No man is an iland

A couple of weeks ago, Sitepoint released a new book on HTML email design written by Mathew Patterson of Campaign Monitor.

Knowing the credentials of both author and publisher, I bought a copy right away but only found time this morning to read and review the book properly. Here are my thoughts.

As an aside, it’s a healthy sign that we’re now seeing books appear on niche aspects of email marketing. It reflects a growing maturity in the industry. Mathew’s book isn’t for experienced email design pros, but makes a great foundation for those learning their trade or migrating across from the vastly different world of website design.

The only downside is having read it, I feel I ought to do something about the pre-1999 design of my own newsletter. But then I always did favor content over style

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• Channel: Book reviews

It’s hard to imagine there’s much new to say about subject lines, yet most of us fall into two traps once we’ve settled on a particular approach.

Our first mistake is to assume all that matters is how the subject line looks in the inbox.

Our second mistake is the tendency to assess each potential subject line in its entirety, irrespective of how long it is. Which can lead to some accidental embarassment…

Inboxes are not everything

The main purpose of your subject line is to get attention and encourage the reader to explore further…starting the chain of events that leads to (hopefully) some desired response, like a sale or download.

Its big chance is in the inbox, where people are reviewing subject lines to see what to delete, read now or read later. That’s what all that subject line advice focuses on.

But the subject line’s impact does not stop there.

Here’s my Yahoo inbox:

Just some 27 characters on display. Not a lot of point in sending Yahoo addresses nice, long subject lines. But wait…

See what comes up in the preview pane:

The subject line becomes a big font, bold headline for the email content, with about 104 characters on display.

So while the inbox impact remains paramount, shouldn’t we also think about how the subject line works as the headline to the email content itself?

Similar things happen at Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail. Here’s my Hotmail inbox when using a right-hand preview pane:

Again, not much subject line to play with. Here’s how it looks in the preview pane:

Boom! The subject line again becomes a big headline title for the email content. Gmail does the same when you open an email.

Subject line display length is a spectrum

Now let’s talk about length.

Here we fall into the trap of thinking in very broad terms…short and long…<50 characters, >50 characters…etc.

Truth is that mobile devices, desktop email clients and webmail services are showing subject lines across a whole spectrum of display lengths.

So shouldn’t we consider how our subject line looks when only the first few characters are displayed, when everything is displayed and at all display lengths in between.

Look at this Gmail inbox:

See how word length and word number affects how many characters are displayed. Three subject lines in the same inbox, but one shows the first 87 characters, one the first 80, and one the first 76…

Remember my Hotmail inbox with just 25 characters on display? If I turn off the preview pane function, the inbox looks like this…with some 80 characters on display:

All sorts of actions influence the displayed length. Yahoo users can manually adjust the size of the subject line field in their inbox. Gmail subscribers can set up filters to add labels automatically to incoming emails: if the labels are big enough, they shunt your subject line off the available space:

And we haven’t begun to talk about mobile and desktop email clients.

Shrink gracefully

Now if we have a long subject line, you certainly can’t optimize for every available display space out there. But you can review the spectrum of possibilities and make changes if anything odd displays that might leave a bad impression on subscribers.

Here’s a simple Excel spreadsheet you can download that lets you enter your subject line once and it will show you how it looks at any length between 10 and 125 characters.

Let’s take some innocuous subject lines and run them through the tool:

1. “Get 20% off all Arsenal gear + lots of offers on summer leisure fashion”

Problems:
20 characters: “Get 20% off all Arse”
44 characters: “Get 20% off all Arsenal gear + lots of offer”

We can’t do much about the first, but “lots of offer” looks like a typo to the casual reader. If we wrote “top offers” instead, then it would still work when the s in offers is truncated by the recipient’s client:

“Get 20% off all Arsenal gear + top offer”

2. “(Gardening News) Ten tips for a better fuchsia display”

35 characters: “(Gardening News) Ten tips for a bet”
42 characters: “(Gardening News) Ten tips for a better fuc”

Ouch.

The examples are extreme, but you see the point.

Now of course our copywriting emphasis is always going to be on the inbox and the power of words to drive interest and action.

But let’s reserve a corner of our email minds for the role of subject line as webmail title and the impacts of truncation on subject line design…

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• Channel: Subject lines

Email is a victim of its own success.

Any self-respecting “why do email marketing?” article begins by referencing the excellent ROI. Then the list of benefits usually starts with email’s ability to garner immediate, direct and measurable responses.

You send an email, you get sales, downloads, registrations, donations etc…wahay! What’s not to like?

Direct response is still email marketing’s dominant culture. The tactics and technologies have come a long way, but most commercial email thinking is still, at heart, about driving immediate response.

But there are two other email marketing cultures struggling for a fair share of your attention.

The first is the idea of email as relationship and brand builder. Its origins lie in the lowly content newsletter: the monthly “useful tips and articles” email from your friendly B2B service provider.

Ten years ago I wrote that newsletters…

“…may also contain action-related elements, such as news of a special offer. But their greatest potential lies in their long-term value; in their ability to build, over time, a lasting relationship with subscribers.”

The second is email as digital facilitator: email that does not (just) drive immediate action through the email itself.

The digital facilitator plays an enabling role, supporting action expressed through other media and channels, connecting channels, driving communication and encouraging interaction…all the fuzzy, soft or banal stuff that sends some direct marketers running for the drinks cabinet.

Examples of this facilitator role might be:

• Distribution and promotion of user-generated content (like product reviews)
• Announcements of offline events
• Transactional messages, such as order confirmations or account updates
• Share-with-your-network (SWYN) links
• Encouraging participation at community sites and user forums
• Promoting other channels, like Twitter accounts or video

The challenge for marketers is to escape the confines of the direct response mindset and embrace all three cultures in their email marketing program.

Lesson 1: All email builds relationships and affects branding

The direct response culture can seduce senders into the “hear and now” trap, where it’s all about today’s email or, at best, a small sequence of emails.

Each message is a discrete invitation to buy, download, register…and is judged accordingly. How many sales, registrations, downloads did we get today?

But every email leaves an impression in the mind of the recipient.

Each additional email strengthens or softens, clarifies or confuses that impression…creating, changing or cementing an overall opinion of the sender and/or its brands, products and services.

This process is happening anyway, so it makes sense to account for it…even when your focus is on direct response.

There are two critical elements here:

1. The message container

The message container is the email’s design, layout, style, color, tone, personality…all of which should reflect the brand or image you want to project.

Apple’s emails, for example, might seek to sell products, but their design shows they are acutely aware of the brand image they need to mesh with.

Consider also emails that don’t display or function correctly in every email client. You can get away with a few broken emails in terms of response and ROI, but there’s a hidden cost in terms of the sender’s image and reputation.

2. The message itself

This is where the short-term direct response perspective can potentially do the most harm.

Discounted product offers are a great way of shifting (excess) inventory for a full-price luxury retailer. They work well on a one-off basis.

Continually sending such emails labels you as a discounter: there’s a disconnect between your desired brand or market position and how your email list now perceives that brand or market position.

Equally, a publisher whose email content differs from the website content may find perceptions drifting in a similar way.

It is right and proper to change email content / offers to match what you know gets a good response from your list or particular list segments. But you still need to consider the wider picture and implications. Not to mention the misleading wisdom of the minority.

(See also Building a list on more than deals and discounts).

Lesson 2: Social media didn’t kill direct marketing

Social media didn’t kill email. In fact, email as digital facilitator has received a huge boost from social media, with the concurrent movement toward interaction, exchange, sharing etc.

But all the excitement and attention around social media hasn’t suddenly made email ineffective as a direct response channel either. Email marketing’s high ROI may be based as much on the low costs as the good returns, but it’s still high.

Many commentators are quick to criticize those who don’t account for social media trends in their email marketing. But abandoning email as a driver of direct response would be a similar sin.

Shifts in email marketing culture aren’t about abandoning one approach for another, but combining the best elements of each.

Lesson 3: Take the leap of faith

The task is not to ignore email’s ability to drive response, but to account for the branding/image impacts and gradually bring in elements or messaging that play on email’s ability to facilitate responses elsewhere or in the future.

However, since we’ve been brought up on email’s ROI and measurability, there’s a big psychological barrier to using email to produce long-term or indirect benefits that are hard to measure.

As Derek Harding put it recently on the topic of one-to-one communication:

“E-mail still delivers such a high return on investment (ROI) from simple bulk messaging that many marketers see little need to do much else.”

Of course, such a leap of faith is a non-issue in many other channels where success metrics are hard to pin down: think of all the branding ads on TV.

The pull of measurability also loses some impact when you remember that the ways we’ve been measuring email marketing success are not nearly as accurate as we might think.

We can overcome our reluctance to embrace new roles for email by finding ways to properly evaluate the contribution of email to overall marketing and business success.

We can consider attribution models or mail/holdout tests, as recommended by Kevin Hillstrom in a recent interview on this blog.

These will likely reveal that email’s benefits come from those facilitator roles as much as direct response.

Equally, cultural change can go step-by-step. Evolution, not revolution: introducing additional (rather than replacement) email streams that serve engagement goals or building hybrid approaches that sell, engage, and facilitate in one.

In the retail world, for example, Chad White talks of an “age of quasi editorial content.”

You still want the sale, but you take a more indirect route to get it: drawing people in through editorials, reviews and short features. Advertorials rather than adverts.

These softer sell approaches need not be the focus of a message, but can act as secondary calls-to-action. Not only do they build engagement or interest, but they offer an alternative point of interaction to recipients who aren’t interested in the main offer or in responding right now.

It also works the other way, of course. For example, we already have facilitator emails that we can better exploit for marketing.

Loren McDonald, for example, lists a range of lifecycle and trigger messages that are informational or service-oriented (or can be pitched as such), but can include promotional elements too. 

It’s as simple as adding “related product” recommendations to a sidebar in your order confirmation emails.

We are limited only by our imagination and the constraints of an ingrained direct response culture.

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• Channel: Email marketing strategy