email

GDPR – the email marketing red herring

Posted by Mike Parry

Have I got your attention? I’m going to say something else controversial, GDPR is not about email marketing! GDPR doesn’t cover email and the ICO doesn’t care how many times you email your data, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, once a day, once a week or once in a blue moon. It simply isn’t relevant. They don’t care when the last time a name on your email list opened an email, it isn’t in their remit. That’s right, GDPR is not about email marketing! It does reference the currently-under-review PECR but more as a make sure you also follow these regulations, which you should have been doing for years now. Now don’t get me wrong, anyone undertaking…

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Emails that work

Posted by Tony Macpherson

As we all experience every day, emails, particularly those viewed on a ‘phone – which is most of them – get read or not based on two things: brand affinity and the engagement factor. And whilst many of us are loyal to the brands we like, most emails are only read and then acted upon if they contain a clear message, easy to read copy, strong call-to-action, are succinct and use eye-catching and original imagery. But this is just the start. Our use of online, interactions with brands, exposure to thousands of marketing message across multiple channels and devices, increasingly short attention spans and reduced tolerance for generic old fashioned methods of selling products and services means even the most…

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Good behaviour

Posted by Tony Macpherson

When it comes to sending marketing emails, it’s still common practice to send manual batched campaigns where the same message is sent to the same people. The smarter marketers are sending more targeted emails to segmented lists based on information such as purchase history, previous email interaction and demographics but there’a a wealth of more subtle information available to really take your email marketing to the next level. Executed well the use of behavioural data and the subsequent generation of emails triggered by certain actions and events can improve customer retention rates as well as increase acquisition levels. When you send an email blast to a large list, you are guessing the message might resonate with the recipients. But when you let customers…

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Set the tone

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Many businesses are still creating online marketing collateral that comes across as rigid and impersonal. It often mirrors more traditional offline advertisements and brochure formats. Whether the excuse is ‘we’ve always done it this way’, fear of brand perception or just plain lack of imagination, adopting a so called ‘professional’ approach and conforming to old school thinking no longer fits with the new user of the Web. Of course, certain business sectors allow for more flexibility than others but, generally, there is scope to increase the appeal of marketing messages using a more conversational approach. TV advertising has been doing this for years. Why? Because you can see people in situations where anything other than interaction and behaviour we can…

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The 12 Email Marketing Stats and Facts of Christmas

Posted by Josh Green

With the enormous surge in online shoppers over the holiday period, now is the time to shift your email marketing into top gear. Over 115 million visits to retail websites are expected from 28th November (Black Friday) through 1st December (Cyber Monday), onwards. And because Christmas shoppers will rely heavily on their mobile devices this season, we want to make sure you’re not missing out on any of the sales! Here are our 12 stats and facts about email marketing during this Christmas period.  

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How to create hi-res retina images for email

Posted by Josh Green

While the world of email might be a a few years off from implementing something like SVG images there are a few tricks you can do to ensure you have high or at least higher quality images in your emails. The technique described here works best for small images, icons, or single colour images. During the testing process I noticed that serving images even slightly larger in size did have quite a noticeable image quality improvement on the retina screen. What we can learn from this is it’s not always necessary to supply exactly the right amount of pixels for the retina screens just try and get as close as possible. For this example I’m going to make a logo…

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