Egghead Design - Email Design Best Practices
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Transcript of Egghead Design - Email Design Best Practices
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