The From Line

Sending, Managing & Monetizing Email

Mobile Email Design: Which Clients Support Media Queries and Images By Default

Mobile Email Design: Which Clients Support Media Queries and Images By Default

Last post, we experienced the hard knock of the following statistics:

“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

“34% of consumers have marked a brand’s promotional emails as spam because they didn’t display or work well on their smartphone.” -Litmus, 2016

Like it or not, fair or not: sending mobile-unfriendly emails is now an unpardonable offense.

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Mobile Email Design: Of Unpardonable Sins and Runway Fashion

Mobile Email Design: Of Unpardonable Sins and Runway Fashion

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.

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The 4 W’s of Winning Mobile Emails

The 4 W’s of Winning Mobile Emails

When it comes to mobile email, you as a publisher have tremendous opportunity - and tremendous competition, as we saw last week.

91% of smartphone users check email on their cell phones at least once a day (and many users spend a lot of their mobile device time on email.

But almost 90% of publishers are involved in email marketing. The competition for your readers’ attention is stiff. How are you going to win?

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Top Five Conversion Optimization Tips

Conversions either in the form of sales or in the form of lead generations are the lifeblood of most e-commerce sites. Conversion rates vary by industry but it is generally agreed upon that 2% is an average for most e-commerce sites. Unfortunately, most business get lost in the small percentage numbers and fail to realize that raising a conversion rate of 2% by a mere 1% can improve profits by a whopping 50%! That 1% can be a definite game changer for an e-commerce site, therefore conversion optimization of your site should be a top priority.

As such, we’ve created a list of the top five conversion optimization tips, which if implemented even partially, should result in an improved ROI. These are not in order of priority but instead we’ve placed them in the natural order of a typical e-commerce transaction.

  1. Relevant Traffic – Relevancy is a word you will see consistently in any e-commerce marketing discussion. As it applies to internet traffic it refers to visitors that are actively interested in what you have to offer. This means your traffic should be focused and targeted, two traits delivered by Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click campaigns. Purchasing generic traffic will generally result in extremely low conversion rates, if any at all. For optimal conversion optimization you should use targeted traffic, though more expensive, is actually more cost effective and will generate more conversions.
  2. Intuitive Navigation – Assuming you managed to get relevant visitors to your landing pages, you want to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. Your product or service offerings should be divided into groups, each one with an easy to find navigational link. Your site should have an easy to use search option and don’t forget to enable breadcrumbs, so visitors know exactly where they are within your site.
  3. Unique Content – Visitors looking for specific products will most probably have already visited a few of your competitors. Make sure your product descriptions are not the same OEM descriptions your competitors are using, that will only cause your visitor’s eyes to glaze over. Instead use unique descriptions with a different angle or twist not covered in OEM descriptions. If you can provide more information about a product, a visitor is more likely to become a customer.
  4. Focus on Benefits – List your product specifications and features, those are always useful. But forconversion optimization you need to have your visitor imagine the benefits of owning that product. They need to see themselves using it, and reaping its benefits. This is why a test drive is so important in car sales. Take them for a drive and the sale is almost in the bag.
  5. Third Party Trust Seals – The last item you need to focus on is consumer confidence. Your potential customer needs to feel safe passing personal and financial information to someone they’ve never met. Third party trust seals are those logos and icons found on checkout pages designed to instill trust. Examples include logos issued by the Better Business Bureau, SSL certificates from your hosting company and Verified Seller logos from credit card processing companies.

There you have it. Implement these five conversion optimization tips and your revenue as well as profits should soar. Remember that some of these changes will result in instant changes, while others will definitely take longer. Should you have any questions about implementing some of these tips, feel free to shoot us a message and we'd be happy to chat with you.
 

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Back to Basics: Email Composition “No-Brainers”


Business email in the corporate setting is generally formal, where million dollar words are common and industry jargon is a must. Marketing messages however, are most effective when they are kept simple. To avoid alienating your audience with useless “fluff”, follow these tips.

1. Get Rid of the Big Words
You’re composing a marketing message, not playing a game of scrabble. Longer, more obscure words will not win you extra points. Avoid using words that are more than two syllables. This rule of thumb helps ground the writer to basic speaking rules and establishes a smooth cadence. The goal is to compose a message that is effortless for the recipient to read and understand. Certainly the recipient is capable of understanding bigger words, but simplifying the message makes it both universally accessible and faster to digest.

2. Omit Technical Terms and Jargon
Read the email after it is written. Are there industry specific terms? Drill them down to more generalized terms. Consider the recipient and their knowledge base. A great amount of time will be saved if industry terms and jargon are avoided. The recipient will understand the message and valuable marketing dollars will not have been wasted on a missed meaning.

3. Get a Second Set of Eyes
Is there someone in the office who does not know as much about the industry jargon as the author? Perhaps there is an intern or someone from a different department who can read the email. The idea is for the author to step away from the document before it is sent and to have an unbiased reader give it a once over. The author is invested in the words and will likely skip over terms that are possibly confusing. A separate set of eyes can point out terms that need clarification and can give input and suggestions to make the message as inviting and easy to understand as possible. An unfarmiliar reader will bring a fresh interpretation that can predict how the message will be received by subscribers.

The idea isn't to "dumb down" the email, but rather to compose a message that is readable by a person who does not understand all the jargon of the industry. The email needs to be written for an intelligent audience who is interested in being educated about the industry. Keep it simple but don't talk down to your recipient.

 

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