Nielsen Norman Group has recently posted its Email Newsletter Usability Report. In the report they note several key findings, of which a summary is posted below:
Newsletter subscribers are prone to reacting more emotionally then website visitors, who take more intereset in functionality
The receiving of newsletters has become part of an online routine
The actual receiving of a newsletter is looked forward to by subscribers
One interesting find is that of the usage of mobile: people tend to spend more time reading newsletters on mobile compared to when they are on desktops
Average time allocated to reading newsletter after opening: just 51 seconds
Email newsletters still rile over social media (Twitter, Facebook) in terms of how consumers want to receive updates from companies
The people over at Campaign Monitor have also looked into the report and focused on the usability of an email newsletter. Below is a heatmap depicting where people look when viewing a newsletter:
Campaign Monitor notes that to get maximum effect a newsletter should be short and sweet: however not everyone agrees. A discussion emerged on Twitter in which some participants noted that short and sweet is nice, but that quality and completeness of an email newsletter should not be neglected. Otherwise a newsletter might look awfully short and ‘fast foodish’.
Last Tuesday Amazon launched a new email service called Simple Email Service. The purpose of the Amazon SES is to send bulk and transactional emails for business and developers. This is all accomplished without having to go through getting a separate email solution set up, either licensed or in house, according to the press release.
The service is fully integrated with all of Amazons Web Services (AWS) and is based upon their experience with delivering vast amounts of emails to their huge customer database. The email team over at Amazon is keen on explaining how they will do their utmost to get a high level of deliverability. This deliverability has been tested through the Litmus email test service by the people over at emailexpert.org. The results were promising: all major spamfilter tests were passed. Testresults can be found here.
The question is whether Amazon with their SES will be able to make inroads into the ESP market and become a major player, or concentrate on a specific part of the market and carve itself a profitable niche. Only time will tell.
The MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas held from 24th till 26th January is in its final day today: I thought it would be nice to gather all the tips, links and otherwise useful info posted on one single page. The tips are all sorted by topic for your convenience. The source for all these tips was the Twitter stream using hashtag #sherpaemail.
Email marketing in general
Kristin Hersant: Email Marketing Gem from Threadless: Be honest. Don’t try so hard… Keep it real.
Kristin Hersant: Non-relevant email is the #1 reason why subscribers unsubscribe.
Kristin Hersant: Internal relevance = Personal interests, demographics, etc. External events = Holidays, Seasons, Sales.
Kristin Hersant: Subject lines = Pick-up Lines. It’s their job to start a conversation.
Kristin Hersant: Creating a clearer, more valuable subject line can increase open rates by 25.3%
Kristin Hersant: Email subscribers are even more cautious and anxious than web browsers because of spam.
Ryan Phelan: when you have value, all you have to do is communicate clearly.
Engagement/Segmenting
Kristin Hersant: Treat the recipients who take time to share with their network as an influencer segment.
Kristin Hersant: Questions to answer: What should the recipient do and why should they care?
Martin Lieberman: Good calls to action include a value proposition/benefit. They don’t just tell people to do something.
Kristin Hersant: People don’t believe hype anymore. You’re going to get diminishing results if you keep using that tone.
Shannon Holato: Email is a conversation, not a magazine ad.
Martin Lieberman: Don’t ask for information from your customers unless you plan to use it
Testing
Kristin Hersant: Test a radical redesign to shake up your thinking.
Hubspot: Test with the most recent names on your email list because they will give you higher performance rate.
Chester Bullock: Optimization occurs in the mind. Goes along with “perception is reality.
Content
Kristin Hersant: Your content needs exclusivity and credibility. Learn to infuse that into your email value proposition.
Kristin Hersant: Key lesson: Content trumps creative. The offer is key.
Kristin Hersant: Key Principle #4: Two common elements that create friction are length and difficulty.
Design
Kenny van Beeck: Images are only useful if they add relevancy to the content of your email or draw your eyes to it.
Kenny van Beeck: You control the eye-path by 5 factors: Size, Color, Shape, Motion and Position.
Kenny van Beeck: The anatomy of a good email : Capture, Convince, Close or “Subject, Johnson box, body.
Ali Landow: Keeping the CTA above the fold in an email is a mistake – it jars the readers’ thought sequence.
Kristin Hersant: Do not give equally weighted calls to action to a recipient. You mitigate your conversion rate.
Kristin Hersant: Plain text outperforms busy emails time and time again.
Deliverability
Kristin Hersant: 20% of legitimate email goes undelivered. 4% is classified as junk. 16% goes missing.
Social media
Kristin Hersant: FreshPair’s Friends w/Benefits campaign drove 25% increase in Facebook fans by offering exclusive discount.
Kristin Hersant: 75% of Twitter users post less than 1 tweet a day. Most users are disengaged. But everyone checks their email… frequently.
Steve Wylie: Email & social media are like PB & chocolate. Good on their own but great together.
Martin from SalesLink: FreshPair’s addition of an “exclusive” tab in Facebook page after getting a “like” is pretty darn clever.
Martin Lieberman: Retail is one of the least-liked words on Facebook, says @hubspot.
Aweber: Clever: send email dedicated to a social network to ppl who click “share” links for that network in previous emails.
Martha Garcia: 96% of people polled were more willing to share their email address vs only 12% of people willing to share their social handle.
David Meerman Scott: Social media are tools. Real-Time is a mindset.
Clients vs companies
Emfluence: Customers don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. And they dislike companies for the same reasons they dislike people.
Martha Garcia: Tone impacts anxiety – A reader’s guard will go up when they think they’re about to be sold something.
Martha Garcia: Clarity trumps persuasion – lose the marketing speak. We are talking w/ people on the other side of our emails.
Karen Rubin: If you don’t get out of your head and into your customers, you will never be the marketer you could be.
Aweber: The goal of the email is to sell the click, not the product. Sell on the landing page, post-click.
Kristin Hersant: Nobody cares about your products except for you. People care about themselves and how you can solve their problems.
Mobile
Rory Carlyle: 29.7% U.S mobile email subscribers operate fully-loaded smartphones.
So there you have it: some nice takeaways from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas. As added bonus I’ve collected some interviews and presentations and more resources below.
Last week David Hobby from Strobist (an excellent photographer lighting resource by the way) noted that the Charlotte Observer had demanded the city of Charlotte to hand over its email subscriber list. According to the local law called the North Carolina Public Records law the city must provide this information. Quoting the article:
Apparently, the Charlotte Observer is using N.C. Public Records law to gain access to subscribers of the city’s email alerts. But this isn’t for an article or an investigative piece: The person at the Observer who is seeking the email addresses has the title of “Director of Strategic Products and Audience Development,” hardly a journalist-like job title.
The request has been met with quite some resistance which is definitely understandable: one of the local County Commisioners noted that they would not comply with the request and furthermore do their utmost to keep the Charlotte Observer from getting any other information from the city. The request was done by the newspaper’s director of strategic products and audience development. It seems that this person is looking at and using the law in the wrong way: this is not the way to collect email addresses for marketing, surely.
More coverage on this topic can be found here and here.
The people over at Pingdom have posted some insight into email spam statistics: this includes an overview of spam facts, originating geolocations of spam and the size of botnets.
Some of the stats posted include the fact that the majority of spam is in English (90%), 2/3rd is pharmaceutical spam and spam from webmail services makes up only 0,7%. Furthermore newsletter spam is increasing too: that type of unsollicited mail is now secondary in unwanted mail.
From the botnet locations and activity below we can conclude that some of the major sources of spam from botnets are east-coast USA, Europe and India:
Knotice has posted a mobile email opens report on Q4 2010 on their website as noted in a press release. The report includes the data of 155 million mails sent in Q4 2010 across 12 industries: one if the key findings in the report notes that nearly 14% of all opens were on mobile devices.
The difference across the various platforms including desktop OSes for reference:
iPhone rules the mobile email world with the Ipad second and Android a close third: the uptake of the iPad for email is interesting since it’s only been on the market for less than a year.
The time of day open percentage is interesting too:
The spikes are early in the morning, when people are waking up and on the go, their minds hungry for new information. The mid-day dip is explained as the time when people are at their desks not using their mobile devices: late in the evening it’s couch or bed time when the mobile devices are brought in again.
