All about A.R.T.

This isn't about graphic design. This is about the 3 rules to follow for ensuring success of your email marketing efforts.

The marketing emails you send should be:

• Anticipated
• Relevant
• Timely

The 3 Rules of Email Marketing. In this case , ART is science.


Anticipated
Anticipated emails are opened. Plain and simple. What is not simple is making them anticipated.

Don't over send.
This is the biggest mistake by marketing beginners. Your subscribers want to hear from you less often than you want to communicate with them. Trust me.

Let them choose frequency.
Monthly, quarterly, before events, etc. Your most interested subscribers may choose to be updated every week. Less interested subscribers maybe once a month.

Provide value.
Every email you send should provide value to person who receives it. It's about them, not you. People are wildly possessive of their inbox. Send them an email in which they receive no value and your brand will suffer.

Every time you send an email a subscriber does not value, the next one will be less anticipated. Too much of this and eventually the emails are unread or unopened.


Relevant
The best way to ensure your emails are anticipated is to make them relevant. The best way to ensure relevancy is through profiling and targeting. Profiling involves gathering more data about your subscribers than simply email address and name. A subscriber profile is built up over time and provides value to both you, the marketer, as well as the subscriber (because they hopefully receive less non-relevant emails from you).

An Example
Let's say you are a restaurant owner and you have birthday in your subscriber profile. Sending a birthday email for a discounted meal, or maybe a free desert is an example of a highly relevant email. I guarantee it will be viewed positively and will increase the chances of the subscriber opening future emails.

Surveys, simple questions, click analysis, and even offline activity can be utilized to add data points to a subscriber profile. I'll write more on this, much more, in future articles since profiling is the single most important aspect of email marketing.


Timely
Timely has to do with giving subscribers enough time to take the action asked for in the email. Using the example above, the birthday email should go out before the subscriber's birthday (of course) and the offer should allow for a bit of scheduling flexibility. Otherwise, the lack of time will be viewed negatively - "you're rushing me".

Sending an email too early can also be problematic. Put yourself in your subscriber's shoes and decide what a normal planning horizon may be. Planning for a birthday meal would have a shorter planning horizon than planning for a ski trip. So the birthday email should go out closer to the birthday than a ski trip offer would to winter.


What about personalized?
You may have read elsewhere about the importance of email personalization. Isn't that the key to email marketing? Personalization is part of making emails relevant, but not fake personalization. Most marketers think of personalization as using the subscriber's name in the subject line or as a greeting in the top of the email. This is not personalization.

Real personalization is when you send a message the subscriber is interested in, which is relevancy. Just because you say "Hi Dave!" in the email does not mean Dave will be interested in the email. Even spammers can use a person's first name and nobody would call those emails personal or personalized.

Anticipated. Relevant. Timely.

The keys to email marketing success.

Simple Design: How Simple?

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I review many email newsletters on a daily basis, most created by non-designers.

The number one mistake? More is not more.

Simple does not mean unattractive, it means...well, simple. Think iPod - simple and professional.

Fewer Colors, not more
The single biggest mistake by amateur designers is to use too many colors. Don't do it.

Pick 2 or 3 colors based on your logo and use a white background. Why white? Because some email programs won't display that nifty dark background. So your white text on a dark background just became white text on a white background. Not so readable.

Also, use colors to distinguish patterns such as one color for article titles and another for subtitles. People scan emails and color can help them scan - if used properly.

Images that do something
Don't use images just to add pizzaz. Images should be important enough to be links to something, not just artwork. Every image should be a link. (Note: You should also plan that your subscriber will have images turned off, so don't rely on images solely.)

Less fonts
This means not only less fonts (tahoma, verdana, helvetica, arial, etc), but also less font sizes. The standard email newsletter can get by with 3 font sizes: one for article headings, one for sub headings, and another size for the content. A fourth font size can be utilized for the fine print.

Easy on the CSS
Emails aren't web pages. You can't be certain how your HTML will be displayed when using CSS because there are so many programs used to read emails. Old school HTML (font tags, tables, bgcolor) is much more predictable. Uncool, but predictable.

Provide a link to a web version
At the top of the email provide a link to a web page version of the newsletter. Browsers are much better at displaying HTML compared with email programs.

Benefits of simple designs

• Take less time to create and edit and zero time to debug in different email clients
  
• Displayed more consistently than "fancy" designs. Your brand suffers when the email newsletter you sent is hacked to pieces in a subscriber's email software.
• Clean and simple copy/design is easier to read. Your subscribers will thank you.

The details of coding
How to do this changes based on the current email programs. Gmail is one of the worst offenders for stripping out CSS related information. So what worked in 2004 won't work now with Gmail. Here is the best article on how to code HTML emails.

- Phil

HTML vs. Text

One debate that never seems to die within the email marketing industry is HTML vs. Text emails.

What is the right answer?

The answer is...

This is the wrong question.

Mass personalization, not intrusion
Email marketing is about using the mass personalization capabilities of software to market differently to customers and potential customers. It is not a different way to use intrusion marketing like tv commercials, billboards, and banner ads. As marketers we need to spend more time (much more time) on segmenting our customers and figuring out ways to learn more about what they want and less time on the display of the message.

Relevancy is key
If an email is incredibly relevant, format and design do not matter. Think about it. If you were in the market for a green widget and some company sent you an email about a sale they were having on widgets at the store 4 blocks from your house and they have the exact color widget you are looking for, would you care if the email was in text or HTML?

Most likely, you'd be amazed at the great service you received from this company for letting you know about this special? Instead of being marketed to, you would consider them to have done you a favor.

Emails that are not relevant to the person can be the best designed HTML email ever and it won't matter - relevancy is key because people simply don't have the time for noise, even if that noise is pretty.

Focus your energy
If you are in the beginning stages of email marketing, spend your time working on building relationships with your subscribers. Create a plan for gathering as much data about them as possible. What they want, what they value. More on how to do this in future articles.

-phil