No man is an iland

“Permission-based lists get more opens and better deliverability.”

Not the sort of sentence you’d pause too long over.

Now re-read it with the eyes of someone who does not live and breathe email marketing. It looks something like this:

“Some kind of list gets more somethings and better somethings (and those last somethings look like they might have something to do with delivery)”

The more we immerse ourselves in any topic or activity, the more likely we are to forget that what we understand as self-evident or self-explanatory…isn’t…at least to most people. Even to people with online marketing experience.

Familiarity breeds laxity. When we know what we mean, we forget that others don’t, so clarity suffers.

And when we focus on expert minutiae and the next-big-thing, we lose sight of the bigger picture, important nuances and the value of the basics. This lures us into false assumptions and poor decisions: our email campaigns suffer.

Here are some examples to illustrate the point:

1. It’s a sign-up form – obviously

We know it’s a sign-up form, because that’s what we call it.

We know that you’re supposed to put your email address in the blank field and then click on “submit”.

And we know you should do that because then you’ll get all those lovely offers or content we send out regularly.

We know that…but does the innocent website visitor know that?

What are they likely to think when confronted with this (a real example):

That sign-up form is a particularly crass example, but there are many places where we easily forget that the reader wasn’t sitting with us in the last campaign meeting. For example:

• calls to action (you know what to do once you’ve read the email, because you planned the campaign…but do they know?)
• links (you know where to click because you coded the link…but do they know?)
• vocabulary in list messages (you know what “HTML or plain text?”, “unsubscribe”, and “whitelist this address” mean…but do they know?)

2. Email has a high ROI – obviously

Quoting email’s high ROI relative to other direct marketing channels has become an identity badge in the email marketing industry. It’s the stock expert answer to the question “why do email marketing?”

Email does have a high ROI, but the strong focus on this aspect of email marketing performance can lead us to neglect all the other benefits.

It encourages the idea that email is entirely about direct, easily-measurable sales.

It invites us to ignore all the other short- and long-term influences email has on response, such as increasing relevant searches on Google or boosting store visits. Dela Quist touches on this aspect when he talks about the nudge effect and how unopened email increases sales.

Regular exposure to a sender name and subject line has an impact, regardless of whether the message is “opened”.

And regular exposure to an email’s design and content has an impact, even when no click results.

We tend, for example, to think of subject lines entirely in terms of getting the open, click, and conversion (for that great ROI!).

But how does your subject line approach change when you consider the long-term impact of exposure to them? For example, if your subject lines are always urgent or always offering discounts, what does that say about you?

The ROI focus takes emphasis away from a more holistic view of email’s value to your organization.

As Kevin Hillstrom writes:

“Each marketing activity should be measured based on the incremental sales it drives, not on the sales that modern metrics attribute to email marketing.”

3. You’d be amazed at what little tweaks can do – obviously

I’m a big fan of little tweaks. This collection of test results demonstrates how a color change, a different call-to-action, or a subject line rewrite can lead to big response lifts.

Every expert loves testing.

But…the impacts of such small changes are often temporary and rarely cumulative. Otherwise the right combination of button color, subject line and CTA would see click rates of 80% in every email.

For all their value, these cosmetic changes have a natural limit. They can draw attention and press the right psychological buttons, but they’re constrained by the nature of the email itself. If you send meat offers to vegetarians, no amount of subject line testing is going to boost your results significantly.

So sustainable, significant increases in results demand more fundamental change in what you send, who you send it to, and why. (Something worth testing, too!)

4. Optimize, accessorize, integrate – obviously

This deeper change is, it must be said, also a topic among bloggers, writers, speakers, vendors and experts. We encourage everyone to build better email marketing programs…targeted, engaging, integrated, database-driven, socially-enhanced email initiatives.

It’s not bad advice, but not everybody has the kind of business or audience (or audience size) that justifies making things more complicated.

The return from investment in sophisticated targeting technologies is very different if you sell 1000 products to an audience of millions or one product to two hundred.

When we focus on the benefits of change and improvement, we need to compare that with the costs, too: business basics can get lost in the euphoria over new toys and tools.

5. Your sender reputation matters – obviously

Perhaps the single most important factor in getting email delivered is the reputation of the sender. Delivery experts are right to remind marketers that this sender reputation is largely under their control, since it’s based on factors like spam complaints, dead addresses etc.

But most sender reputation is actually tied to the physical source of the email: the sending IP address. Not the sender as an entity (Mark Brownlow), but the sending address (the server that sends out my email).

In many cases this is one and the same: my server, my reputation, my control.

I’m not even close to being a delivery expert, but I know that hundreds of thousands of small senders that use an ESP are sharing an IP address with other senders.

So their sender reputation is largely influenced by what these other email marketers are doing.

This is not an ESP scam. Quite the reverse: small senders need to share an IP address with others to get enough email volume together to register on the dashboards of those systems measuring and allocating reputation.

Nevertheless, it means that most (small) senders are not actually in full control of their reputation, despite what all the expert advice (correctly!) tells us.

But the nuances continue. Enlightened ESPs are rewarding “good” senders by grouping them together with other good senders. So in practical terms, your reputation is, again, under your control.

So if you’re on a shared IP address, it might be worth asking your ESP how they manage the reputation of these addresses and whether good behavior is rewarded.

Oh but wait…here’s another nuance…the same practices that lead to a good sender reputation have other benefits. You keep spam complaints low by sending email that people want…which means those same emails likely get higher response rates.

So practices that are good for deliverability (even if only in theory) are good for your bottom line anyway…

Fun, isn’t it?

Find related articles:

• Channel: None

The mobile email challenge has got easier.

And harder.

Um, let’s try again…

Designing emails for mobile devices has got easier. But designing email campaigns for mobile use has got harder. And more confusing.

And actually, mobile email design is a little confusing, too.

Oh, and just to make matters worse, mobile email is a lot more popular than nearly everyone in email marketing assumes.

OK, let’s explore the issues and point to places and resources that can help…

True mobile email use

Tools – like Litmus, MailboxIQ or CampaignCog – are now available to give some estimates of how many people open your email on a mobile device.

The number is probably well under 10% for most senders, unless you’re serving a particularly mobile-friendly audience.

Phew…no need to panic.

But…the numbers typically quoted are a snapshot. They tell you what percentage of people open a specific single email using a mobile device.

This doesn’t account for the many people who check email from different places. Sometimes using the mobile, sometimes the PC.

If 40% of your list switches between mobile and PC for reading email, then maybe only 10% are using their mobile device to read any one single email campaign.

So the question we should actually be asking is how many people use a mobile device to read their email at least some of the time.

And that cumulative figure is much higher than stats on device opens suggest.

Look at broader Internet statistics:

1. The people at Pew tell us 79% of US adults use the Internet and that 94% send or read email.

2. The US Census suggests there are around 220 million adults in the USA. Which gives us some 163 million adult email users (plus a few children who email, too, when they’re not on Facebook).

3. In November 2010, Comscore estimated that 70.1 million US users accessed email on their mobile.

4. Even allowing for use of email by non-adults, the implication is that over a third of all US email users have read email on their mobile.

They don’t do it all the time, but that’s a big chunk of people doing so at least some of the time.

The number isn’t going to drop, either.

Comcore also note that “69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011″. And Gartner expect 95 million smartphones to sell in the US across 2011.

And we haven’t even mentioned iPads and other tablet devices.

If I’ve done my sums correctly, we’re heading rapidly toward a situation where potentially half our subscribers could view at least some of our emails on a mobile device.

Should you be worried?

Maybe.

Implications for design?

Here’s a plausible theory:

People with mobile phones that handle HTML email badly don’t email much with them. If they do, it’s to deal with urgent, person-to-person email…the rest gets saved for later.

People who do more than triage their email using a mobile device are investing in email-friendly devices with good HTML email display capabilities.

Those same phones and devices are also encouraging people to use mobile email more.

The result: most mobile email that needs to display well will be read on mobile devices that do a pretty good job of it.

Yay for us!

Designing for mobile is no longer about coping with devices that display HTML email in a myriad of dissatisfactory ways. There was never a reasonable solution to that problem anyway, as previous posts explain.

But before we get too self-congratulatory, this does not mean the design challenge is over. It’s just changed.

Disparate screen sizes, fingers not cursors

Mobile, by definition, means smaller screen sizes.

Not just smaller, but more diverse too. Compare an iPad with one of the smaller Samsung Galaxies.

And different devices have different approaches to how they (re)size (or not) content.

So the new generation of email designers are now moving to simpler, narrower layouts and/or fluid designs that allow images and other elements to collapse gracefully as the screen size shrinks.

Now throw in coding that specifies specific styles for specific viewing situations and you have the magic of mobile email design.

But we’re not finished yet.

Designing for mobile devices also involves designing for touchscreens. As Anna Yeaman puts it, this…

“…means reevaluating the placement of each element in our email creative. Making adjustments for ergonomics and user expectations that are sometimes in conflict”

For example:

• How big do links need to be to allow touch navigation without expanding the email first?
• How much space should be left between clickable items?
• Where does the eye focus when using a mobile device? Is it different to classic desktop viewing habits?
• Do navigation conventions on different mobile operating systems change what makes a good email layout?
• What about font sizes? Sentence and headline lengths?

And as smartFocus point out:

“…seemingly innocuous instructions like ‘click here’ don’t hold much relevance when using a touchscreen.”

And there’s more…

Most webmail and desktop email software put sender names and subject lines on one line in the inbox, with a common font size. Is this the case for mobile devices?

Paul Rijnders notes that his iPhone email display was:

“…encouraging me to focus primarily (if not solely) at the sender of my emails…the subject lines were not truncated, but they were in a subordinate position…the sender literally receives top billing: Bold, double size and on top.”

Oh yes, and if your emails look great on mobile devices, do your landing pages and website look great, too?

Recommended design reading

I don’t have simple answers to many of the questions and issues raised above. My aim is simply to raise awareness of the changing mobile email design challenge.

Others with more experience have offered their thoughts and answers. Try:

• Designing emails for touch: Part 1 and Part 2 (and many other articles at the StyleCampaign blog)
• Designing emails for mobile devices
• Mobile email design in practice
• Your Subscribers Are Mobilizing — Is Your Email Program Ready?
• 6 Design Tips for Mobile Email
• Five Keys to Mobile-Ready Email Design
• Email insight: future of email part 1 – Mobile
• Designing Mobile Friendly Emails
• Menu size for touchscreen phones
• Email Marketing Design for Mobile Devices

Implications for tactics and strategy?

But the mobile challenge doesn’t finish with design.

The spread of mobile email also affects how people use email in the first place.

Many email marketing practices are based on the idea that users are dealing with email in a much more uniform manner, largely at desktop PCs in a study corner, library or office.

Not any more.

The fragmentation challenge

Previously, those few folk using mobile email were mainly “sorting for later”. They only interacted with those emails that were urgent or personal.

Given improvements in the mobile email and browsing experience (not to mention cheaper and faster mobile Internet plans), it seems reasonable to suggest people are more willing to interact meaningfully with all sorts of email now.

After all, at the end of 2010, mobile commerce had jumped 550% compared to the previous year.

The outcome is fragmentation…

Fragmentation in timing, as new “peak times to open email” emerge through mobile email use in, for example, the early hours and late evening.

Fragmentation in location, as people use mobile email…um…when mobile.

Fragmentation in behavior, as people check mobile email in a growing range of scenarios.

The mobile challenge is to account for and exploit this fragmentation. A challenge accentuated by the lack of consistency in mobile use and behavior: people switch devices, scenarios and locations constantly.

Consider, for example, “mobile email users”.

Traditionally we’ve seen them as purely skimmers and scanners. Loren McDonald describes them so:

“Mobile readers — those on smartphones, tablets and other portables — probably are more time-pressed and purpose-driven or simply have less time to scroll down through the inbox.”

As a result, all advice on mobile email recommends trimming the content down. Adam Holden-Bache writes:

“Use the bare minimum needed to get across your offer or information. This may mean using small amounts of copy and linking to your site more often, or simply reducing the amount of textual content in your campaigns.”

All of which makes total sense. But…as smartphones move out from the harassed business user to the wider consumer world, the pattern of mobile email use diversifies.

For every executive snatching two minutes of email between her meetings, there’s a dad killing two hours on his mobile while the kids are at soccer practice.

That second example’s me, by the way.

As Jeanniey Mullen writes:

“When you wait you get bored…When you are bored you pull out your mobile device…When you pull out your device you read things you may not have read in the past, you go back and reread things you’ve enjoyed, and you click through things you haven’t had time to click through to before.”

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen says of mobile in general:

“We’ve known since our first mobile usability studies in 2000 that killing time is a killer app for mobile.”

…presenting us with two complete opposites: one mobile email user begging for something to do, the other with no time at all.

We’re just dipping our toes in what all this means for email marketing.

Three approaches come to mind.

First, back to basics. The more value you offer, the less affected you are by issues of timing, location, behavior, design etc…people will simply seek out your messages.

Second, this sounds like another vote for trigger emails. It’s getting harder to guess when, where and in what circumstances people get your emails. Trigger emails let the user determine what they get and when, through their actions or unique characteristics.

Third, is there a role for dual-purpose emails? Where the core message is short and simple, but secondary elements and links lead off to more engaging, time-killing content and online experiences?

Fun times ahead. Thoughts?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Mobile email marketing