The From Line

If you send emails to your consumers, brace yourself for the following statistic.

“45% of consumers have unsubscribed from a brand’s promotional emails because the brand’s emails or website didn’t display or work well on their smartphone.” -Litmus, 2016

Survived that one? Don’t relax yet - it gets worse.

According to to Litmus “Email Analytics”, 55% of all email is opened on mobile devices. It’s time for publishers to face the fact that information is being consumed more on the go, and email that is not designed for the mobile world first is doomed for failure.

User Experience
It’s all about the user experience. Understanding what is pleasing to the eye and attention-grabbing to subscribers is vital. There is a lot to be learned from the layout of the email design and how it is interpreted -- to ensure a second glance and not an immediate dump into the trash.

For starters, it’s imperative to create a responsive design that will optimize viewer traffic. We’re all familiar with responsive web design, and email is no stranger to this veneer. The methods to generate responsive email design are practically scientific. A effortless change of the font size, layout, adding padding, modifying color, navigation, scaling of images, hierarchy, and alteration of content can make all the difference. 

Native advertising is a tough nut to crack. It’s not just black and white. While it is one of the fastest growing advertising segments, a lot of publishers are still in the dark when it comes to the wide spectrum of native advertising. 

By definition, native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. Native advertising is NOT content marketing. There’s a big difference. Content marketing is a type of advertising message while native advertising, is a type of distribution.

The buzz word of the year is most definitely automation. Everyone uses it, in almost every industry. Of course, I can only speak for the email technology industry where automation has reached new heights. Automation features in email are now available to even the smallest of publishers. The cost to automate email newsletters has dropped substantially, leaving no excuse NOT to automate.

As publishers, we’re obsessed with content relevance. However, with audience fragmentation it has become quite the challenge to remain relevant since multiple audiences often exist on a publisher’s list. Although there’s  a lot of interest overlap, it’s difficult to hold the interest of an entire audience without losing the attention of a few.