Some thoughts on optimising marketing emails in accessible chunks covering elements of content, design, user experience and retaining campaign insights.

1. Ingredients of a great email

2. What is ‘great’?

3. What does success look like
Considerable variance in performance due to cultural issues as well as relative
email marketing performance
Region / mean value of
atttribute
Unique open rate Click-through rate Click to open rate
Overall 21.0% 3.2% 12.6%
US 20.7% 3.0% 11.8%
EMEA 20.4% 3.8% 15.9%
UK 22.2% 3.5% 13.6%
Canada 19.8% 2.6% 9.9%
APAC 26.1 4.6% 14.2%
Data: IBM – 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study

4. What does churn look like?
Region / mean value of atttribute. Hard bounce rate Unsubscribe rate Complaint rate
Overall 0.473% 0.127% 0.026%
US 0.467% 0.122% 0.026%
Canada 0.340% 0.183% 0.017%
UK 0.386% 0.144% 0.023%
Rest of Europe 0.382% 0.091% 0.030%
MENA 1.001% 0.182% 0.033%
Au NZ 0.925% 0.175% 0.024%
Rest of World 0.891% 0.066% 0.016%
Losing audience for email marketing

5. Audience engagement

6. Before opening
• Has the recipient asked to be contacted?
• Ideally ‘double opt-in’ - collect consent by phone and confirm with a click by email
• Clear opt-out option at the bottom of email
• Opt-in is best practice, even if the email is ‘generic’. Minimum legal requirements
are not best practice
• Rep triggered emails, where email marketing is tightly integrated to augment the
salesforce has been shown to triple open rates according to vendors
• Is it meant for the recipient
• Personalised subject line
• Brief headline accurate reflects email content
• Can the ‘from’ line be personalised?
• Salesperson triggered email
• Customer services triggered email
Relevance

7. Before opening
• Frequency
• Anything we can say about optimal email rate
• Benefits of triggered email etc
• Is the email easy to download?
• Is is less than 100KB in size?
• Is it optimised for mobile?

8. Preview
• Preview mode is the email equivalent of ‘above the fold’ in
direct marketing
• No use of imagery that negates any benefit of preview
• Clear call to action visible
• Clear signposting that the content continues further down
in the email

9. Design
• Use a responsive email design
• View in browser link clearly visible at top of the email
• Apply vertical hierarch with the most important contents at the top of
the email
• All images should have alt tags
• Web safe fonts
• Legibility on all platforms
• Dimensions
• Aim between 600 and 640 px for desktop, 320 px for mobile

10. Inverted pyramid approach
• Deliver key messages at the
top, supporting points below
• When thinking about content
and call outs consider the
inverted pyramid method
• Clear call to action (CTA) near
the top of the mail, repeat further
down
• Avoid dark background with
white text (it works better for
presentations)
Grab attention
Build anticipation
CTA

11. Examples: effective design

12. Examples: effective personalisation

13. Learning through marketing

14. Constant learning
• A/B testing
• Where the community to be emailed is
sufficiently large, testing two alternate
designs
Internalising learnings
• Have a repository of knowledge
• Layout tweaks
• Audience preferences
• Copy that does (or doesn't) work
• Image preferences
Test and learn
Analytics
• Email (bounce rates, open rates, click
though rates)
• Destination (own web analytics or that
of a third-party publisher)
Data

15. About me
Amazon author page: amzn.to/1SeO5Il
LinkedIn page: linkedin.com/in/gedcarroll
About: renaissancechambara.jp/about
Blog: renaissancechambara.jp
Email address found here: scr.im/renaissance
Twitter account: @r_c
Sina Weibo: renaissancechambara
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