Cut and waste: are your marketing emails being clipped?

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…

Great Christmas Emails

Emails are an underestimated communication platform. In most situations, they could be even more efficient than phone calls and they are well adopted by businesses as a communication channel. There is no better way to attract new customers than through email marketing. Good emails should be concise and straight to the point. They should have a clear goal and a short summary to start things off. The structure is also essential to a logically organised email. This will ensure that the email is visually scannable. With the holiday season already here, if you haven’t started sending those holiday emails, now is a great time to start! Sales during the winter season have been increasing each year and smart brands are…

Tips from a Junior Email Developer

As a fresh media graduate looking to make a start in my career, I did not expect to join the email development industry. I was familiar with web development, but had little knowledge of how the email world worked. Joining this new and unfamiliar industry was a challenge, there was a lot of information to learn quickly since email development is a fast paced and busy industry. From my own experience, here are some tips that I can share from my brief time as a junior email developer. Ask for help Chances are, you are going to get stuck or confused. It’s always better to ask a quick question to someone with more experience instead of struggling for hours on…

Your email open rates are changing

Unless you’ve been living on a remote island somewhere you’ll know that on September 20th Apple’s iOS 15 update was launched, containing a feature call Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) which – amongst other things – will eliminate the ability to accurately track email open rates. For the uninitiated, email opens are recorded using a tiny image in the email code. When the email is opened, that image loads, which tells the sender an email was opened, by whom, when, where and on what device. What Apple have done is add a ‘middle man’ into the mix, first routing emails through their own proxy servers to pre-load email content – including the tracking image – before serving the email to the…

AeSTATic value: 5 ways to turn your info into imagery

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…

User experience in email design

Email is a fantastic graphical way of communicating with others, however so often in email design the primary function of an email is forgotten. Sure, some emails are just to pass on information, but nearly every single other email is about selling. It is currently impossible to complete a purchase with just an email but this is no bad thing, it streamlines the email’s function. The email exists solely to drive traffic to a web page. The email exists solely to drive traffic to a web page. This key idea is so often lost in email design – often it is closely tied to reproducing a similar or lesser version of a website instead. I think this is a terrible…

Does marketing to third party email data work?

The answer is it very much depends on how you do it. Often seen as the dark side of email marketing, sending messages to email addresses who did not sign up directly to your brand is frowned upon by many. It’s easy to see why – my inbox is already a busy place and I can do without even more emails I didn’t ask for thank you very much. As with your email marketing efforts to your first party lists, there are a host of things to get as right and as tight as possible. Data is king Long term success needs good data. Third party lists should be collected fairly and with transparency. People need to understand what to…