Email Marketing Tips and Ideas from Email Marketing Agencies

Email Marketing: Simple, Smart, and Sleek Works

Email marketing has always had ‘revenue power’ it’s the reason why spammers continue to make tons of cash and your inbox junk folder is full of pills, refinance offers, and random emails from African princes. These days email marketers continue to unleash smatterings of deployments to grow their company and garner revenue. With increasing eyeballs on email as a solid revenue driver it’s becoming harder to stand out among the crowd.

So, How Can You Stand Out?

It’s actually pretty simple — keep your messaging easy to understand, make your content informational, stop blathering about corp. marketing speak, and be helpful. Consumers don’t care about your latest press release unless they’re in it or it’s an investor update about how your company just made them a fortune.

Take this Mint.com update as an example of simple and effective email communication to a user:

1. It’s clean – eye candy
2. It’s concise – clear CTA (call-to-action)
3. It’s engaging – “don’t get dinged with late fees” & an image of App/iPhone
4. It helps the user get more out of the software – educational (helps retention and referrals)

You’ll notice how nice it’s laid out and how obvious it is to figure out what they want you to do. It doesn’t hurt that the messaging is very beneficial to users who want help with finances and want reminders that maybe their bank doesn’t offer. I personally love this approach and it will keep me opening these emails going forward.

What’s even better about this approach is the cadence of the email marketing. I’ve been a Mint.com user for a while now (years), it’s helpful. I’ve got all my notifications and alerts set up for my accounts that email me on a weekly sometimes daily basis. With that frequency I’d burn out super-fast if they lumped on another 1-2 emails a week. Mint.com has emailed me outside of my normal alerts just over ten times in 18 months. Every email has notified me of settings I’m not using in my account or of features that I’ll be interested in – like the email above.

How Can I Use This for My Email Marketing?

I challenge you to peel-back the frequency, educate more often, and be aware of other departments in your company that are using email to communicate. Doing these three things along with the messaging tips above should help you get more relational with your email lists than you’ve been before.

Remember; people don’t care unless you’re helping them. Sending more, reusing content too often, and weighing emails down with content isn’t helping anyone. Keep it simple, keep it safe (thanks Gandalf).

Viva la Email.
Rory Carlyle
@rorycarlyle

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Sometimes, ALT Text Can Send The Wrong Message

In email marketing, the use of alt attributes in images is often a recommended and common practices for communicating branding elements and graphic calls to action, while images are “off”. However with this particular execution, I’m afraid it backfired.

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When Email Marketers Go Bad

Indian Dating, University of Phoenix, and Email Marketing, oh my!

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You Moved? I Never Knew You Were Here!

How important is your subject line?

Take a look at the email screenshot below. Let me know if you see the potential confusion that I see.

On the whole, this is a pretty solid email from LegalZoom. It’s a very simple offer, quick and to the point. It contains solid use of preheader text, whitelisting requests, header images, headlines, and content. What’s not to like?

The subject line. Specifically, the first two words of the subject line: “We’ve Moved!”

Should I classify this as an “Oops” or am I missing a Vandals song reference in the title? If it’s not a Vandals reference, then it has to be a mistake given that there is no reference to moving anywhere in the content of the message.

Perhaps a better subject line could have been: “Free Joe Friday! Get Free Legal Advice Every Friday.”

The moral of this story: The subject line is the second thing your recipients look at beyond who the email is from. A misleading subject line can destroy response metrics in a heartbeat.

About the Author: Scott Cohen is Vice President of Managed Services at Inbox Group. He also writes on email marketing, fatherhood, sports, and politics on ScottWritesEverything.com.

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What not to do: 1 indispensable tip email marketers can learn from old direct marketing pros

The old pros had it completely wrong.

Direct mailers of the past would accept as gospel that you needed a full color envelope with “URGENT” emblazoned across the front, view windows, and other gimmicks to get folks to open and read their mail. The flashier the better! Do whatever you can to stand out. That will get your letter opened and read, right?

Wrong.

What they forgot was that people sorted their mail over the garbage can. Anything that resembled a “pitch” or “sales material” would be gleefully destroyed with extreme prejudice (see: above).

So what’s the point? They put all their time and effort into selling to these folks but. . .

People don’t want to be sold to.

Fun Story: One guy I know hated commercial mail so much, he’d go out of his way to open it, tear the offer into teeny-tiny little pieces before shoving it into the return envelope and TAPING it closed (yes, on all the edges, so they couldn’t open it). He would get some strange satisfaction out of harassing these companies that tried to sell him things.

The only thing that glitter and fanciness would accomplish is their letter immediately being identified as garbage. On the other hand when the direct mailers figured out that mailing their offers in a PLAIN envelope (no graphics, no windows, nothing), with a REAL stamp (no bulk rate penny pinching), and with a personal, engaging, thoughtful letter inside. . . all of a sudden they saw their response rates TAKE OFF. Go figure.

So how does this lesson translate into email marketing?

Here’s how.

Forget (or at least, focus LESS on) graphics and spend more time on your copy.

When an average person gets a commercial email what do they do? IF they open it (and that’s a BIG ‘if’), they SCAN it quickly, decide in 2 seconds whether it’s worth a 3rd second (it’s usually not) and mercilessly delete it. What does the average person do when they receive a personal email with no graphics or fancy type?

They read it.

Imagine that. . .They don’t begin by rushing to the end to see what is wanted from them, they simply begin reading. If your letter is written well enough (ie: the subject line compels them to open, the 1st sentence makes them read the 2nd, the 2nd the 3rd, etc.) you can just about sell anything to anyone.

If you’re trying to sell something via email and writing genuinely thoughtful copy specifically tailored for your audience isn’t your #1 focus (it almost never is) you’re doing it wrong.