Email Design Best Practices

Peter Scully – Online Marketing Manager

Introduction to Email Marketing

• Maximise customer lifetime value• Create upsell opportunities• Generate repeat sales and higher conversions• Helps to retain customers• Promotes brand loyalty • Builds an emotional connection with your audience• Can be used with other marketing activities

Campaign Goals

• Increased website traffic• Online sales• Sales calls• Website enquiries• PDF / Whitepaper downloads • Video views• Social media followers / shares• Surveys completed

What defines a successful campaign?

List Segmentation

• Location• Gender• Age• Occupation

Common characteristics: Subscriber Activity

• New or most recent subscribers• Inactive subscribers• People who opened, but did not click

Sales Segmentation:

• Existing customers• Prospective customers

Segmentation Example

• Customers who bought clothes for men• Customers who bought clothes for women• Customers who bought clothes for children

• Customers who haven’t purchased in the last 6 months• Customers who purchase regularly (every 3 months)• Customers who have never purchased

Further Segmentation

Avoiding Spam Filters

• Over use of punctuation!!!!!!!!!• USING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS• Using the word ‘test’ in the subject line• Sending to multiple recipients within the same company• Designing HTML email’s in Microsoft Word

Permission, Reputation and Trust

Permission is the first step to gaining a good reputation and earning trust.

Reputation is related to trust. With no reputation, trust is hard to earn. With a good reputation, trust is easier to gain.

By earning trust, you can improve your reputation one subscriber at a time.

By abusing trust, you will damage your reputation and lose permission.

Basic Design Principles

• Simple Design Structure• Consistent branding and layout• Maximum width – 600px• Use tables – not CSS

Creating Call-to-actions

• Based around your campaign objectives• Be clear and concise • Use colour and imagery to catch the eye

Technical Information

• Avoid using background images • Use inline styling • Use Alt tags on all images• Encode all characters ( & instead of just &)• No javascript

Best Practices

• Include an unsubscribe link• Include a browser version

Browser & Email Client Testing

• IE 6/7/8• Firefox• Safari• Google Chrome• Opera

Web Browsers

Browser & Email Client Testing

• Outlook (2000 – 2010)• iOS (iPad, iPhone etc)• Hotmail• Apple Mail• Yahoo Mail• Gmail• Windows Mail• Android• AOL• Thunderbird

Email Clients

A/B Split Testing

• What day of the week gets better open rates?• What time of day works best for your promotional campaigns?• What time of day works best for informative campaigns?• What type of subject line returns the most bounces?• Do you get a better open rate from a personal ‘from address’

rather then a generic one?• Does time of day affect overall click rate?

Behavioural Merchandising

• Highly targeted emails• Personalised recommendations• Can send thousands of unique

emails, personalised to each subscriber based on behaviour

• Increase open rates and upsell opportunities

• Generate more revenue

Email Marketing Examples

• No Copy• No Image Text• No un-subscribe link• Poor landing page

• Misleading Subject “FREE Upgrade to ASOS Premier starts now”

• FREE in the subject line• No branding on the email• £14.95 a year sign up

• Sent to a customer who already has this credit card

• The existing interest rate is lower then the one advertised for new customers

• Clean and elegant design• Product focused• Simple call-to-action

• Fun to read and explore• Interesting design• Good use of navigation

and links to content

• Clear call to action• Good use of images• Clean and elegant design

Thanks for listening

Peter ScullyEgghead Designwww.eggheaddesign.co.ukmarketing@eggheaddesign.co.uk

Any Questions?...