Blog - Email Marketing Rules

@EmailSeinfeld: Kramer invents Scent-in-Email: “It’s like having the beach, right in your inbox.” Elaine’s bf (@chadswhite) says her subject lines are weak.

@EmailStatCenter: 50% felt getting their name wrong in an email was a reason to think less of the brand. – @Emailvision http://t.co/LgBHuwVkJ9

@aliverson: Hey “email expert,” your email’s going to spam because you messed up your DMARC record.

@JustinBridegan: Don’t be afraid of long subject lines, be afriad of words without meaning. Clarity is the key #ETcafe #emailmarketing

Great additions to the Email Swipe File pinboard

Litmus email sent on 4/23/13 >>View the pin

Tumblr email sent on 3/6/13 >>View the pin

Jack Spade email sent on 3/21/13 >>View the pin

Sephora email sent during 3/2013 >>View the pin

Noteworthy subject lines

Karmaloop, 4/30 — What? We Are Not F’n around 40% Off Footwear- 48 Hours‏
Etsy, 4/27 — Watch Your Language!
Gap, 4/29 — 1 dress, 4 ways to wear it‏
Crate & Barrel, 4/29 — Chop chop. Up to 45% off Wusthof Gourmet knives.
Restoration Hardware, 4/27 — Introducing RH Small Spaces. 116 Pages of Inspired Design.
ThinkGeek, 4/25 — ThinkGeek: F5, F5, F5!
The North Face, 4/22 — Opt for Recycled Gear this Earth Day‏
Uncommon Goods, 4/22 — Re-Make a Difference‏
Boston Market, 4/11 — The Big Rib-bate: Two Rib Meals for $10.40!
Brooks Brothers, 4/11 — An Interview with Wynton Marsalis‏
Threadless, 4/10 — These new Iron Man tees will not give you super hero powers… or will they?
The Container Store, 4/8 — Ever wonder why we have so many hangers?
Clinique, 4/4 — BB or CC? Find your skin perfector and we’ll ship it free.
Home Depot, 4/4 — Black Friday Is Back! Savings Start Today!
Zappos.com, 4/4 — Puddles Beware!
ModCloth, 4/3 — Retro looks you can wear during your next time warp.
Ninety Nine Restaurants, 4/3 — Our New Menu is Here!
Ann Taylor, 4/3 — NEED. WANT. MUST-HAVE.
West Elm Market, 4/1 — No green thumbs needed…

Most popular posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

1. Yahoo Mail Hacking Reveals Do-Not-Reply Failures

2. Email Signup Failures at Crisis Levels

3. The Many Gradations of Mobile Email Design

4. The One-Two Punch of Subject Lines and Preheaders

5. Quarter of B2C Marketers Send a Welcome Email Series

Posted by Chad S. White

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#ETCafe Twitter Chat Preview: Measuring Email Marketing Success

Posted on April 30, 2013

The ExactTarget team invites you to participate in our #ETCafe Twitter chat every Thursday from 11am-12pm ET, where we discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. The virtual coffee chat is held directly on Twitter, hosted by @ExactTarget.

This week I’ll be a guest on the chat and we’ll be discussing measuring email marketing success. Here’s a preview of the discussion questions for our chat this Thursday:

1. Do you know the return on investment (ROI) of your email program?
2. How do you measure your email program’s influence on offline behavior and online sharing?
3. Do you measure subscriber lifetime value in addition to measuring campaign success?
4. Which email metrics do you find most valuable to running your email program?
5. How much weight do you give to negative metrics like spam complaints and opt-outs when measuring success?
6. Which key performance indicators does your CMO/CEO judge your email program by? Do you think they are the right KPIs?
7. What resources would you recommend to help email marketers better measure their success and set the right goals?

Please join us this Thursday for an exciting discussion with dynamic interactive marketing professionals! Follow the #ETCafe hashtag in your favorite Twitter application and be sure and add the hashtag to your tweet to participate.

Posted by Chad S. White

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The One-Two Punch of Subject Lines and Preheaders

Posted on April 25, 2013

While the growth of mobile email has more radically affected email design, it’s also affected subject lines by displaying fewer characters. As a consequence, subject lines have been steadily trending shorter over the past few years. While we used to recommend that subject lines be no longer than around 60 characters, now the recommendation is no more than about 40 characters. So subject lines are working harder on a per character basis.

The good news is that subject lines have backup in the form of preheader text, which is HTML text that’s placed at the very top of your email. Preheaders play a more prominent on mobile devices—and that’s in addition to the extra attention that preheaders get from Gmail and Outlook, which display a portion of your preheader text as snippet text after your subject line.

Many brands are wisely using their preheaders to elaborate on, continue or otherwise support the subject line, including hyperlinking some or all of their preheader text to enable subscribers to take action without reading further. Here are some great examples from recent emails:

West Elm, 2/18/13
Subject line: Today only: free shipping (plus a Presidents Day surprise)‏
Preheader: Use promo code FREE4PRES at checkout, some exclusions apply

LeapFrog, 2/18/13
Subject line: Be First to Love Our New, Exclusive LeapPad2 Bundles!
Preheader: Featuring Hello Kitty + Jake & the Never Land Pirates. Shop Now

The North Face, 2/22/13
Subject line: Win a $100 Gift Card – only 6 Days Left‏
Preheader: Download the app and submit a photo for your chance to win a $100 TNF eGift Card – don’t miss out on The North Face Never Stop Exploring App Photo Contest

Barneys, welcome series
Subject line: Fashion at Your Fingertips: Stay in the Know!‏
Preheader: Follow Barneys New York on The Window, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest & YouTube.

Expedia, 3/4/13
Subject line: Save up to 50%: ASAP hotels‏
Preheader: ASAP: A Sudden Amazing Price

Wayfair, 3/19/13
Subject line: ★Convertible sofas under $499, go crazy for chevron, colorful accents & decor, get an elegant master bedroom ★
Preheader: Get framed art $55 and under. Kids love outdoor playhouses. Travel with carry-ons $100 and under.

Threadless, 4/24/13
Subject Line: Aerosoiled and 9 more new goofy designs by MADE artist Aaron Jay!
Preheader: Plus, hang out while we interview Aaron Jay at 11:30AM CST.

Gap, 4/24/13
Subject Line: Last day for 30% off! The clock’s ticking…
Preheader: Offer ends today, 4/24. Online only. Can’t see images? Click here.

Sephora, 4/25/13
Subject Line: Pick your gift!
Preheader: Choose from five of our favorite fragrances.*

Preheader text can be a significant source of clicks and spur deeper interactive with an email, so if you’re not using it you should probably reconsider and do some testing. And if you’re using your preheader text for whitelisting requests, “View this email with images” links or unsubscribe links, consider placing those calls-to-actions after preheader text that supports the subject line.

Posted by Chad S. White

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Sending a Welcome Series Is the New Onboarding Differentiator

Posted on April 23, 2013

The beginning of an email marketing relationship is the most important. Not only are subscribers more engaged and more likely to convert, but optimizing the experience of a subscriber’s first month or so on your list can extend the overall time they remain engaged with your brand via email.

The welcome email has been a key tool in getting that relationship off on the right foot. In recent years, more brands are sending welcome emails. At the same time, the welcome email that simply confirmed a subscriber’s subscription has largely disappeared to be replaced by a welcome that seeks to immediately engage new subscribers with deals, progressive profiling and cross-channel opt-ins.

Nearly 81% of B2C marketers send welcome emails to their new subscribers, according to new ExactTarget research involving… Read my entire Email Insider column >>

Posted by Chad S. White

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Email Signup Failures at Crisis Levels

Posted on April 11, 2013

Opt-in failures are costing brands high-quality subscribers and dampening their list growth. More than 15% of homepage and site registration email signup processes resulted in failures, according to ExactTarget research involving more than 160 B2C brands, including retailers, restaurants, manufacturers, travel and hospitality, and nonprofits. This is a worsening from several years ago when signup failures hovered around an already-too-high 12%.

These failures are particularly costly because people who signup via your website are your most valuable subscribers. So losing these has an outsized effect on your email program’s ROI.

While it’s not clear why many of the signups failed, some program characteristics coincided with higher and lower failure rates:

Using confirmed opt-in (COI): Brands that use COI, where a subscriber has to click on a link in a signup confirmation email to complete the signup process, were more likely to have their subscriptions fail. Nearly 27% of the brands using COI suffered signup failures.

For example, GoDaddy’s COI failed because every time you confirmed the signup by clicking on the link in the signup confirmation request email, it sent you another signup confirmation request email and bounced you back to the page notifying you that you have to confirm your subscription by clicking on the link in the email they just sent you. Simply put, it created an infinite loop that you could never break out of.

Sending a welcome email: Signups were less likely to fail if a brand was able to successfully deliver a welcome email. Only 9% of brands saw their signups fail after delivering a welcome email. (See More Brands Sending Welcome Emails, But Opportunities Remain.)

Sending a welcome email series: Not a single brand that delivered a welcome email series saw their signup fail subsequently. (See Quarter of B2C Marketers Send a Welcome Email Series.) This is likely an indication of greater sophistication and therefore better controls.

The high level of signup failures speaks to a need to do more subscription process audits, which have become more complex in recent years.

Platform proliferation means there are now more devices, more operating systems and more browsers to check since they all don’t work the same together. For instance, Discovery Store’s signup form encountered a fatal error when using Firefox on Windows 7, but worked fine when using Internet Explorer.

Acquisition source proliferation means there are now more channels to check. For instance, is your text-to-subscribe working properly? Does the email signup form on your Facebook page work? Does the email signup during checkout on your mobile app work? Tracking your subscribers by acquisition source can help you uncover signup issues, in addition to helping you make decisions about subscriber value by acquisition source.

If you haven’t done an acquisition source audit recently, it’s probably time to do one as you could be unknowingly losing valuable subscribers.

Posted by Chad S. White

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Yahoo Mail Hacking Reveals Do-Not-Reply Failures

Posted on April 9, 2013

Much has been written about all the Yahoo Mail accounts that have been hacked in recent months. One of my tracking accounts was among those hacked and hijacked into sending a spam email to each of the contacts in my address book—which was full of sender addresses used by retailers to send promotional email.

The resulting stream of “Failure Notice” messages made for a poignant commentary on the practice of using do-not-reply email addresses and mailboxes that don’t accept email. Even the “Thank you for contacting us” replies were mostly just messages saying that you reached an unmonitored inbox and instructing you to contact them by other means. Only a handful of brands including Alloy, Banana Republic, Crutchfield and Drugstore.com confirmed receipt of the message and said they’d reply (which none of them did considering it was obviously spam).

In the past, opponents of do-not-reply addresses have argued that they’re subscriber-unfriendly, that they send the message that it’s okay for the marketer to email the subscriber but not vice versa. Making it impossible to easily reply to messages eliminates interactions that might otherwise occur, which is a detriment to the marketer and their brand. Those points continue to be true.

However, over the past year or two, a new reason has emerged to ditch the do-not-reply address and start monitoring the replies to your promotional messages: deliverability. ISPs now factor in engagement metrics when determining whether to deliver, junk or block your emails. So if your subscribers open, scroll through, click, mark as important, forward, reply to or otherwise interact with your emails, then your future emails are more likely to be welcome.

While monitoring promotional email sender address accounts can be a chore because of all the spam and out-of-office auto-replies they get, more tools are now available to separate the signal from the noise.

So if you’re still using a do-not-reply address, you now have one less reason to keep using it and one more reason to make the switch.

Posted by Chad S. White

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The Many Gradations of Mobile Email Design

Posted on April 4, 2013

With mobile email reading now beyond the critical mass stage for nearly every brand, marketers are finally making creating mobile-friendly emails a priority. According to a MarketingSherpa survey, it’s an even greater priority than integrating email and social, which I think is very appropriate and overdue.

My design colleagues here at ExactTarget just released Designing for the Mobile Inbox, a report that gives a great overview of the need for mobile email design and discusses the basics of mobile aware design and responsive design and how they’re different from desktop-centric design.

While it’s helpful to think of email design as falling into those three major buckets, there are actually intermediary steps along the way from desktop-centric design to truly responsive design, and many of the brands I watch are definitely taking intermediary steps:

1. Desktop-Centric Design: Traditional design that’s wide for viewing on desktop and laptop monitors and small links and buttons that are intended for clicking on with a cursor

By my estimation, most marketers are still here at square one.

2. Quasi-Mobile Aware Design: The primary and secondary messages use images and buttons that are mobile-friendly, but the header, navigation bar and footer are still desktop-centric

This is the first step that many marketers take toward being mobile-friendly. Rather than overhaul their entire template, they’re improving the content that changes from email to email. Uncommon Goods is a good example of this approach. Their primary and secondary messages are mobile aware, but their navigation bar and footer aren’t touch-friendly yet.

3. Mobile Aware Design: A single email design that works pretty well on both desktops and mobile devices

Skinny designs fall into this category. I like the creative approach taken by Daily Candy, which makes the entire right-hand side of their emails expendable in case it’s clipped by a small screen.

Spacious designs—with large images, large type and large buttons—that look good on tablets but scale down nicely for smartphones also fall into this category. Lowe’s emails are a good example of this approach.

4. Fluid, Liquid or Scalable Design: Expanding or contracting to fill the screen size, the design keeps everything on the screen to avoid the need for pinching on touchscreens

5. Adaptive Design: The design generally uses one or two pixel-width “breakpoints” that correspond to typical screen sizes for smartphones, tablets and desktops to trigger content changes and reformatting so reading the content is optimized for those screen sizes

This flavor of design is often lumped into responsive design, although it’s technically simpler and more predictable in terms of rendering. For instance, we recently called this Starwood email and this REI email responsive when they’re actually adaptive designs with a single breakpoint that converts the email from desktop-friendly to smartphone-friendly. Many marketers will likely never see the need to improve their email designs beyond this point.

6. Responsive Design: The design format and content dynamically changes based on the screen size

This is held up as the holy grail of email design, but there’s very little true responsive design out there in terms of emails. To get a sense of what responsive design can do, just adjust your browser window when reading my blog, which is fully responsive. You’ll see the size of the images and text change dynamically, as well as the content reorient itself, all the way down to a screen width of just 180 pixels.

How mobile-friendly are your email designs currently and which flavor of mobile email design are you aiming for in the future?

Posted by Chad S. White

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The Last Word on March 2013

Posted on April 2, 2013

A roundup of articles, posts, tweets and emails you might have missed last month:

Must-read articles, posts & whitepapers

Responsive email design (#RED)

Spamhaus Speaks

Marketers Push to Take Email Mobile

Marketing In The Age Of The Inbox Within The Inbox

Using a Popover as an Acquisition Tactic

Triggered Emails Secure Higher Open Rates, Engagement

Insightful & entertaining tweets

@stylecampaign: Anyone….how are they doing this? http://t.co/VkoivrrJzL v @alexcwilliams
@stylecampaign: Great @alexcwilliams already figured it out http://t.co/qSMYl0eKNK (cheers!)

@jackexmachina: Just received an invite to a “mobile email master class” that looked like junk on my phone. What is this, amateur night?

@AdamTSutton: At the end of the day, all that matters… is slapping yourself for #cliche copy

Great additions to the Email Swipe File pinboard

Zulily welcome email series sent during Q1 of 2013 >>View the pin

Warby Parker triggered email sent in 12/2012 >>View the pin

The White House email sent 3/15/13 >>View the pin

Anthropologie email sent on 3/15/13 >>View the pin

Noteworthy subject lines

Horchow, 3/4 — #ThenAndNow video with Roger and Sally Horchow + Friends & Family starts tomorrow!‏
ModCloth, 3/28 — Our most ‘Pinteresting’ pieces + wedding-worthy frocks!
Zazzle, 3/22 — Make your own Zazzle products with Instagram!
Container Store, 3/29 — Do you know what’s in your fridge?
Michael’s, 3/4 — March is National Craft Month. What will you make?
West Elm Market, 3/22 — Blue, yellow, red or orange?
UnderArmour, 3/28 — It Won’t Be Cold Forever.
Wayfair, 3/27 — ✿Floral bedroom decor, patio set upgrades, hosting essentials, bedroom under $400, living room furniture and more‏
DCCC.org, 3/22 — Mitch McConnell actually said this:
Karmaloop, 3/19 — Extended! KL Code: CELTIC‏
Neiman Marcus, 3/6 — Dress for the Year of the Snake‏
Tiny Prints, 3/28 — The 2013 Grad Collection Is Here!
SkyMall, 3/28 — From Now Until Opening Day, Save 25% at SkyMall!
ThinkGeek, 3/22 — ThinkGeek’s sorry you couldn’t go to PAX…
Lululemon Athetica, 3/26 — yoga on the rocks‏
Etsy, 3/16 — ROYGBIV‏
Urban Outfitters, 3/18 — One Thousand Shoes & Counting!
ASPCA, 3/15 — Top Five Pet Poisons of the Year‏
Walgreens, 3/4 — Say hello to Britain’s #1 beauty secret | 20% OFF Contacts‏

Most popular posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

1. The Email Marketing Rules Book Is Now Available!

2. Quarter of B2C Marketers Send a Welcome Email Series

3. More Brands Sending Welcome Emails, But Opportunities Remain

4. The Introduction to Email Marketing Rules

5. 1 in 10 B2C Marketers Using Lightboxes for Email Signups

Posted by Chad S. White

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More Fields, Fewer Subscribers

Posted on March 28, 2013

Companies spend a lot of time and money optimizing their online checkout pages because they know that checkout abandonment is money lost. The same is true of email subscription forms—higher abandonment means slower list growth and therefore less money generated by the email program. Yet, brands don’t appear to be giving these forms nearly the same level of attention.

After signing up for emails from more than 160 B2C brands, I saw many behaviors that are reducing signup completions, including:

Forcing consumers to register in order to receive emails. An email relationship is an incremental one. It’s like a conversation—You don’t blurt everything out at once in a huge monologue, but rather reveal a little at a time over the course of the back-and-forth of the conversation.

It starts with them sharing their email address, and then if they enjoy what you say after that then they give you more information through email and browse behavior, via progressive profiling, and by checking out or registering.

For example, Southwest Airlines eases into the email relationship, asking for relatively little information. On the other hand, Delta Air Lines requires consumers to register with their site in order to receive emails. The “Basic Information” portion of their registration form alone has 25 fields and includes TSA warnings that get people thinking about airport hassles instead of saving on a fun getaway.

Very few retailers still require consumers to register in order to sign up for promotional emails, but many non-retailers still require registration.

Asking for too much information, especially additional contact information. Even if they’re not asking you to register with the site and set up a user name, password and security questions, some brands are just one step shy of that and ask for mailing addresses, phone numbers and other details that have absolutely nothing to do with fulfilling an email subscription.

Not only do more fields lower completion rates, but consumers are suspicious of brands who ask additional points of contact like mailing addresses, which lowers completion rates even more, according to research. Especially if you sell online, there’s no reason to try to grab tons of information upfront, because if your emails are effective then your subscribers will be buying from you and you’ll collect mailing addresses and phone numbers during checkout.

Most retailers have figured this out, with many only asking for a consumer’s email address in order to opt in. Some also ask for a zip code to do segmentation or personalization, and some ask for a first name for personalization. But many non-retailers are well behind the curve when it comes to keeping email opt-ins simple and then using progressive profiling or checkouts to collect additional information.

Making consumers accept content they don’t want to get the content they do want. You would like for consumers to be interested in all of your brands, and you’d certainly like to leverage their interest in one of your brands to get them interested in your others. But you have to tread softly.

For instance, Peeps and Company doesn’t give their subscribers a choice as to which brands they get content from. If you want to get Peeps updates, you also have to get updates about Peanut Chews, Hot Tamales, and Mike & Ike. Let your subscribers choose which products they’re interested in and make that the focus of your message, and use secondary messaging to occasionally promote your other brands.

All three of these practices reduce email signups. What’s more, our research only looked at homepage email opt-ins, which are generally among the most productive you can get. So the opportunity cost of long and inefficient forms there is higher than average.

Posted by Chad S. White

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The Fundamental Imperatives of ‘Email Marketing Rules’

Posted on March 26, 2013

Back in November of 2010, I wrote an Email Insider column titled ‘Best Practices’ Are Dead, in which I argued that the term “best practices” has been much abused and was too broad to cover what I called the never-break “Ethical Imperatives” and the okay-but-unwise-to-break “Recommended Practices.” I didn’t know it at the time, but that column would be the genesis of my new book, Email Marketing Rules: How to Wear a White Hat, Shoot Straight, and Win Hearts, which discusses 108 email marketing best practices.

That column discussed six practices that I consider critical to being a legitimate member of the email marketing community. All six involved permission, which is still the vital element that separates us from spammers.

The book expands on those never-break rules, bringing the total to 10, which I’m delighted to share exclusively with you here… Read my entire Email Insider column >>

Posted by Chad S. White

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