by Lee Chadwick and Dan Hare

Guide to creating a highly effective

B2B email marketing campaign

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Challenges and Opportunities p4

Deliverability & Spam p6

Your Objective p8

Marketing Automation p9

Target Audience p10

Content & Design p12

Two Second Rule p13

Calls to Action p17

Mobile & Responsive p18

Design & Layout p19

Testing p21

Reporting p22

Quick Guide p23

Established in 2005, CommuniGator has rapidly become one of the leading email marketing software providers in the UK.

Hundreds of organisations, worldwide, rely on CommuniGator for on-demand, on-premise or fully managed email marketing solutions.

We believe that if you treat email marketing with the attention that it deserves, then your audience will do the same. With this in mind, the features and functionality of CommuniGator’s email marketing software (GatorMail) have been developed to make the marketer’s job both easier and more effective.

In 2009, we introduced GatorLeads; a unique way for B2B marketers to understand what contacts do on their websites as well as in their emails.

We now track over 70% of the UK’s Limited Companies using this technology, enabling our clients to merge their digital and real world sales and marketing efforts and produce highly targeted digital communications.

Contents

A little story about CommuniGator

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Best Practice in Email Marketing is becoming more and more about targeted, automated campaigns and less and less about the bulk newsletter sent out manually. Using technology to send highly personalised content with the minimum of human effort should be the core focus for those wishing to demonstrate a fantastic ROI from email marketing. Targeted email is a proven business generator that other channels struggle to match.

However, if your email design, content and calls to action are not well thought through and proven to be effective, there is little point in automating them.

This guide will help you to plan a B2B Email Marketing Campaign. It contains many small tips that you can easily action, along with a more strategic view on how to ensure you can use email as a highly effective aspect of the digital marketing mix.

You will find a distinct lack of theory here. The advice is disseminated from the millions of B2B emails that CommuniGator send every week on behalf of our (predominantly UK-based) customers.

You may be reading this as a consequence of attending our best-practice seminar, in which case, this guide will act as a handy aide-memoire or a way to concisely communicate what you have learnt at our event to others.

If you have not previously attended one of our seminars, then you might wish to consider coming along. You will find a list of dates and venues on our website. We usually give you a rather splendid lunch which would have been difficult to include with this guide!

www.communigator.co.uk/events/

Introduction

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Email is an extremely versatile medium, which remains the beating heart of modern business communication. Despite innovations like Yammer and National Field attempting to introduce disruptive new communication tools for the corporate world, businesses of every size still rely on email as their principal method of internal and external communication.

Many consumer audiences have stopped using their personal email regularly in favour of social networks, but corporate inboxes are still checked extremely frequently.

Email is so pervasive in the workplace that many people have a difficult relationship with their corporate email account.

This means that if your marketing emails reach the inbox and are not being read or interacted with, they are being skipped specifically rather than the mailbox being ignored in the general sense. Equally, many B2B emails are targeted at generic (e.g info@) addresses or secondary inboxes which can suffer a similar level of inactivity as consumer Hotmail accounts.

The relentless task of keeping ‘on top’ of business emails has undergone a fundamental shift in recent years, with mobile now becoming the primary device for reading

emails for more than half of us. This is not just because workforces have become more mobile. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that many people use their mobile for email even when they are sat with conventional desktop email access at the same time. The mobile device is our universal communication tool. Email is just one channel the mobile supports alongside social, messenger apps and the good old phone itself.

For the B2B email marketer, mobile represents a big challenge. Coding an email to work responsively depending on the reading device is possible despite the HTML limitations of many email clients. The real challenge comes with Calls to Action; forms, downloads and other complex or interactive content, that can be difficult to digest on a mobile. So even if the message is relevant to the recipient, the mobile medium may not lend itself to encouraging a response.

Delivering the right message, to the right recipient, at the right time, with the right call to action, regardless of reading device, can be complicated and resource intensive. So many B2B email marketers continue to blast out untargeted, salesy emails on Thursday afternoons (because that’s when somebody said it is a good time) and they see poor

B2B Email Marketing Challenges and Opportunities

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results as a consequence. As we move to increasingly automated email workflows, the opportunity to be more customer-centric and hence more effective has never been better.

There is no silver bullet to getting B2B email marketing right, but the little details can make a big difference and we hope that this guide can show you how...

Email Environment Tracking

Mobile is the primary device for consuming email

Email activity device data from Litmus (February 2014)

Mobile

Desktop

Webmail

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Before your email can have an impact on any human being, it has to overcome the large hurdle of being delivered in the first place. Over three-quarters of all email is Spam and consequently, there are very robust, automated technologies in place to prevent anything inappropriate reaching an inbox. As Spam is such a widespread issue, there is inevitably some collateral damage whereby legitimate emails get caught in Spam filters.

There are two core aspects to staying out of trouble with Spam filters; Reputation and Content. Both aspects have some fundamentals that do not change, but increasingly, Spam filters automatically adjust their behaviour as the Spammers adapt their attempts to get through. So, we have to continually check before sending campaigns to ensure everything is okay with your Reputation and your Content.

The Geeky Bits of Deliverability

IP Address

The IP address of the server from which your email is sent is checked against blacklists. CommuniGator maintain a range of clean IP addresses to ensure high deliverability for our clients and liaise directly with ISP’s and Spam filters to avoid issues on your behalf.

Sending Domain

A sending domain is used to deliver emails and host all the elements of your email. We normally mask this domain with an alias, so the recipient sees a name rather than an email address. ISP’s and Spam filters will check the Sending Domain’s authenticity and reputation before allowing the email to pass.

Engagement Data

Since 2012, some of the major ISP’s and email providers have used engagement data (how much your emails are interacted with) to decide what is Spam and what is genuine email. Different elements of the email; the sender address, the reply-to address and links within the email can all fall foul of these advanced algorithms. So, it’s important to understand that poorly performing campaigns can have a future impact on other emails that you send in different ways.

Deliverability & Spam

“More than 80% of all delivery issues arise because of a problem with your sending reputation.”

Return Path

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Common Content Mistakes:

Spam filters are very basic in some respects. They algorithmically examine email designs for things that are programmed to give you a Spam score. It is rare that one single thing will put you in the Spam folder, but a combination of seemingly innocuous things can get you in trouble quicker than you think!

Red Alert

Spam filters think that Spammers use red (or specifically #FF0000) so if you use this colour excessively in your design, you could be in trouble.

Oh Dear

The worst word to a Spam Filter is “Dear”! Combine it with something like “Dear Business Owner” and you’re in serious trouble. Normal emails start with “Hi” or just the name, so if you are using personalisation, keep it informal.

Heuristics

The exact phrases that Spam filters do not like change continuously, based on keyword density - if the filter finds a word in a lot of Spam, it will give it a higher Spam score. Seasonal and topical phrases can get you into trouble if your usage coincides with widespread Spamming and Phishing email campaigns.

Best Practice:

Always check your Reputation and Content

before sending a live campaign.

Feature: Advanced Inbox Checker

CommuniGator automatically sends a copy

of your email to the major Spam Filtration services and ISP’s to check Reputation and

Content issues before you send.

We get reports from:

• SpamAssassin

• Message Labs

• Barracuda

• Gmail

We also verify DKIM and SPF records along

with other checks like the inbuilt junk mail filter in Microsoft Outlook.

Proper geeky stuff!

WARNING: It is very dangerous to send bulk emails from your corporate email server.If you received complaints about bulk email that you had sent in this way, you could find your ability to send normal email compromised. CommuniGator have specific infrastructure and processes in place to protect you from unfair complaints.

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It always helps to begin with the end in mind. What do you want an email campaign to achieve ultimately? Be as specific as you can and quantify. Examples:

Many email marketers focus on flawed metrics like Open Rates. How does a recipient opening an email help your business make money? It’s a small step in the right direction if you can get an accurate picture (see Reporting; page 22), but it’s not going to have the MD opening the champagne.

The most effective emails are usually part of a wider, integrated marketing strategy, where the email pushes contacts along the path to fulfilling a business objective.

Not all B2B emails can actually sell something - If only the customer journey were that simple! If collecting payment for products or services from your email is unrealistic or inappropriate for your business, then what should the email campaign do to generate, nurture or qualify a lead? Then consider the steps inside the email campaign that contacts will need to take to fulfil the objective.

What is your objective?In the age of Content Marketing, you may simply be maintaining engagement in your content and keeping your brand in the mind of your audience. This is tricky to quantify in terms of ROI or ROE (return on engagement) if you do not have an objective.

To be engaging is to be influential and there are scientific ways of doing that. For example:

Demonstrate Authority - Objective: 100 recipients read a thought leadership piece

Strengthen a relationship - Objective: 500 recipients download a free guide

Consensus - Objective: 50 recipients endorse content on social channels

When devising a campaign to achieve your objective, think carefully about the realistic nature of how and when contacts would complete your objective?

Might you need to send multiple emails?

Does something else need to happen before the email can be sent?

Do you have an ongoing need to fulfil this objective?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, you might want to consider using Marketing Automation as a way of enhancing the effectiveness of your campaign.

5 contacts to take a 30-day trial20 contacts to register for a webinar100 contacts to complete a survey

Can you automate?

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A triggered campaign runs for a specified period of time. You effectively design and build your email in advance and then it is set to send automatically when a contact is added to the campaign audience. There are a variety of ways a contact can be added to a triggered campaign; website actions, email actions and form submissions. You can also push contacts into a triggered campaign through various integrations to CRM and other systems via an API. The key benefit is that the email goes when it is appropriate for the contact to receive it. Triggered campaigns are often used for remarketing/retargeting.

If it would be difficult to get a contact engaged to the point of completing your objective from a single email, you might benefit from a Lead Nurture campaign. Lead Nurture campaigns present a series of emails to contacts in a sequence. The emails are sent automatically at predetermined intervals. E.g:

Email 1 = Helpful email (attention) Email 2 (+3 days) = Product specific (interest) Email 3 (+1 week) = Testimonials (action)

Advanced Lead Nurture campaigns can automatically adapt their content based on contact variable and actions.

Drip Campaigns are very similar to Lead Nurture, but are less linear. They are commonly used to keep in touch with contacts over time and maintain brand awareness. You may use a Drip Campaign for contacts who had dropped out of other more intensive marketing programmes or for those who had only shown a modicum of interest in your products or services.

One of the simplest forms of Marketing Automation is a Follow Up Campaign. This is where you follow up on your original email based on how people interact or do not interact with the first one. For example; if someone downloaded a whitepaper from your original email, you could program another email to go to that contact automatically, thanking them for downloading it and offering a more advanced call to action as a next step. The other useful aspect of Follow Ups is automating emails based upon a recipient’s inaction. Everyone who did not do the thing you wanted to do on the first email can automatically get a reminder email to encourage them.

Automated Campaign Types

Triggered Campaign Lead Nurture Campaign

Drip Campaign Follow Up Campaign

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Once you have established your objective, you need to identify a target audience who have the potential to respond to your communications and fulfil the objective.

You cannot be all things to all people

The common mistake that many email marketers make is to think that more email volume = better response. You may have obtained ten qualifiable leads from 10,000 emails previously, but that does not mean sending to 100,000 will give you one hundred leads if those extra contacts have no interest or need for your products and services.

Build a target profile of those most likely to respond. Current customers are often a good steer if you are unsure of the profile of your next customer. Your email must appeal to the recipient; their problems or their hopes. In a B2B context, even if it is a problem that you know the business has, is it a problem for the specific email recipient in that business? Who

looks after IT Support? Who has been given responsibility for staff training?

It might be important to you, but if it’s not engaging to your audience then your campaign may not perform well.

Buying Data

You may find that identifying and sourcing email addresses for contacts who are interested in your products or services is difficult and expensive. The rules around opted-in contact data are not nearly as stringent as many people think for B2B marketing in the UK, but regardless of the legalities, responsibly sourced data will always perform better. Untargeted, unsolicited data can actually do you more harm than good.

Low Hanging Fruit (or Chillies!)

CommuniGator have a unique way of discovering companies that are interested in your business. Our website tracking technology uses a proprietary database with over 70% of the UK’s Limited companies. We can tell you the companies visiting your website and what they are doing on it. This enables you to very accurately target companies that have shown some level of interest in you of their own accord. Their propensity to engage with emails is much higher than that of contacts who have no prior knowledge of you, even if they fit the profile.

Who are you targeting?

Who are your target audience?

What do they currently think and do?

What do you want them to think and do?

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Effective TargetingDeciding on the most appropriate audience for your email can be based on a range of factors and each business has its own criteria for segmentation. Common segmentations for B2B target audiences revolve around Demographics:

Which Industry are you targeting?Role - Who is the decision maker relevant to what you offer?

Size - How big are the companies you’re targeting?

Location - Is there a specific geography that you cover?

And Lead Status:Awareness - They have no prior knowledge of your business, your products or services.

Research - They are aware of you and have an understanding of what you provide.

Interest - You are a potential supplier who could solve their issue or fulfil their objective.

Purchase Intent - You’re shortlisted for a specific buying decision.

Who do you leave out?Targeting effectively is just as much about who you exclude as who you include. If the proposition does not work for any particular Demographic or Lead Status, suppress those contacts from the target audience.

Industry Role Size Location

Awareness

Research

Interest

Purchase Intent

Target Profile: IT Manager, 100-250 employees, LondonLead Status: Read case studies. Downloaded whitepaper.Objective: Invite to IT Security Breakfast Briefing

Target Profile: Hospitality Industry, Finance Director Lead Status: Downloaded implementation guide. Attended webinar.Objective: Book ERP system demo

Two examples of combining Demographic and Lead Status criteria to decide a target audience for a specific objective:

Targeting Matrix

Example 2

Example 1

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You now know what you want to achieve and who you are going to target in order to achieve it. The next step is to create engaging content and house it in a design that will enable the target audience to fulfil the objective. What is your proposition and why is it compelling? There is an old website designers saying:

“3 clicks to glory” The premise behind this, is simply, if you cannot get someone to the objective within three clicks, you’ve failed in your design.

In email marketing, this is particularly hard as our first two clicks are ordinarily opening the email and clicking on a link to the website.

You may have come across the concept of “Squeeze Pages” - website pages with a stripped back navigation. These pages are singularly focused on the Call to Action.

Email can and should work in much the same way. Dispense with functional distractions from your main Call to Action.

When was the last time you received a personal email from someone with 10 different links for you to potentially act on?

We tend to see best results in email newsletters that contain no more than three articles with Calls to Action.

If your objective warrants it, and the target audience will accept it, an e-shot with a singular call to action can work very well.

Keep the housekeeping stuff low key and down the bottom, where few recipients look anyway.

Common Link Distractions:

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Content & Design

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There is another big barrier to overcome; getting the email opened in the first place.

The average UK worker now sends and receives 40 emails per day, with one in 12 handling over 100 daily emails. This all-out assault on their attention and affront to their productivity means many professionals are highly selective about which emails they spend time on.

The initial assessment of whether or not to spend time looking at an email tends to take just two seconds and in that time, there are just a couple of things that the assessment is based on:

1. Who the email is from

2. What it is about

Number 2 is presented by what is said in the subject line. In most, but not all cases, the text visible in the preview area - typically two lines of text - also shows what an email is about to the recipient.

These elements can make or break the performance of an email campaign before your content or design even gets a chance to influence the recipient. Yet they often receive very little consideration when designing an email campaign.

The Two Second Rule

Who is it From?

Familiarity or Notoriety

When there is an existing relationship between your organisation and the recipient, you should leverage that in the From Field:

Who will they recognise?

Who is in their address book?

For most B2B organisations, brand awareness is an uphill struggle. To build a household name is no overnight process and even if you have the brand, what does it’s usage in the From field say to the recipient?

This is a personal and relevant communication to you?

Or this is blast to all and sundry from a big name?

Amy JohnsonEvent: Best Practice Email DesignHi Dan, are you free to join us next Thursday in London for our latest

marketing@communigator.co.ukBest Practice Email DesignIf you can’t read this email, then click here to view it in your web browser

Which would you be more inclined to open?

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The From field is one of those areas where there are few absolute rules, so thorough testing is always advisable, but we tend to see better results for campaigns from a person rather than a functional entity.

If you can leverage the familiarity of your recipient with an individual; their account manager for instance, then great. If not, who might they recognise? A spokesperson for your brand? A leader within your industry?

Who the email is from is just as important as what it is about.

You only need look in newspapers to see how this applies in another medium. Famous columnist’s names and pictures are often given as much of the page as the headline.

Bear in mind that email applications are increasingly integrating with social tools to pull in avatars and profile information into the From address area, so being faceless can put you at a disadvantage over other emails.

The From field is actually devised of three component parts and CommuniGator is quite

rare in giving you full control over these to include both static and dynamic values.

Behind the Sender Alias, who the email is from has a technical element, your Sending Domain which forms part of the Sender Address. This is more of a consideration for Deliverability (see page 6) than attention in the inbox, but still important.

Reply To

If you treat email as a broadcast medium, you could miss out on genuine opportunities. Your call to action may be to visit the website, but if a recipient likes what you’re offering and simply hits reply to ask for more information, then you should be ready to receive

that. The difficulty with reply to addresses is that the human responses will be buried in a sea of automated ones.

Also consider who you present in the Reply to, some addresses can get you into trouble with Junk Mail filters.

Avoid using these addresses in From and Reply fields:

sales@

marketing@

info@

donotreply@

Anatomy of the From field:

Sender Alias: Who the email appears to be from

Sender Address: The actual source of the email

Reply To Address: Where any replies, human or automated are sent

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Subject Line - What’s it about?

A good subject line explains what the email is about in terms that appeal and motivate the recipient to open the email and read it’s full content. Remember that it is competing with other, perhaps similar, subject lines from your competitors and others vying for the attention of your target audience.

The best subject lines tick one or both of these boxes:

1. Relevant Does your subject line resonate with the recipient’s problems, objectives or feelings? What’s in it for them if they open your email?

2. Remarkable Does the subject line stand out from the rest? Does it excite or intrigue? Does it compel them to delve deeper?

Top tips for effective Subject Lines

Avoid structural words Sort your Inbox by Subject and you will invariably find plenty of unread emails containing “Newsletter” in the subject line.

Words that serve no purpose other than to identify one email from the last one you sent offer little or no value to the recipient. Avoid using the name of the month or saying “This month’s” or “This week’s” or the word “Latest” in combination with “Newsletter”, “News”, “Update”.

Avoid the obvious Many email marketers love seasonality, but few recipients need email reminders that Christmas, Easter, Valentines or any other day is coming. If you are focused on a particular industry, think about it before you waste your subject line telling everyone something they already know.

Do not mislead It can be tempting to grab attention by exaggerating in the subject, but if recipients feel let down by what the content then provides, this could harm the performance of your future campaigns. Play it straight, but keep it upbeat.

Personalise If there is a data object that the recipient will recognise as being more relevant to them, then draw upon it in the subject line.

Be succinct There is a lot of conflicting advice about the ideal length of a subject line. This tends to oversimplify what is a multifaceted challenge, but as a general rule, subject lines over ten words will perform worse than shorter ones.

Best Practice:

Having a dedicated Reply To Inbox with a personable address and rules to filter mails with “out of office” and other common automatic phrases can help to ensure recipients who want to do business with you can reply easily.

p16slightly more copy heavy in preview text. Ideally the Preview copy should support the subject line and entice the recipient to read in more detail. Personalisation in the preview area can appear more genuine than in the subject lines.

Preview Keywords Starting your preview text with words like “Thanks” or “Your” can help to make a recipient feel the email is relevant to them. If you start with personalisation, make sure, firstly, that your data supports it and secondly, avoid the word “Dear” (see p7)

There is a lot to the From Address, Subject Line and Preview, but the importance of getting these right is crucial. With the average level of non-engagement in an email database at around 84% (contacts that have never opened or clicked any emails) you cannot pin this on anything other than poor performing From Addresses, Subject Lines and Previews because that 84% never looked beyond those things. Try anything once, if it works do it again, but always be ready to adapt.

✪ Try Gimmicks Sparingly Adding symbols to your subject line, including “RE:”or “FW:” at the beginning or using ALL CAPS are tactics that can be frowned upon, but can also improve your results. It remains to be seen if these sorts of tricks can help you with your ultimate objective, but if your challenge is getting more people to read the email in the first place, then give them a go. Just remember: Test, Test, Test. You cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Feel free to use “Free” It is an email urban legend that using the word “free” is a one way ticket to the junk mail folder. Such is the fear around “free” that hardly anyone uses it. As a consequence, Spam filters do not mind it as they encounter it so infrequently.

Add Sauce There is a fine line to tread between being cheeky and insulting, but a little bit of sauce in your subject line can have a great effect. Two of the best performing subject lines across all of our clients in 2013 were:

“The Joy of Tax” and “Small Hole Problems”

Ours is not to reason why and consider your relationship with your target audience before employing these sorts of tactics.

Preview = Sub-headline

The same rules apply to the subject line and the preview text, but you can afford to be

Try not to waste the preview text with functional statements either:

“If you can’t see this email, click here to view it in your browser”

This is very common in previews and very poor at convincing recipients to open.

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Once you are into the email content itself, the next big thing to get right are the Calls to Action.

Most marketing emails have an objective of driving recipients to web pages. There will be other things to do once on the web page, but the email itself must sell the click to the recipient. Why should they invest more time? What is behind the link?

The rules to making Calls To Action compelling are similar to those we looked at with Subject Lines, but you do not necessarily want to repeat the subject.

Avoid functional language

Using instructions like “click here” on a link offer little value to the recipient. Trying to draw attention to a link through images and styling and then using an innocuous statement like “click here” or “more info” for the link text itself is a waste of an opportunity to drive interest in your links.

What would Google do?

There is a very simple, sure-fire way to present Calls to Action in your emails that your audience will readily understand is where they should click.

And it’s this simple

Google presents links in their search results as blue underlined text. This is such a well established behaviour that it is almost instinctive. We all know that a bit of blue, underlined text is clickable thanks to Google conditioning us all to know so.

So presenting your links as blue, underlined text is the best way to indicate to an email recipient that this is where you want them to click. From a design perspective, this works well on mobile or desktop and avoids any issues with images not being visible in the email.

Google also makes the headline the blue link, whereas the common behaviour in email marketing is to have the link at the bottom.

In practice, you should probably have both, but the headline is the one that will tend to receive the most clicks unless your body copy has a lengthy explanation to encourage the click.

Best Practice:

Verbs and Adverbs in Calls To Action can give them an uplift, so look at ways to amplify the language:Decent Start: Best email marketing tipsAdd Adverb: Very best email marketing tipsAdd Verb: Discover the very best email marketing tipsGo nuts: Discover 6 of the very best email marketing tips ever!

Call To Action

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Responsive Calls To Action

As we increasingly embrace mobile as an email consumption device, our Calls To Action need to also become mobile friendly.

Forms, downloads and other complex or interactive content can be difficult to digest on a mobile. If you want something completed, keep the fields to a minimum.

Offer one-click registrations to events, webinars and other programmes if the contact data that you already hold is enough to take action on.

CommuniGator’s Landing Zone technology uses an encrypted contact ID to enable us to track activity on web pages with an individual contact without them needing to divulge their details.

Presenting content in video format can be another effective way of ensuring it is well received across device types.

Mobile Context

Consider also the likely circumstance of a recipient viewing your email.

In between meetings? On a train? In bed?

The always-on nature of email means you’re never quite sure what mobile recipients are up to when they read your email. It’s not necessarily when you send it either. We often see a spike in activity early in the morning

on the day after a campaign has been sent as recipients catch up on emails they had no time for the previous day.

Balance the need to be compelling with a realistic expectation of what the recipient will be willing and able to do in responding.

New Techniques: Click to CallAlthough the use of phone numbers as a call to action in emails presented on desktops has been relatively ineffective historically, there is growing evidence that mobile audiences are much more comfortable with responding to an email with a phone call. After all, it is the original, primary function of a mobile device. The latest Responsive HTML techniques, using CSS and Media Queries, enable us to not only adapt the layout and sizing of an email dynamically, but also to show or hide elements that are focused around device types.So you can have a traditional website link in your desktop version of the email and a button to initiate a phone call in the mobile version. The email coding will dynamically alter what is shown to the recipient depending on the device they’re using to access the email.

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Forget HTML design for the web. Designing an email is totally different. Your message must display correctly across dozens of clients and platforms, each with its own quirks and compatibility issues, limits, rules and filters.

Many email clients, including every version of Outlook, were never designed to handle complex HTML. Indeed, Microsoft still actively develop Outlook in complete disregard of modern web standards. The reason that they do this is, for them, Outlook is not a marketing tool, it is a business communication tool.

Many businesses take security very seriously and allowing images to display in emails is a security risk. So most people in the corporate environment do not see images in emails by default. At best, they’re an extra unnecessary click for the recipient. At worst, they completely undermine the message within your email when blocked. Some users have no option to unblock them either.

What does this email say about the sender?Not a lot on face value

We won’t embarrass who sent this one!

Design

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Many designers use Apple Macs and Apple has never blocked email images in their OS. So, designers are blissfully unaware of what their Windows colleagues experience in email.

As the focus shifts more to mobile, image blocking is less of an issue, but on smaller screens, images can mess with the layout and obscure Calls to Action with excessive scrolling. There are many neat tricks for designing email for mobile; but you cannot ignore the desktop contingent in your audience as you aim for mobile email Zen.

Lotus Notes is still very much alive and kicking as a email client in the corporate environment. To code a complex email design to look good on an Android phone and in Lotus Notes at the same time, along with all the rest, is a big challenge.

Older versions of Outlook and other desktop clients also utilise a preview pane that will typically display the top 6 lines of an email design.

Images Enabled

Even if you do not perceive blocked images to be an issue, do you have the image assets that support a compelling proposition? The ubiquitous smiling telesales representative is in the same league as “click here” when it comes to convincing recipients to engage with your content.

Background and spacer images can also break designs in many email applications, so avoid these in your designs.

In the same manner as we looked at Calls to Action with Google’s ubiquitous blue, underlined links. Emails that look more like personally written communications or classified listing (a la Google’s results) tend to perform better than those that try to mimic

the full design experience of a fully fledged web page.

You can still use the full HTML web experience to communicate your proposition, but this should be in a landing page or web page that the email links to, rather than the email itself.

We also want to encourage a click behaviour to get accurate reporting,

but if all the information is in the email, you leave the recipient with little reason to click.

Design

Generic stock photography does little to encourage action in your email design

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The most important aspect of email design is layout. In Western Society, we read left to right, top to bottom. Or more to the point, we don’t read, we scan. Eye tracking studies have shown us that the top left corner of an email receives the vast majority of attention and then recipients scan down in a sort of “F” shape, searching for keywords and things to take action from. It is a deeply embedded habit to search a business email quickly to find the thing that you need to do.

Some advanced email clients are starting to use semantic search to find things to do inside an email and presenting them separately from the email body itself. For most of us though, keep your calls to action clear and near the top left. Put the housekeeping at the bottom and remember that many suffer “ad blindness” for anything put down the right hand side of the email - a good place to put images if you must!

The F in Email

As we said from the start, there is no silver bullet to successful email marketing. As you try a few of the suggestions in this guide, it is important to measure their effect. Always test small changes in a controlled manner. Do not change too much at once or you will not know which change had a positive or negative effect. It is also important to test against what is important - your objective.

CommuniGator offers in-built split testing functionality to help you easily and automatically try out different email designs, subject lines and other changes, but if you do not have access to these tools, you may wish to consider manually splitting your target audience and sending different emails to sections of it.

Testing

Twitter Testing GroundSocial channels are a good place to test out Subject Lines and Calls to Action. Share your content on social before you send your email using different copy and see which performs best in terms of clicks and shares.

Look at who as well as how many engage. Are you attracting the right target audience? Are you getting the attention of those who would buy?

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The first question that many marketers ask after an email campaign has been sent is “what was the open rate?” This industry-standard metric for supposed success is deeply flawed though.

Every ESP uses a tracking image to record email opens, but that image is not tracked as an open for anyone with images blocked in their email, even if they read it. iOS devices throw this metric out even further. They download the tracking image even if the email is not opened.

You may have noticed the uplift in webmail statistics on page 3. This is due to Gmail’s recent changes on automatic image downloads. It is a technology change that further distorts the open metric.

So what? Even if you could reliably track opens, what would it mean? If a recipient opens your email, reads it and takes no further action, is that a good or a bad reflection on the effectiveness of your campaign.

Clicks Click behaviour is more reliably measured, but again, what does it mean?

An Unsubscribe could be a click. Is that a sign of success?

This all boils back to where we began - Your objective. How many recipients did the thing that you wanted them to do?

CommuniGator’s website tracking technology extends your ability to report on email behaviour to your website too.

Beyond Single Actions Sometimes it is difficult to give your contact a specific action to fulfil which you can track. Even if you can, not everyone does what you want them to.

Lead Scoring the activity that your contacts take with your emails and on your website is an increasingly popular way of segmenting contacts and assessing performance. When a contact interacts with key pages on your site, they accumulate a Lead Score which gives you an easy to understand insight into how interested they are in your company.

Sales teams can then take action on qualifiable leads produced by your marketing activities with confidence. No more cold calls.

Reporting

2 2 2 10 22 22

Lead Score = 48Lead Score = 60 points

Website Activities:

Lead Score: The meaningful, modern marketing metric:

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From: Someone familiar or notableTo: A targeted contact

Preview: Back up the subject with something interesting/personalised.

Call to action as a headlineGet your call to action up top, front and on the left. If you must rely on images, then put them on the right where they will not interfere with the copy. Repeat your link below the body copy and make it attractive underneath each article and make the text compelling.

Discover the best way to present links

Keep housekeeping at the bottom.

Subject: Remarkable / Relevant30th March 2014 14:00

Use this page as a quick aide-memoire for what you have learnt in this guide:

1. Have a clear objective

2. Identify your target audience

3. Refine your proposition so that it is compelling to your target audience

4. Grab their attention in 2 seconds: From Address, Subject, Preview

5. Humanise your Reply mechanisms

6. Create a compelling Call to Action

7. Consider how your audience would respond on mobiles

8. Focus on language and format rather than imagery

9. Design with the F in mind.

10. Proof read it and scan it yourself

11. Test everything in a controlled manner

12. Check the Spam Filter before sending

13. Measure results against your objective

14. Refine, improve and do it again

Quick Guide: Anatomy of a highly

effective email campaign

CommuniGator Ltdwww.communigator.co.uk | 01483 411 911

The Old Byre, Peper Harow, Godalming, Surrey GU8 6BQ

“I went to CommuniGator’s Best Practice Email Marketing Seminar last Thursday with a colleague to refresh our brains on the dos and don’ts and on the back of it we created a new email template, applied some new ideas, ran a split test against the ‘old’ style campaign and then saw 18 times more click throughs on the new compared to the old!”Mike Harrison - Digital Marketing Manager, Spikes Cavell

We’ve been running our Best Practice Email Marketing Seminars since 2006.

For up to date advice and insights like those in this guide, why not join us?

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