How many sacrifices should you make to the God of Email Functionality?
Latest posts | By Mark Brownlow | 21 Comments | Licence this content
So, do you think this email would work?
Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t. But we probably all feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of this kind of message as a marketing email, no?
Why?
It is, after all, the ultimate expression of much of the (sensible) advice around on email marketing:
- Renders correctly everywhere
- Is mobile-friendly
- Optimized for the preview pane
- Skimmable, scannable, readable
- Concise and to-the-point
- Clear call to action
So why do we feel uncomfortable?
Well, there’s the intuitive role of fonts, copy, colors, layouts and images in guiding the recipient’s perception of the sender and encouraging response:
- One ESP examined its clients campaigns and found HTML emails correlated with an average 59% higher CTR than plain text messages
- An email agency lifted total clicks by over 50% by adding a small image near to the CTA
So a marketing email is about balance. Ensuring functionality and usability are high, while delivering a good impression and a persuasive case to take further action.
Yet there is a seductive pull to the idea of the purely functional email, as expressed in the above example.
Especially when we keep hearing how little time people have…and how unwilling they are to do more than skim and scan and pick and peek and pass over and pass on to other things as quickly as possible.
So we pare things down, eliminate editorial, increase headline fonts, skip the chatter, keep to the facts and feel good about doing so.
All things considered, it’s is no bad thing, except…
Too much focus on functionality can also commoditize and dehumanize your email and take away your ability to reach the people who really matter.
Crowds, character and the diminishing competitive edge
The first danger is that the way your email looks and reads begins very much to look the way a lot of other emails look and read.
This is an especial danger with image-lite B2B newsletters (including my own), where we’re all starting to follow the same “functional” template. Small logo top left, table of contents, headlines and teaser summaries.
Combine that with less text (because people don’t read) and the email can begin to lose character. It’s harder for recipients to distinguish between senders…harder for senders to stand out and deliver a memorable “email experience”.
You’re then left to compete increasingly on the inherent value of your content or offer.
This can certainly work as a strategy (some top B2B marketers use plain text newsletters), but not all of us are lucky enough to have unique or leading offers or content to work with.
That’s why I often talk about the key role of personality and non-functional optimization as a way of adding value to your emails and competing when you…um…can’t compete.
The non-transactional audience
A second danger is an over-emphasis on functionality assumes that all recipients act like machines: simply computing the relative value of buying the product, reading the article, “learning more” about the event…or not doing so.
Your emails then pander to the unemotionally involved…and these are not necessarily the people you’re really trying to reach.
And, frankly, nobody acts rationally anyway…whatever people may say and think, they are influenced by form as well as function.
Sure, there are some people primarily interested in “the facts”. Maybe even the majority. But it may be that your best customers, your loyalists, your real fans and real followers are being shortchanged by a purely functional approach.
For example, most people will not read the friendly editorial at the start of a content newsletter. So let’s dump that and get straight to the content.
But wait…
“Most” isn’t everyone. And the people who do read that editorial are likely your best, most engaged, subscribers.
Engagement versus reach
Which brings us back to the idea of balance.
Perhaps it’s better to keep the editorial and accept that some folk not so emotionally connected with you or what you offer will skip your email entirely: a smaller, more engaged audience, usually beats a bigger, disinterested one.
Or can you find ways to connect with those loyalists without disrupting the purely function-based approach to your emails that the rest are taking? For example, with a table of contents that lets people skip straight to the newsletter meat.
So what’s more important to you: functionality or personality? What do you think?
P.S. I’d still be curious how that email would work out…
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21 comments on “How many sacrifices should you make to the God of Email Functionality?”
Mark,
Another great, thought-provoking post. I have to say, when I first saw the screenshot of the simple email, I thought it was a spam or spoofing message (and still do). Spammers have gone with this short, one line, to the point message, which takes away from marketers’ ability to do something out of the box like this.
I do believe that trying something completely outside the box will help you stand out, but for me, it ultimately comes down to the reputation that you’ve built with subscribers that allow you to step out and get response.
-Kelly Lorenz
That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t thought about Kelly: thanks…design care and attention also enables marketers to set themselves apart from spam/spammers.
It’s definitely all about finding a balance between the two. While I would avoid something that basic, you don’t want it to be too elaborate either since the focus should really be about the offer or discount that you are providing. I agree that a smaller, more engaged audience is better than a large, disinterested one.
“design…enables marketers to set themselves apart from spam”
So much so that spam filters automatically gauge your design. For example, that email would trigger a high risk spam warning for not having enough content (e.g. Spamassassin would say ‘BODY: HTML: images with 800-1200 bytes of words’)
So not only are you quite right Mark that the ‘non-essential’ stuff in your email is actually essential to engage people, in fact excising it make your email into spam. As Kelly pointed out, it looks like spam because it is!
Oh, and re:”nobody acts rationally”
Check this out http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2095
(all credit to Zach Weiner)
I’ll give you possible spam filter issues, though maybe we can override that with a solid sender reputation.
P.S. I actually once knew a perfectly rational guy. Faced by an important exam that had everyone else in a state of excessive panic, he said to me: “Of course I’m not panicking. Panic is not a useful emotion”.
Great stuff as usual Mark. And I agree about engagement. Better to have a few people love you than many more who simply tolerate you. The ones who love you are just one step away from hiring you.
I’ve been thinking about this myself as I experiment with mobile email. The limitations of the channel force you to edit out the fluff, but were do you draw the line?
That’s the challenge & fun, trying to design within those constraints while maintaining some individuality.
Lean, focused content does not have to lack personality. Native iPhone apps come to mind, most use the standard UI building blocks but through the use of color, texture & copy make it their own.
Michael – yep, and personality etc. also stops other people competing with you just by distributing the same “facts”.
Anna – I think the “where do you draw the line?” question is, like you say, the real challenge as user habits/devices shift emphasis toward function. Meeting that challenge will be one of the differences between good email design and really great email design.
Thanks for the post Mark, as always very in depth and insightful. I agree with what Kelly mentioned in her comments – the example really does look like a spam email and I personally would be very reluctant to open it.
Yes, I guess an aspect here is also how different it is to the normal emails you send out. Even if your recognizable sender name and subject line branding got people to open, would they be put off by the shock of the design (or lack of design) and assume it was phishing or some other scam?
I might be weighing in too late and I am intimidated to say anything at all in the company of all the email marketing experts who’ve already commented, as just a copywriter, but is there a degree of relationship here that affects how minimal (i.e. functional) your email can be? It seems like the more a subscriber knows you and trusts you, the less you can get away with. If I know I always find great deals at Mark’s Store, because I’ve shopped there before and I’m a loyal and satisfied customer, then I trust even a simple email like this and will likely take advantage of the offer (if the email got past my spam filter, per earlier comments). However, if I barely know Mark’s Store, or worse don’t recognize the name, I will disregard this email completely.
It’s a strong point Sharon! Where there is trust and recognition and experience, the less “persuasion” you have to do.
Usability “star” Jakob Nielsen’s newsletter, for example, is at its heart a minimalist plain text email with a single text link to the relevant article he wants you to visit.
In fact, the response to such an email might tell you something about the relationship with your subscribers.
Hmmm.
Assuming good deliverability…can you perhaps segment out groups of readers that will likely respond better to a brief announcement type email, rather than anything fancy?
But we still come back to the basic argument against the bare bones approach: the email is totally efficient, but could still perhaps benefit from persuasive HTML elements. And, being totally efficient, is easily copied by the next sender with a similar offer.
It’s a balance that needs to be walked very carefully. On the one hand if it’s just a simple call to action like the email example people might think of it as spam – I know I would. Personally I would prefer a little more engagement.
That being said there can be such a thing as too much engagement wherein the resulting message seems over the top as to come off as fake.
I guess it depends on the person receiving the email and how they perceive the message being said. I mean if they have a bad day it won’t matter how engaging the email is – it just may go to the trash.
Yep, I guess a lot of it boils down to “know your audience”.
“Straight and to the point” would seem to meet both the challenges of fleeting attention spans and creating stand out in overloaded inboxes. But these can be achieved with a decent “design for images off” – as previously covered by you Mark.
But I think that stripping down all (or too many of) the elements of an email to the example shown makes it more of an “alert” or “notification” which may be well received if, for example, “Mark’s Store” has never discounted before and is not know for doing so.
It also strips away those elements (even if regularly ignored) that keep subscribers engaged and serve as an implicit “authentication” that the email is actually from the sender it is purporting to come from. . . “Mark’s Store wouldn’t send an email like that, surely?”.
And the other potential negative impact of “couldn’t be bothered” – to put together a decent email to win my business/appeal to me.
Engaged subscribers have become so, and remain so over time, from a combination of factors – which include format and presentation of content.
Deviation from what nurtured the engagement without subscriber request is likely to cause defection from the email channel. It is hard to nurture engagement with such stripped down content.
Agree with you Robin. Hadn’t thought of the “they couldn’t be bothered” argument before: that’s another good perspective.
That also works the other way around. I now get domain expiry notifications from my provider that are so full of stuff that the actual *critical* information (which domain is expiring and when) is actually quite hard to find: it’s extremely annoying!
The broader point is to find that balance that combines engagement/branding with clear communication.
I agree, we are both recipients of considerable volumes of alerts and notifications – and having to scroll through erroneous information is irksome – but we do it because we have an engagement with the sender.
If only more thought could be put in by the senders…. of what the recipient wants and needs. (now, there’s an idea!)
Great post Mark.
Great article. Interesting read.
Thanks for the post. Some sound points.
Interesting article again
You wrote Mark: “Assuming good deliverability…can you perhaps segment out groups of readers that will likely respond better to a brief announcement type email, rather than anything fancy?”
Segmenting is exactly what i would do. Segmenting content to certain groups within the email. Prob. by prior behavior. Lets say my most loyal readers are allso the ones clicking on my links or certain links. Now put those into segment 1 and the rest who just opens into segment 2.
Let each segment see the same mail different. And if in doubt should segment 1 or 2 have this or this content presented in the top, or plain text or with images, then split them into A and B and do a splittest and analyse the result afterwards.
I know this might sound really techy for some, but I do believe this is even doeble in mailchimp,
At at least in the system i use it is, and its no enterprice solution.