Do you even know me? Watch out for these email personalisation pitfalls

Posted by Adrian Young
February 19, 2019

It’s ready. Your beautifully designed, flawlessly coded email is one click away from being fired off to thousands of customers. There’s just one problem: everyone is about to receive the same message. No, the forename which has been shoehorned into the subject line doesn’t count. It’s spray-and-pray dressed up as one-to-one. Email marketing deserves to be more sophisticated than that. And it can be. We live in an age of dynamic content, data science and machine learning. To the benefit of customer and business alike, it’s possible to send expertly tailored content based on a person’s purchasing and browsing activities. But even a richly personalised email programme can sometimes trip up. Read on for a list of personalisation perils –…

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Getting started with Email Marketing for small businesses Part 1.

Posted by Josh Green
January 4, 2019

Starting out with email marketing for small businesses can seem like an impossible task. You have to make time to create content, you need to update your list of subscribing customers and many other tasks. All these tasks take time out of your work day. Marketing with email can also seem like a legal minefield with GDPR legislation to consider as well as all the laws governing spam email. Email marketing does not need to be difficult, however. It is easily the cheapest and most effective form of Marketing. 73% of marketers rate email as the number one digital channel for ROI (Marketing Week). It is also more often people’s preferred method of receiving marketing communication. Litmus’ 2016 State of…

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Predictions for 2017 email marketing

Posted by Mike Parry
January 17, 2017January 17, 2017

Well, it only took 2 years, at this time in 2014 I wrote that 2014 was going to be the year when mobile responsive email just became email, became the common place, was what all the hip kids were doing. That finally happened in 2016, so the market was a little behind the curve but, boy, did email marketing catch up quickly! Responsive and Spongey coded emails abound, as do gif animation emails. Open the door and when you marketers come through it you do it with vision and a vengeance. So what will 2017 bring us? is it finally the year of video in email? Is it the year when automation crosses the chasm and is no longer the…

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How retail should use email marketing

Posted by Josh Green
August 9, 2016September 5, 2016

Email marketing can be the most effective sales support for retail companies. It is undisputed that it is by far the best value for money form of advertising. For every £1 spent, email marketing generates a £38 ROI. Email has been claimed to be more than 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter. This is easy to imagine as people have absolute control over their inbox in choosing to receive emails from their favourite brand it is reasonable to assume a retailer will be sending emails to people who want their emails. People have very little control over the type of content they receive via social media and most retailer brand messaging gets lost, not least because people don’t…

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How to recover from an email disaster

Posted by Josh Green
June 28, 2016November 10, 2016

Anyone who has ever had to send an email marketing campaign will know “The Fear” – the sense of dread you get when you personally are about to hit the go button on an email that is going to be received by potentially thousands and thousands of people. This fear also never leaves you. I have been sending email for 11 years now and I’m still very nervous when I send out emails. I always say, “there is ALWAYS time for another preview!”. Sometimes even to clients. I often test and retest to myself just to make sure I have got every last mistake fixed before the final send. But mistakes do happen to everyone at some point. It’s how…

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Email strategy – getting the basics in place

Posted by Tony Macpherson
August 5, 2015July 15, 2016

Creating a strategy for email marketing will keep you in the race for customers. Continuity is key – both in terms of implementation and in identifying and reacting to change. Outlook (Hotmail), Gmail, Yahoo et al have been employing user interaction (or lack thereof) to determine whether emails are delivered in the inbox or junk folder for some time now but engaging users should, of course, be a marketing fundamental. Email is the mainstay of online marketing – commercial tools for sending mass marketing emails have been available in the UK since 1999. Every year since has shown double digit growth in email marketing spend despite the decline in the cost of email volume. Why? Because people like emails. Well,…

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Mobile Opens

Posted by Josh Green
March 25, 2015April 24, 2015

Mobile optimised email is now nothing new but the excuse that mobile email is not right for all businesses is now a complete lie. All businesses across all sectors should be sending mobile optimised email. It is the industry standard now. Brands who fail to send out mobile optimised email risk losing subscribers and increasing the chances that their marketing will be less and less effective. The stats don’t lie the time to mobile optimise email campaigns has long since past. It’s not a nice to have anymore but a necessity. Mobile opens across all industries show high numbers of opens on mobile devices many with mobile opens well over 50%.

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Writing link text in emails

Posted by Josh Green
February 18, 2015May 20, 2016

Email design and coding has always been about the ever important call to action. While button styles have changed over the years on thing that has always remained present is the need to have text links through out the copy. Email designers, coders and the people sending the email are often putting the words “Click here” on their links. While the mistake of adding the words “Click here” into an email might be an innocent or seemingly a minor one it really is a big problem for a few reasons. Firstly it doesn’t tell anyone anything, it is a instructional command and does not give the user any information about where that click might take them. Secondly on the web…

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Tapping potential – email click through rates

Posted by Tony Macpherson
September 11, 2014April 24, 2015

With 60% of emails being opened on mobile devices, we all want as many people as possible to tap links and visit our websites. So, what can you do to encourage people to get tapping? Email design is key and should be all about clear communication. Your message should be both precise and concise in our overloaded and fragmented digital World. Email click through rates can be improved by adopting the following actions; Don’t think, feel Our reactions to most things aren’t driven by thinking, they are driven by emotions with desire and fear usually right at the top of the list. Tapping on an image is easy if we see something we want. Equally, a fear of missing out…

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Top 10 things to consider when building responsive email.

Posted by Josh Green
July 30, 2014April 24, 2015

Your users Having a good understanding of who your subscribers are and knowing what types of devices they use is obviously the most important thing. You should not only understand who your users are but consider whether they have the latest devices or possibly only read emails on the desktop. Most email broadcasting platforms these days give a device breakdown. This is important but it is also worth remembering that most people use more than one device to check their emails. What are you trying to achieve? This is a question that relates to all email but is especially relevant when it comes to responsive email. Some marketing managers are too keen to hide vast swathes of the email, wrongly…

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