Archive for: September 2010

Holiday season: get ready for crowded inboxes

Sep. 29 Email Marketing, Trends in Email Marketing 2 comments

This holiday season, Santa’s going to have a problem. Not because Rudolf is being silly or Comet is not a good team player, but inboxes of consumers are filling up to the limit these days. For instance recently Hotmail’s Product Manager Dan Lewis noted that no less than 15% to 20% of emails received by Hotmail users are social media notifications. As retailers are increasing the email frequency as well, especially during the holiday season, inboxes will be crowded. There are many other things received these days by email as well, compared to old times. A list:

- invoices and purchase confirmations

- welcome campaign messages from subscriptions

- tickets for events, movies, trips and more

- media like presentations, personal movies, pictures

- earlier noted social media notifications

- software update notifications

- (internal) event and agenda notifications from your own agenda, company or group

- spam (sorry, it’s still part of email sadly)

- ‘regular’ private email

There are some special categories here: the last one is the classic one: in the old days all you did is just send and receive email to and from the people you knew. If you only had a personal account and received more than 10 emails a week, it was a lot. Another special category is the second one: automated campaign messages, especially welcome messages from new subscriptions, have been growing more and more in recent years. This is possible due to the marketing automation tools available on many ESP platforms these days.

The last special one is the first one: there are experiments going on with ordering and paying within an email by and with selected companies. This means you’ll get an invoice on your electricity or insurance for exampleand can pay for it right away in the email: no logging in, no codes, just accord it and it’s paid.

A giant mailbox in Greenland. Better get ready for holiday season.

All the other categories have been subtly but steadily starting new streams of email into the inbox, costing more time and effort from the receiver to handle. The trouble is: the receiver doesn’t have any more time: the same time is shared between all those emails now, which means less time per email. Some webmail providers like GMail have been trying to solve the problem through providing Priority Inbox: but that’s more of a smart filter than an actual solution to the problem. Getting less email is the actual only solution to the problem, because the problem originates from receiving too much of it in the first place. The trouble is: how to achieve this?

A recent chat message from Peter Roebuck during an eMailradio broadcast noted the following:

allwebemail: I’ve started unsubscribing from newsletters and instead reading just those articles that are popular with my twitter peeps. It’s a great filter.

This is simply a choice by Peter: he chooses to receive (a certain portion of) his news and information through another channel. Just like the option for people to subscribe to RSS and read it in their Google Reader instead of going to websites and reading news and blog posts there. So here are some tips (definitely not a complete list) to survive the holiday season:

- Turn off all social media notifications (you’ll be on those channels all the time or at least once a day anyway, right? Either via mobile or other device)

- Choose your channel of choice on news/blog updates: be it RSS, Twitter, or yes, email: spread the input over multiple channels

- Move stuff like media to ‘the cloud’: have an intranet microblogging option like Yammer (in your company) or chat privately available to share media

- Have software updates just update, or not: good software tells you when an update is available

- Change the frequency at which you receive newsletters and sale offers from retailers

Of course, these are just some tips: there are dozens of things you can do yourself to tame the inbox and be ready for the holiday season. For marketers, the challenge will be to get your email campaigns right in terms of timing, content and way of delivering that content: that will be key for you to be succesful with your holiday email campaigns. Good luck!

Subject lines and mobile: what works?

Sep. 24 Email Marketing Design, Mobile, Trends in Email Marketing 2 comments

More and more people are solely reading and sending email from their mobile devices. This happens on all those beautiful smartphones (I have and love the HTC Desire for instance) but also from smaller-than-laptop-screen netbooks (example: Dell Mini 9 has a reso of 1024 x 600), iPads (1024 x 768) iPhones and all other battery powered electronics.

The trouble with email on mobile is that it requires a complete new approach in the design and subject line department. The classic ’600px wide works everywhere’  doesn’t work everywhere anymore: many of the small screens are somewhere between 300 and 500px wide: the not so small Motorola Droid has a resolution of 480 x 854 while the first mentioned HTC Desire has 480 x 800 available screen real estate. Lesser smartphones run on the humble resolution of 240×320: not much compared to many desktop screens with 1280×1024 of even 1900×1200.

How does this work out in real life mobile email land? Something like this:

Even though there are Dutch subject lines, you can see that almost all of them have been cut off: average character visibility is 28. The only one completely visible is the Transavia one with ‘ Prinsheerlijk vanuit Den Haag’ . The KLM subject line personalises with “Meneer Bergsma…” which would be throwing away a lot of potential: I know my name and it doesn’t need to be used in subject lines: save it for the email itself, I want to know the content of the email (hence the name ‘subject line’).

Just two subject lines higher there is ‘ Gratis bezorging bij Drogist..”  which means free delivery. Now we’re talking: this is attractive. There’s something else: Android (which runs on my HTC Desire and many more smartphones) has GMail Priority Inbox available if you have it turned on in your GMail account: this will filter out some messages too depending on how smart it already has gotten.

For email marketers there’s a lesson to be learned: can you trim down your subject line to 35 characters, or even just 25? If yes then please do so, it’ll help your subscribers to understand what the email is about and hopefully open it. Next time I’ll be focussing on the other big impacting factor of mobile email: resolution and email design.

Video in email marketing on the rise, slowly

Sep. 21 Email Marketing, Trends in Email Marketing Comments Off

According to DMnews Inbox Insider video in email marketing is on the rise, but the growth is slow. One of the reasons of the not-so-speedy progress is that there are still many bumps in the road for marketers and that not all ESPs are offering solutions covering the use of video in email marketing. A recent survey by ExactTarget noted that 50% of respondents have used video in their email marketing campaigns and 24% are still on the fence about it.

Some of the key reasons noted by marketers as making it difficult for using video in email are the high cost, implementation and having the right video content available. In addition, 40% of marketers have said that linking to a video landing page from an image or weblink has been proven the best way to put video to work in email marketing: however some 33% said that having the player embedded would be the most effective solution although current email clients (mostly) don’t support it yet.

HTML5 video in email on Apple platform

In an earlier post here on Emailblog.eu it was noted that the combination of HTML5 with the newest browsers and new webclient versions of Hotmail and GMail could bring more platform coverage for video in email compared to what is possible at this moment.

Microsoft quits making smartphones

Sep. 18 Mobile, Social media Comments Off

The Microsoft Kin line (remember that?) was killed off quite soon after introduction: after less than two months on the market the project was stopped and the smartphones never even reached Europe. Rumor has it that less than 10,000 Kin smartphones were sold. According to Tivanka Ellawala, Microsoft’s CFO of mobile communication business the company is now fully dedicated to bringing Windows Mobile 7 to the market.

The Kin smartphones were supposed to appeal to a young hip audience and looked like this:

So far the Windows Mobile 7 OS will be implemented by HTC and Samsung: it is unknown which other smartphone companies will be making phones with the OS as well.

Holland America Line – subtle animation enriches email

Sep. 17 Email Marketing Design 1 comment

In their most recent email, cruise ship company Holland America Line puts in a very subtle animation to draw attention. The 3-day sale has more info to offer: below the sale line the line alternates between the separate destinations and the book now option (now that’s a cta). The simpel yet beautiful execution of this gif animation makes it non-obtrusive yet draws attention: the number 1 thing an email marketer wants with their email campaigns. Below is the email, with the right column cut off so it could fit here:

3-DAY SALE Happening Now, with fares from $399*!
Find Cruises Destinations Onboard our Ships Virtual Tours & Videos Special Offers
Holland America Line: 3-day sale - FARES FROM $399*
Book special fares before they open to the public.
Call now for best selection!

Such subtleness puts the email apart from many others that are non-animated or animated in an obtrusive way. Hat tip to Holland America email designers for this design and animation implementation.