We all have a mental image of what the perfect email looks like. It’s sleek, it’s beautiful and it makes us crave the product or service being presented. Most of us have seen the posh Apple emails or Betty Crocker’s mouthwatering email masterpieces. They are the gold standard that everyone wants to live up, to but I would never in a million years recommend to one of my clients to copy those emails.
Why?
My clients aren’t household names. My clients aren’t branding - they’re selling. If you are not trying to make money off your emails, I say go ahead and make them as pretty as you want! Have a ball! If, however, your goal is to maximize your ROI and get people clicking, buying, filling out lead forms or making a phone call, then ugly is what you really want. I’m not saying that your email should repulse, offend or have some ridiculous color scheme; I am just saying you want to avoid the temptation to create some household -name, beautiful-branding wanna be email campaign.
The majority of those beautifully crafted email campaigns are almost all images. According to MarketingSherpa, 66% of people have images turned off in their email programs by default. If you are a household name, or you have a constant 70% open rate, then you can pull that off. Otherwise you are sending your subscribers an email of big red X’s. If you want people to turn on your images, they need to see some content that appeals to them first. Firefox has a plug-in called Image-Show-Hide that will let you turn off images in your browser. See what the emails look like with images off during the design phase so you don’t waste your time making edits once you finally see it with images off during testing. Make sure your email conveys your message just as well with the images turned off as it does with them turned on.
Secondly, do you want people to look at your email or do you want them to click and convert? You have about 3 seconds to get their attention and make them want more or you’ll miss that conversion. How do you get people to convert? A good value proposition and a well-placed call to action! If people are concentrating on your pretty images, they are more likely to miss your call to action.
We recently ran a test on email navigation. Version A had plan old HTML text links to different conversion pages. Version B had beautifully crafted, eye-catching buttons for each one of those same links. Guess what? Version A’s boring text links blew away the colorful images in version B. It received 16% more clicks than the prettier version. Imagine how much more money you could make if you had 16% more traffic coming in from your emails?
It’s been tested a million times, and the way your email looks matters a lot less than you think when it comes to making you money. Even though all it takes is a simple A/B test to realize the power of uglying up your email, there are still very few people doing it. Test it already!
When clients come to us on a performance basis they picture that perfect email template. When we present them with our idea they can often be confused by the direction we take them in. It takes those clients longer to take off because we end up having to first test the pretty email they want against the one we know will convert.
Rest assured that the perfect email you are picturing in your mind and the plain Jane email that brings you the most wealth are not one and the same.
3 Comments »Just last week we were trumpeting the continued growth and popularity of Internet video and its many uses across the Web. We do this ocassionally to remind our readers about this amazing tool that you have at your disposal for powerful marketing strategies and branding efforts.
Coincidentally, Clickz.com reported only last week that Nielsen Company data indicates online video use in America is up by 45% compared to where it was last year at this time. Now, admittedly, it's been a rough winter in parts of the United States and a lot of folks have been home-bound, but we at Fathom don't think that explains this very large jump in web video viewing. Rather, between Netflix, Hulu and YouTube, more and more consumers are "tuning-in" to the convenience of Internet video as their viewing resource. And with YouTube now featuring more commercials before their video content, advertisers are "getting it" about reaching this growing Internet generation with their products and services messages.
If you "get it" too, we'd like to work with you. Fathom Online Marketing produces and distributes web videos for branding and marketing purposes for clients across the spectrum of the business world in North America. Contact us today to learn more about our Internet video marketing services. And check out the full Clickz.com article here to learn more about the growth of online video in the U.S.A.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »A mechanic relies on his racket and socket set. An artist relies on her paint brush. An email marketer relies on the best email marketing tools. Here is what you need to be using.
HTML & CSS
- W3Schools offers free HTML and CSS tutorials. You'll need to know both for designing email templates and editing content.
Email Marketing Creative and Design
- Adobe Photoshop for editing images, creating layouts, and slicing large images.
- HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver for creating and previewing HTML. Just make sure you use the coding view in Dreamweaver to build your html email template.
Email Lists
- Sign Up Forms to help you build a high converting email marketing list.
- TextPad to open different types of text files.
- Microsoft Access to work with large databases.
- Microsoft Excel as a general purpose database tool.
Email Message Delivery
- Email Service Provider because there is no reason for you to manage the complex process of transferring email when there are hundreds of great, and ultimately less expensive, options available.
- Transactional Messages to immediately communicate time-sensitive information to your subscribers.
- Rendering Tests to preview how your email design looks across ISPs, browsers, devices and operating systems.
- Delivery Reports to learn more about potential blocks or delivery issues at certain ISPs.
- Test Accounts with AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo at the bare minimum. Check rendering and delivery manually.
Tracking
- Open and Click Tracking should be provided by your Email Service Provider, if not, get a new one.
- Conversion Tracking to segment out subscribers who have completed your desired conversion goal.
- Google Analytics to continue tracking subscribers after they leave the email and peruse your website.
These are all great tools and are the bare minimum to get started creating effective email marketing campaigns. What is the best email marketing tool though? What one tool will help your email marketing performance and generate the highest ROI?
In my opinion, the best email marketing tool is a smart, creative, and outgoing team. No one person is ever going to be the best at strategy, design, analysis AND testing. Sure, they can attack the low hanging fruit of email marketing, but they aren't going to be able to generate the highest ROI for a big email database by themselves.
By allowing your team members to focus on their one area of expertise, you can build an email program that is strong in every area, not just one or two.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »
When it comes to blogging, you might think there’s no right or wrong way to go about it. Blogging gives you the freedom to creatively express your opinion and state your viewpoint on any given subject. Yet, there are a number of things you could do wrong that not only make it difficult to communicate your point effectively, but also tarnish your reputation. Here are the “seven deadly sins” of blogging:
1. You don’t answer the 5 W’s (and the H). In just about anything you write, you need to address the who, what, when, where, why and how of the subject you’re talking about. Without these basic questions answered, readers won’t have a complete understanding of the subject and will wonder what was the point of your blog post.
2. You make “actual word” typos. Any typo will easily and immediately tarnish your reputation. Don’t use spell check as your safety net because this tool won’t catch an incorrect word spelled correctly. Examine your content to make sure that each word is actually the word you intended to write.
3. You publish your first draft. Each step of the writing process needs to be carried out when blogging. Your process should include writing, editing, proofreading and more proofreading. The first draft of your blog post should never be the final draft.
4. Your post looks like a Wikipedia article. Don’t mindlessly spit out facts. Each fact included must have a purpose and support your blog post thesis.
5. Your paragraphs break the four-line rule. Edit your paragraphs to be four lines or less. People don’t have all day to read your blog posts, so your posts should be structured for short attention spans. Shorter paragraphs grab people’s attention and keep their attention.
6. Your posts include obvious factual mistakes. For instance, if the URLs you link to are not accurate or are no longer live, your post just ends up looking sloppy and you look like a careless blogger.
7. You make word choice errors. Do you know the different between “stationary” and “stationery?” You should. By not using the correct words, your blog post looks unprofessional.
How do you keep your blog and your reputation in mint condition? Share your tips in the comments below.
2 Comments »When Facebook Messages was announced last year, it was rumored to be a “Gmail killer”, a “Yahoo! Killer”, etc. Basically, the conventional wisdom was, as the popular song has it: “It’s the end of the world as we know it”, and Facebook was feeling fine.
Following the announcement, I polled acquaintances, friends and reviewed comments from industry folks about whether or not they would use the new Facebook Messages. The consensus among the people I surveyed varied between “What’s that?” and “No thanks, I already have email and I don’t need another place to check.”
Here we are, roughly four months out from Facebook’s message, and the excitement has died down a little. Maybe more than a little. I’ve been tracking the impact of Facebook email addresses on our major client since the implementation, as email addresses became more and more available, and while there has been growth, it’s been relatively minor.
Those numbers represent the presence of @facebook.com email addresses in two email lists. Yahoo! still holds first place in both databases.
However, numbers only tell one small part of the story. Even Facebook admits that Facebook Messages isn’t a replacement of email. In Facebook’s blog, one of their engineers says:
“To be clear, Messages is not email [my emphasis]. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”
Having used Messages since it was possible for me to do so, I can say that I find the lack of the things mentioned above, particularly subject line and the inability to cc: so that I can include people indirectly in my “conversation”, quite annoying. If you send out a message to more than one person, any responses someone sends you get distributed to everyone who got the original message (along with complaints about getting messages not meant for them).
In addition, it is presently impossible to delete a segment of a conversation. You have to wipe out the entire thing. Joel Seligstein, the author of the above blog post, states:
“I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From ‘hey nice to meet you’ to ‘do you want to get coffee sometime’ to ‘our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight.’ That's a really cool idea.”
I beg to differ with Mr. Seligstein. I don’t necessarily want to remember EVERYTHING I said to someone, and I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. In one thread, I could have a deep and meaningful conversation followed by a really stupid comment I’d like to kill and forget because I hit the Enter button before my brain had a chance to edit itself. Only I can’t.
Facebook is the largest, most heavily used social media site on the planet. It would be foolish to assume that they won’t change and adapt as the Messages (and @facebook.com email address) rollout continues and user feedback comes in. In the meantime, what it seems to be that they’ve done is reinvent Twitter with no 140 character limitation. I have to be honest – if I want to use Twitter, that’s where I’ll go.
In the meantime, it would be interesting to know if anyone has seen a major increase in the presence by percentage of ‘facebook.com’ addresses in their mailing lists. Until that happens, Facebook Messages is not going to have half the impact on how email is done as the growing Mobile market. Right now, that’s where the challenges lie for email marketers.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »
