Author: Adrian Young



Cut and waste: are your marketing emails being clipped?

Posted by Adrian Young

Headings Header one Header two Header three Header four Header five Header six Blockquotes Single line blockquote: Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Multi line blockquote with a cite reference: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. Steve Jobs – Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference, 1997 Tables Employee Salary John Saddington $1 Because that’s all Steve Job’ needed for a salary. Tom McFarlin $100K For all the…

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AeSTATic value: 5 ways to turn your info into imagery

Posted by Adrian Young

People like stats. People like numbers. How many points have you earned? What was your total number of steps walked last week? Was your screentime up or down? Personalised, bite-sized snippets of information are well-suited to the transient nature of email. Rambling walls of text (like this article) are not. But you know what’s even better than straight-up figures? Those figures… in graphical form. A picture is more engaging, more instinctively understandable. That picture might be a bar graph or a pie chart or any other visualisation that meets your need. If you can think it, there’s probably a way to do it. Let’s take the theme of loyalty points. If your customer can see their progress – rather than…

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Split decision – what to consider when conducting an A/B test

Posted by Adrian Young

Which of these statements about A/B testing is correct? A. It’s a fun little experiment. B. It’s a powerful tool which must be handled correctly. The correct answer is B. Split testing is a powerful tool. And, like all tools, it has the potential to do more harm than good if it’s not operated with care. It’s therefore unfortunate that split testing is often treated more like option A. "Hey, let’s try this" says someone… and suddenly you’re conducting an experiment based on an arbitrary, last-minute decision. Testing in a haphazard and disjointed manner may garner useful insights into your customers’ behaviour but it’ll be mostly down to luck. Such unplanned testing is as likely to waste time on inconclusive,…

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Three interactive email problems (and how to solve them)

Posted by Adrian Young

Electronic mail has come a long way since its humble, text-only roots. The modern medium is one rich in imagery, animation and – if you fancy it – interactivity. Until recently, interactive email could only be achieved by means of some CSS wizardy. While CSS was never actually intended for this purpose, it’s capable of powering surprisingly complex interactive content. In the JavaScript-free world of email, this was a revelation. Of course, technology doesn’t stand still for long. The advent of Google’s AMP for Email has introduced a standardised system of interactive email. Is that the death knell for CSS-based interactivity? Not yet and potentially not at all. It’s early days and remains to be seen whether AMP becomes widely-adopted…

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Do you even know me? Watch out for these email personalisation pitfalls

Posted by Adrian Young

It’s ready. Your beautifully designed, flawlessly coded email is one click away from being fired off to thousands of customers. There’s just one problem: everyone is about to receive the same message. No, the forename which has been shoehorned into the subject line doesn’t count. It’s spray-and-pray dressed up as one-to-one. Email marketing deserves to be more sophisticated than that. And it can be. We live in an age of dynamic content, data science and machine learning. To the benefit of customer and business alike, it’s possible to send expertly tailored content based on a person’s purchasing and browsing activities. But even a richly personalised email programme can sometimes trip up. Read on for a list of personalisation perils –…

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Inbox of tricks: stand out with Gmail’s new promotion tools

Posted by Adrian Young

The inbox is a competitive place. Marketers strive to craft compelling subject lines which shine that little bit brighter than the rest. But only so much can be done with clever wording and look-at-me emoticons. Fortunately, Google has made the playing field more interesting. The Gmail application on iPhone and Android now supports email annotations. That sounds pretty dull, so let me rephrase it: it’s now possible to serve up additional content – including imagery – before an email has even been opened. Let’s take a look at the options by following Fictitious Travel’s quest to stand out from the crowd. Stage 1: unannotated email Nobody loves January. The people at Fictitious Travel know that, so they’re running a winter…

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The 10 commandments of responsive email

Posted by Adrian Young

James reads his emails on the slick new iPhone. Sarah uses Gmail and loves her ageing Android too much to say goodbye. Bob’s at work, using Outlook on a desktop PC. We’re about to send all of them a message. And we know it’s going to look fantastic. Not just for these individuals but on the countless device and email client combinations out there. That’s because the mailing has been carefully developed from planning to execution with responsive design in mind. Nearly 70% of companies send responsive emails these days. But how many of them are doing so as effectively as they could be? Take a look at these ten rules to find out how your responsive emails stack up.…

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