I was looking at some statistics and reports recently and it really got me thinking about the implications that it could have on the email marketing industry.  In the next couple of posts, I will be looking at two of the biggest factors that may very well shape the email marketing world for the future.

According to facebook, a quarter of their users access their accounts through mobile phone devices and are twice as active as regular users.

The figures have risen from 5 million users in 2008 (source) to 150 million in 2010 (source) with 50 million of those new users coming in the last 6 months.  This, it seems is just the beginning.  With Android software being open to all phone manufacturers, there is a flood of affordable Smartphone devices coming into the market leaving these figures undoubtedly rising further.

In a presentation earlier in the year, Mary Meeker, head of global technology research at Morgan Stanley, forecast that mobile browsing would surpass desktop browsing within the next 5 years.

So what does this have to do with email marketing?  Well, if there is an increase in mobile usage, there will be a drop in actual PC/Laptop usage times.  That drop in usage I attribute to the casual Internet user.  The main goal when they usually log on is to have a quick check of their Social Networking, Email, and one or two select other sites that they will always visit.  Ultimately though, their agenda isn’t more than that.

In the past, a good number of these may actually end up aimlessly surfing the Internet for a long period of time as they have no real purpose to the session – a point where they would be more susceptible to marketing messages and exploring around the site and beyond their original intentions.

With mobile users, if they are intending to search for an item to buy, they will be more specific in their searches.  You will see browsing times drop, due to a lack of browser capability compared to desktop browsers.

Research from late last year also backs up this claim, stating that “60% of consumers have encountered a problem when accessing a website from their mobile phone during the past 12 months”. 

The main factors that caused this are:

• Slow load times (73%)
• Experiencing errors and crashes on the mobile site (51%)
• Formatting of the mobile site makes it difficult to use (48%)
• Mobile site not functioning as expected (45%)

With no unlimited amount of tabs and browsers running simultaneously, users would get frustrated trying to mimic their actions on a desktop browser, so their habits will consequently be different.

This does though, throw up opportunities for email marketers; ones that are already in place.

Recipients more tuned in?

Whilst the mobile browser will have a decrease in ability to browse, this also decreases the amount of things they can be doing at the same time.  This could lead to users paying more attention to your message than before, as long as it is readable and you have got your timing right….

For more on mobile email design, check out this style campaign blog, a great resource for design ideas.

Landing Pages

If the mobile browser user experience is an issue in conversion rates, then it is a marketers duty to ensure that this problem is limited as much as possible.  Landing pages optimised to mobile browsing is the best available solution, and so should be considered in the planning process.  Furthermore, sites that retain their customers details such as billing and delivery addresses being automatically loaded after the user supplies email address and password, will also help in limiting the users poor browsing experience.

The importance of timing

With mobile email marketing, you are potentially plugged into contacting them all the time.  The timing of when they will be receptive though will differ to that of a send to a desktop recipient.

Maybe your mobile recipients are on the train home from work and with not much else to do, will pay much more attention to your message than at any other point.

On the other hand, you could catch them out with friends, and if the email is not relevant it could be instantly dismissed.

Timing will be incredibly important and something that will have to be tested to get the most out of your campaigns.

If we’re looking to the future, I can envisage the sending process of email marketing evolving to be more intuitive to each subscriber; more of an advanced trigger mechanism based on  the subscriber’s past history opposed to a bulk send, which is the usual way to carry out an email campaign now.

Less is More

If we’re going to look at the best way to achieve success from mobile recipients, we are going to be looking at shorter email campaigns, with straight to the point content.

Indeed, Mary Meeker in her presentation even notes that “One of the implications of mobile access is a growth in ecommerce, featuring things such as location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc.”

Coupons, location specific and time limited offers could be a lot more effective with mobile marketing, catching people on the move and enticing them into your store, bar, restaurant, event etc.

Less may also mean more in the case of sending frequency, with a useful statistic drawn from the comprehensive guide on mobile email over on Mark Brownlow’s blog post (well worth a read) that stated “mobile email users less tolerant of higher-frequency emails than “traditional” email users”.  Although I personally believe that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case and that this is drawn from people receiving desktop emails to their mobile devices; I’ll be going more into frequency strategies in my next post.

Images keep going really big when I preview it to myself

This is something that happens to a lot of people and can be very easily fixed.

The chances are you are using Outlook 2007 as your email client, and that uses a different rendering engine to other desktop and web-based clients and affects people who have used the image resizing tool within their campaign to get their images to the right size.

When the email is sent to Outlook 2007, the client removes the code that resizes the image and leaves it in its original (and normally huge) state; making your campaign look ugly, and unprofessional.

The Solution: Images need to be uploaded to mailingmanager in their desired size to prevent this from happening.  A major hurdle for a lot of people with this is that they don’t have the software to do this.  Luckily, we at mailingmanager have found a great, free bit of software for you to use.  View the tool on CNET and download it and remove this problem from ever happening again.

Are you a Mac user?  Try this app from the Apple site.

The email keeps doing weird things after I’ve saved it (content disappearing, layout moving around, text changing font and size)

This is a very common problem we hear and some poor people keep struggling through it, re-doing the campaign again, only to find it reoccur after saving again.

The problem is down to copying and pasting from Microsoft Word, email, or from any word processing software that defines the font type and size.  The reason it causes this problem is because it doesn’t use html code to change the font format and instead uses code that WYSIWYG html editors can’t read and display correctly.  The result is that the WYSIWYG, in its attempt to make sense of the unrecognised code, will break and distort the email causing erratic (and sometimes drastic) changes to the email, leaving your shouting profanities at the screen!

The Solution: Never, ever copy and paste from Microsoft Word, Publisher, Outlook, or any other word processing program that can alter font formatting.  You have two options really:

Either type directly into the editor or, alternatively if you want to copy and paste from an existing document, paste it into the Notepad prior to pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor and then you will not bring any dodgy coding over with it.

The Email keeps expanding in size when I…

….put links in

We’ve seen this enough times for this to be mentioned as advisory to not do.  A lot of times people will put in a link such as:

http://www.mailingmanager.co.uk/reallylongurl/inasubsectionofthesite/reallylongpagename.html

This will be inserted into the email how it is above.  The problem with doing this is that the link will not split onto two lines and will instead just continue on the same line, causing it to push out the size of your email, and make it lose its desired shape.

The Solution: The link needs to be put into a hyperlink to stop this problem from happening.  Just have it inserted behind wording such as “view the rest of this article” or “read more” and you will remove this problem.

….put images in

You may have taken our advice above and resized the images to your desired size and then gone to insert it, only to find that when you do insert it, it pushes out the width of the email.

The Solution: It is a pretty simple one; the image is too big.  The reason this is included is because people normally do the whole campaign before realising this mistake.

When they look at it though, they normally see the image as having space on either side of it, making them presume that it can’t be the image causing the problem.  What they sometimes miss is that most tables have a padding value in it that makes the images and text not touch the sides to give it a nice overall look.  You can reduce the padding if you want the image to fit, but we personally recommend shrinking that image a little bit more.

These are our most common issues that we receive.  If you keep having a recurring issue that you want solving, please post a comment below or email support@mailingmanager.co.uk with the problem and we will give you the solution.

What’s in store for Email Marketing in 2010The start of the year always seems to be a time for marketers to take stock and start planning for the forthcoming year.

Over the past year we have seen some parts of the email marketing industry progress and become more prominent whilst we have also seen announcements which mean certain aspects of email marketing will stay the same for quite some time.

Domain Based Reputation

One of the big issues to arise for me is ISP’s adoption of domain based reputation.  There’s a couple of great articles on it here:

Times are changing for E-Mail Marketing
The coming gold rush with domain based reputation

In a (very small) nutshell, this potentially could mean that you’re accountable for your sending practices regardless of how many different IP’s or ESP’s you go through.

Although in this Return Path post it does point out that rather than being the sole solution to everyone’s problems, it will more likely be another tool for ISP’s to adopt to be more accurate with their reputation filtering.

So what does this mean to you?  Well, basically it’s another step forward in promoting good sending practices and sending relevant emails.  Those of you who are conscientious about your sending practices and campaign content, will see your campaigns strive, whilst those who don’t will see their campaigns continue to lose effectiveness.

Engagement

The best way to adapt to domain based reputation filtering is to keep your subscribers engaged in the emails you send out.  Engagement has become a more prominent issue throughout 2009, and I can see that continuing through 2010.

This post from Mark Brownlow brings up a great point “organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender’s messages”.

As reputation filtering progresses, so does the definition of spam.  Marketers still looking towards what the law defines as spam will ultimately fail as its definition is now the opinion of each person you send to; legal terms won’t stop a recipient from disengaging or pressing the “this is spam” button.

Have a look at a previous post I wrote for inspiration on how to maintain engagement.

Preference Centres

Another way to keep your recipients engaged is through preference centres.  Okay, not a new subject but it has continued to grow in popularity since it was introduced.

Preference centres are an alternative to unsubscribe links.  They will allow your subscribers to choose what they receive from you.  In theory, this should reduce the levels of unsubscribes you receive – great.  This in turn will allow your subscribers to also choose what emails they receive, which should keep them more engaged in your messages – also great.

So why not use them for your campaigns? Read more here:

Why an email preference center matters
Preference centres and positive unsubscribe processes

Strategy

The new year is a great time for marketers to start to plan ahead for the year.  A post I wrote last year outlines how some campaigns become stale and fall into a rut.  Eventually you could see your recipients becoming emotionally unsubscribed from your messages – an email marketers’ nightmare.

So with the new year in place, why not try planning out a full years campaigns using the email campaign life cycle model?  The idea is that by setting out your campaigns with a definite end to it, it will keep you engaged in your own campaigns as well as your recipients.

Design

News in 2009 was that Microsoft confirming that Outlook 2010 will keep the same rendering engine as Outlook 2007. Despite a big uproar from the email marketing community, the engine in Outlook 2010 will keep the design side of the industry limited.

Here’s an email design essentials post I wrote a while back to help you on your way in this area.

For all designers out there, here is the only guidesheet you need.

In the build up to our new website design, we’ve now got our blog redesigned and in my opinion, looking great.

To celebrate, we’ve decided to do a double blog post series with our IHM web design team.

This series is a look from two different angles of the email marketing world.  My posts will be based upon the fundamentals of email marketing whilst Chris’s (one of our designers) posts will be based purely on the design aspects of the campaign.

First up is Chris’s choice of email – One from Font Shop Digest.

The subject line is a bit of a tame affair (Digest | FontShop News | October 27, 2009).  It repeats the send from name in the Subject Line which is never impressive and it doesn’t really entice me into opening the email. 

In terms of offering some improvement of the subject line; it’s a bit tough as I know virtually nothing about the font industry (about the last 10 minutes looking on their site) but if they could mention what the main feature of the email is in the subject line, that may see an increase in interested openers.

My Suggestion: “This months new and exclusive fonts plus all the latest news”

Okay so onto the actual email itself.  The first thing you nice is the date – I mean, there’s no way to miss it; it’s huge. I eventually decided though, this isn’t a bad thing. 

The logo is near by so that the branding is still coming across and it gives the beginning of the email a quirk to it – something I’m sure the design community love.  The addition of a link to the font that has been used to create the date is something which I quite liked as well; the large date initially draws the eye and then there is a clear call-to-action to satisfy any further interest.

The email itself is nicely put together – the obvious gripe I’m going to have with it is due to the overuse of images in the email – the ratio is in the favour of the images far too much.  Understandably, it is going to be an uphill struggle for a font company to advertise their fonts without having them as images and in there defence, they have made use of text wherever possible so I can’t really make improvements on what they have done.

They do get minus points for the use of the search function in the email – nice idea, if it worked in most email clients.  As it doesn’t, it’s a bit of a waste.

In terms of the campaign on a whole, it has more than just a sales pitch which means that even if the recipient isn’t interested in purchasing at the time of the email, there is still interesting content for them to read through; meaning the recipients interest is maintained throughout.

You can view Chris’ take on this email here