Media (2009), found some optimal timings at early morning, early afternoon and early evening. However, this information is now four-seven years old. When I look to my surroundings, mainly students, I see people that deal with emails as and when they receive them on their phones, with the responses being ignore, delete, read or remember to read when there’s more time. With this demographic I believe further study is needed with alternative and updated metrics. Only testing will determine optimal timing for your own business, such as open rates and click throughs throughout the day.
Integration
Yang et al (2015) underline that online marketing activities should form an integrated system and not stand alone. Email needs to join your marketing communications with social media, websites, and even direct mail. It’s important to have a consistent brand voice across all channels to give your business a personality that customers will connect more easily with. A past blog, Juggling Your Channels, offers a deeper look into this area of become fluid across all platforms of online presences.
Creativity
This refers to the overall design; layout, use of colour, images and copy. Direct mail often ‘saves the best til last’, but “email is an impulsive medium where visitors will scan it quickly.” Your subject line and first paragraph should be enough to let the consumer click through straight away if they like what they see. Therefore, you should include a link in the first three or four lines of the email with a Call-To-Action repeated in the closing lines. Being a bit more out of the box with your campaigns is a great way to reach Gen C consumers and distinguish yourself from competition.
Attributes
Attributes of the email include the Header; subject line, addresses, date/time and format, Deliverability; whether your email is assessed as spam or not, and Renderability; how your email is seen while still in the inbox. An initial discovery from Mailer-Mailer (2015) was that shorter subject lines had higher open rates. Duffy (2007) found that on average 20% of commercial emails are blocked or filtered by internet providers, which leads to a massive revenue loss. One way to improve odds, is to have an official company emails address, and not one made from a combination of numbers and letters @ info or @ do not reply.
Landing Pages
Most people use a web page already part of their site, such as home page or product page, but this doesn’t lead to very much action. A landing page is what your recipients will reach after they follow your CTA link. B2B emails often lead to an online form that helps learn about their consumers. It’s important to test this factor in your creative layout as it could make have a dramatic difference on the conversion rate. Bonini (2013) discusses how consumers have become immune to the generic CTA links, so you need to stand out and pop off the page. The success of a CTA can be optimised if it is placed in relevant content and offers value to your audience.
References:
1st image : B. Moss (2015) The future of responsive web design http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2015/03/the-future-of-responsive-web-design/
3rd image: BlueFountainMedia (2009) Top 5 Elements of Successful Email Marketing Strategies Available <http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/top-5-elements-of-successful-email-marketing-strategies/> [Accessed 1/05/2016]
D. Chaffey (2011) Email Marketing : Seven Steps to Success Guide Smart Insights Available <http://www.melia-technology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/7-steps-email-marketing-guide-smart-insights.pdf> [Accessed 27/04/2016]
F. Ellis-Chadwick, N. F. Doherty (2012) Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing, Journal of Business Research, Volume 65, Issue 6, June 2012, Pages 843–848 Available <http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0148296311000063> [Accessed 01/05/2016]
J. Bonini (2013) Design Tips for Creating Calls-to-Action that Pop Off the Page Impact branding and media Available <https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/design-tips-for-creating-calls-to-action-that-pop-off-the-page> [Accessed 02/05/2016]
K. Heinonen, T. Strandvik (2002) CONSUMER RESPONSIVENESS TO MARKETING COMMUNICATION IN DIGITAL CHANNELS FRONTIERS OF E-BUSINESS RESEARCH Available <http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30642640/Heinonen_StrandvikFeBR2002.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1462115711&Signature=GWKS4FYvslsWwJG43n6jFUp%2BZBk%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DConsumer_responsiveness_to_marketing_com.pdf> [Accessed 30/04/2016]
Mailer-Mailer (2015) Our Fifteenth Email Marketing Metrics Report Available <http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/index.rwp> [Accessed 01/04/2016]
M. Sebastian (2012) The Best and Worst Times to Send an Email (Infographic) Entrepreneur Blog Available <https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225266> [Accessed 29/04/2016]
S. Duffy (2007) A guide to email deliverability for B2C email marketers Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice p 156-167 Available <http://www.palgrave-journals.com/dddmp/journal/v9/n2/abs/4350081a.html> [Accessed 01/05/2016]
S. Yang, S. Lin, J. R. Carlson, W. T. Ross Jr (2016) Brand engagement on social media: will firms’ social media efforts influence search engine advertising effectiveness? Journal of Marketing Management Volume 32, Issue 5-6 Available <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0267257X.2016.1143863> [Accessed 30/04/2016]
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