Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Return on Subscriber HQ’s are in Portland Oregon, which is home to the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers.  The Blazers are a team on the rise, and the community is buzzing over the prospect of this team leaving the “junk folder” and returning to the “inbox” (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Naturally, email marketing is an important part of the mix for building buzz and driving revenue for the upcoming season. The last thing you want to take away from this buzz is email rendering issues (how your email appears across multiple email clients) and a confusing conversion process.

This particular email, which highlights single game suite options, appears fine above the fold in Gmail.  But once you get into the options, the bullet points strike right through the content. Unfortunately, the calls-to-action are right below this.

Did this result in a complete failure for the Blazers?  Probably not. But it had to have a negative impact on conversion. Similar to looking at your watch in a movie, you are not fully engaged anymore.

Instead of breaking down why this email rendered incorrectly in Gmail, I wanted to talk about 5 simple tweaks to this email campaign that would increase click through and conversion.
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I heard from fellow ROS author, Alex Williams, that Evernote was a great product to keep notes and access them from your iPhone, desktop, etc. So I decided to do a quick search on Google for “evernote” and found the results. The thing that jumped out at me was their PPC ad that says “Info management that’s so good our competition buys the keyword.” It is creative and confident, however it does not work well when no one else is buying the keyword…

TeNo, a manufacturer of some really nice men’s and women’s jewelry, sends image-heavy emails that are great for showcasing their product but in this day and age of image blocking, it can be…unreliable. This email I received from them last week is a prime example of why you use Alt Tags. The entire preview pane is blank. They did not even chop up the image into multiple smaller images to help in load time, so I sat and waited for about 5-10 seconds for the image to download (on a T1). When the average time an email is looked at is just under 3 seconds, this is totally unacceptable.

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- Alex Williams 8/21/08

Threadless is a hip t-shirt company that allows users to upload designs and create t-shirts for sale through their site.  After receiving emails from them for a while now, I noticed a feature of their email design that I am clicking on more and more: “Browse everything that’s in stock in your size:”.

I have never been a huge fan of website navigation “above the fold” in email marketing designs, as I feel it will receive clicks from users that aren’t reading offers/content in the email.

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While this email from Paypal might not blow your mind, I think it is effective and well thought out. How well did it convert?  We don’t know that (hint, hint Paypal email marketing team).  But let me tell you why I singled it out and what you can learn from it for your campaigns, after the jump.

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I registered for daily email alerts from NYLJ.com, the website for the New York Law Journal. Below is the welcome email I received after confirming my subscription. While I commend them for using this welcome email as an opportunity to convert me into a paid subscriber, the attempt fell flat with me for a couple reasons.

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ReturnonSubscriber.com has a brand spanking new design today, which we are giddy about.  Looks pretty cool, huh?

With the new look will also come a slight shift in topics. We are still going to be covering email marketing best practices and email campaigns, but we will now focus more on conversion. Specifically, converting subscribers into paying customers. This is the question I hear the most from clients, so we are going to focus on techniques and strategies to get them to click AND covert. We will do this by highlighting examples of both good and bad, outside-the-box and inside-the-box.

If you see an email, landing page, or website that is discussion worthy, please let me know with a comment and we will open it up for debate.

Stay tuned, grab an RSS feed for your feed reader, tag us, or sign up for email list, it is going to get interesting…