Return On Email Subscriber

As the holidays approach, the email marketing messages we all receive doubles and for some, triples.  With consumer spending grinding to a halt, marketers are going to have to get more creative.  A lot of times, with email especially, it not the deal per say, but how you phrase it and how quickly you can get you offer understood.

This email from Details Magazine contains a great offer, but I’m not sure they reached the full potential of the email.  While “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” is easily understood, the fact you could buy yourself a subscription and get a free X-mas gift for somebody else is a much better incentive for a subscriber.

This type of offer would be a perfect chance to A/B split your list and test phrasing of the offer.  For the B list on this email, I would try “Give your friend a Free Subscription to Details Magazine this X-Mas” or something similar.  Analyze both the click through and conversions, then launch the campaign.

When you come up with an offer for an email campaign, always create at least 2 versions.  It’s not always what you say, but how you say it.

How would you have phrased this offer?

Gwyneth Paltrow, who you may know from such films as Shallow Hal and Duets, has recently launched a new website called Goop. The site might best be described as a Oprah-esque lifestyle/advice site. There is plenty of commentary about the site and the point of it all. I am here to talk about the email marketing aspect of it, which I like a lot better than the website.

Home Page Opt-In

First off, a great top left email opt-in form on the home page.  Any company that doesn’t include an highly visible Opt-In for/box on their home page is simply not focused on growing their email list. In this day and age you also have to sell it a little bit - “Get the Scoop from Goop”. (more…)

Above the Fold (as defined by eROI):  the part of an email message that is visible without scrolling.

I have taken the liberty of editing an HBO email to show you how a simple change will increase email click through and overall campaign conversion. 

I have placed a line the creative to show where the fold would most likely be on a horizontal preview pan. (Usually the fold is estimated at 300 pixels top-down.)

Original HBO Email

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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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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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I recently tried a new technique for a client who send predominantly full image emails. With many email clients blocking images by default, it is more important than ever to use Alt Tags and HTML elements to get the subscriber to unblock those images and view your email in all it’s glory.

HUF, a hip chain of skate culture shoe stores in SF & LA, has a pretty hip and fun audience, so I took a little different approach to the image ALT tag….

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What better way to illustrate the importance of a email subscriber preference center than through real world examples, right?

After blowing past 1100 work emails last week, I decided it was time to move some newsletters off my work address, and over to a personal address. I imagine a lot of people have this need as well everyday.

So,the first two newsletters I tired this gave me wildly different results.

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Sender ID is a Microsoft initiative that validates the origin of e-mail messages by verifying the IP address of the sender against the alleged owner of the sending domain

To add a Sender ID record in Register.com, follow the steps below:

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This info is based on eROI clients. Your Domain Key may differ, ask your provider.

The Domain Key is added as a TXT entry. Below are some examples of what these TXT entries will look like:

TXT Name
_domainkey.eroi.com
kesp._domainkey.eroi.com

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We get asked this question a lot, so we thought we would post it.

To setup a Sender ID record in GoDaddy.com:

1. Go to Domains and Select the domain,
2. Click on TotalDNS and click on “Add New TXT Record”
3. In the TXT Name field enter a “@” character.
4. In the TXT Value field, enter the Sender ID record supplied, be sure to NOT include the quotes
5. Click OK.

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