Using emoji’s in subject lines is a trend that can increase open rates when used correctly. In fact, when relevant, we’ve used them from time-to-time with some of our clients. But can there be too much of a good thing?

To explain my gasp, I’ve included a screen shot of my phone. What do you think: excessive or effective?

I’m not picking on Best Buy or Sears, but during the week of Easter both companies went a little crazy with themes, emoji’s and sends. In the example below, not only did I receive an email pretty much every day, but many times I received two! Over six days, I received six emails from Best Buy to the same email address – of which 50% included a cute little emoji in the subject line, (the bunny was my favorite).

And what about Sears? (Note, I’m including Craftsman Club as they’re owned by Sears). In four days, I received six emails of which 100% included an emoji in the subject line.

My inbox is colorful to say the least, but I think Best Buy and Sears may experience emoji overload and audience burnout very soon if they’re not careful.

So…when is it okay to use an emoji?

We sought our very own email guru, Jason Meeker for comment:
“Emoji’s are perfect for email subjects or pre-headers because they can grab attention in an otherwise text only inbox. They are also great to engage with younger subscribers that are used to communicating with emoji.”

 The downside:

“Outlook doesn’t support emoji – so as with all things its use really depends on your audience. If you’re mostly B2B and a significant portion of your recipients are opening your emails in Outlook then you should probably shy away from emoji. If the majority of your audience is opening emails on something other than Outlook then emoji’s are fine.”

Jason has included emoji’s in his work. In fact, over a 30 day period – he used them twice, but each time the situation was timely and relevant.  Because we use Litmus, an email rendering and analytic tool, we also know that 73% of the Hyde Park Jewelers audience read their email on a mobile device and less than 5% use Outlook, as shown below.

Three takeaways with using emoji’s:

• Don’t overuse or you’ll suffer audience burnout.
• Keep it relevant!  Align with the subject line and content of the email.
• TEST! Know your audience and what device they use to view your emails to ensure rendering and interest.

MORE INSIGHT:

• Symbols in Subject Lines
• This Month in Community: Emoji + Email to Fall in Love With
• A Heart-y Dose of Responsive Design, Animation and Clever ALT Text from Hyde Park Jewelers

Effectiveness comes from knowing your audience instinctively. Are you listening to their wants? Answering their questions? Meeting their needs? Just “blasting” content to get something out the door isn’t the answer. Email marketing can be a challenging, unending journey but to be a better marketer, placing our audience first is essential.  

ELIMINATE THE WORDY EMAIL

Here is a collection of tips offered by email and content marketers (referenced below) as well as our own team of experts.

PREPARE

• Set a clear goal.

DRAFT

• Lead with a value proposition.
• Personalize in ways that give insight that you know who they are.
• Write for scanning using the “F” pattern.  People scan left to right then up and down.
• Be brief. Eliminate useless adjectives that take up space instead of adding value.
• Write for a sixth grade reading level.
• Watch including industry jargon – keep it simple.

DESIGN

• Use supporting images.
• Use a clear, strong and friction free call-to-action button.
• Lead readers to a landing page for deeper insight.

REFINE

• Read the content aloud to see how it sounds.
• Segment and send to those that will find the content useful.
• Test. Test not only how the email renders on all devices but test the message, too. Did your content resonate with your audience?  Did they engage or better yet, convert?  Did you accomplish your goal?
• Adjust. If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, then adjust and test again.

RESOURCES

MarketingProfs Take 10: “Three Principles That Will Increase Your Email Marketing Conversions”

Litmus – “The Evolution of Email Spam: Here’s How Your Customers Now Define It”

Litmus – “How to Design Email Landing Pages that Convert”

MarketingProfs University – Marketing Writing Bootcamp, 2015 “Improve your Marketing Content by Writing with Purpose”,  Amy Thibodeau, presenter.*

*Registration to the latest Marketing Writing Bootcamp course is required to access this resource, but the course is well worth it!

]]> https://rootedelm.com/blog/email-design-tip-real-test-versus-text-as-images Fri, 25 Sep 2015 18:12:17 +0000 http://rootedelm.com/dev/dev/?p=1723 Have you ever received an email, say from your favorite retailer, that included a coupon code you couldn’t wait to use? Most of us don’t write down the code; we simply click to the website to make our purchase. When it’s time to purchase, ideally we can use our mouse to copy and paste the code from the email into space allocated on the checkout page. But if that code is embedded within an image, as shown in the example below, on the original email, we’re out of luck.

The solution to this problem is in the original email design code. Many emails, including those from large, national companies, embed text as images within the email. How can you tell? Pull up the next marketing email that lands in your inbox; hover your mouse over a group of text. If you can copy and paste that text, it is real text; if the text moves together as an image would when you grab it, then it’s an image.

Why is real text better for email design?

It can be seen in the email even when the images are not loading or are turned off, allowing your audience to see your message regardless.

Your emails will upload faster, and they will upload every time on every device, which leads to a higher response rate.

Your customers are less likely to become frustrated because coupon codes or other vital text can be copied and pasted when needed.

At RootedELM, we want to provide the highest quality email design for our customers. We code emails with text and we use Litmus, an email preview, analytics and spam filtering tool, to test how the email will render on different email providers (for example Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, etc). We provide fallback fonts in the font stack in the code, so if a certain platform can’t find the correct font, it will still render in a similar and attractive way.

Check out the examples below to see how real text makes a huge difference in email design:

In this example, designed by RootedELM, special fonts are shown as actual text which will show up even when the images do not load. The ability to read the text means customer still receives the message even when images do not load. In addition, adding background color blocks to the code where images should load makes the viewer more likely to reload or turn on images.

In this final example from a national retailer, text was designed as images and is not seen when images do not load. We are left viewing a bunch of white space and having no idea what this email is about. There is no incentive to try to load the images and the email will likely be deleted because it frustrates the receiver.

The bottom line is: the best email design includes actual text on key messages so you never miss the opportunity to engage with your subscriber — even with images off.

———-

We are always looking for ways to provide the highest level of email design to our customers. At the end of August, our own Jason Meeker attended #TEDC15 The Litmus Email Design Conference in Boston to gain even more insight. He just couldn’t get enough, so this weekend, he travels to London to take part in The Litmus Email Design Conference there, too! Follow along this Monday on Twitter as Jason tweets away more terrific tips and information straight from the conference. We’ll be re-tweeting his most important musings @RootedELM.

Here’s some of the highlights

“Mindshare before Marketshare” You can’t sell if you don’t have it up here. @bethcomstock #CNX14

— RootedELM (@rootedelm) September 23, 2014

Always great when @WesterLisa and I can do stuff in person instead via FaceTime or phone calls. #CNX14 pic.twitter.com/LRDir6dLC7

— Jason Meeker (@jpmeeker) September 24, 2014

I’m glad I didn’t miss the CMO conversations session. I appreciated the different perspectives from the panel. #CNX14

— Hiram Centeno (@sisko199) September 23, 2014

The ability to micro-target has totally changed how we do business. -Beth Comstock of GE #CNX14

— Chad White (@chadswhite) September 23, 2014

Engaging with the customer on their terms. The beginning point of a long term relationship. #CNX14 Nick Besbeas – @LinkedIn

— RootedELM (@rootedelm) September 23, 2014

Think about the people first. Everything else will follow. B2B, B2C, we’re all humans/people. #CNX14 @mparkerbyrd

— Justine Jordan (@meladorri) September 23, 2014

Great talk from @realjohngreen at #CNX14 — be yourself, be sincere and it’s alright to be a #nerdfighter.

— Jason Meeker (@jpmeeker) September 25, 2014

Let the work drive you. Proving yourself through what you know and can do is the best way to build yourself and your career. #CNX14

— Matt Byrd (@mparkerbyrd) September 25, 2014

Marketing Cloud’s New UI

Resources

Current state of Email Client Marketshare
Litmus: Going Responsive with limited resources
ExactTarget Email Swipe File

Within the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, Lisa Wester, CEO & Founder, explored Playbooks and set a Customer Anniversary campaign in motion.  Jason Meeker, Strategic Partner & Lead Developer, spent time discussing upcoming changes to email rendering – specifically with Gmail – and why responsive design is so important.

Gmail’s changes to the Promotions Tab

Make sure your emails take advantage of Gmail’s forthcoming grid view in the Promotions Tab. You will want to create an appropriate image that is 580px by 400px and add the code below prior to your email’s closingtag:

If you have a Google Plus account you can replace the large letter icon with your company’s avatar. To get the code to achieve that and learn more about Google’s implementation check out the Google Developer page about this upcoming feature.

ExactTarget Resources

ExactTarget Help Portal
ExactTarget Design Blog
ExactTarget Email Design Toolkit
ExactTarget Email Design Board at Pinterest

General Resources

Current state of Email Client Marketshare
Litmus: Going Responsive with limited resources
The Science of Email Report (PDF 2.5MB)
The email design review
The Best of Email Inspiration Gallery

Career Builder actually crossed the stage as the winner but the Hyde Park logo was front-and-center during the announcement.  Although this is the fourth award* that my team has been recognized as a finalist, I’ve never been disappointed.  It’s truly an honor to have the collaboration of our team and the confidence afforded by our client to have a project to share through an award application.  We all win.

The Award Process

Applying for an award allows reflection and a deep dive into where we started and where we are today.  It measures success and affords an opportunity to compare our work against others.  It validates our intuition and analytic interpretation to refine the customer engagement strategy and campaign design.  I love it and just going through the process is rewarding.

The ExactTarget Power of One Award application focused on the responsive design coding for proper rendering on all devices and the creativity, using animation, of RootedELM Strategic Partner Jason Meeker.  Working closely with the Interactive Marketing Director at Hyde Park Jewelers, Molly Wojcik, Jason designed and developed an engaging Valentine’s Day series.  Even better, these campaigns resulted in a significant increase in online sales, exceeding their goal.

Our Work with Hyde Park

We invite you to read more in our previous blog post about the Hyde Park Jeweler Valentine’s Day campaign series along with a featured inspiration blog post written and shared by Litmus titled A Heart-y Dose of Responsive Design, Animation and Clever ALT Text from Hyde Park Jewelers.

We haven’t stopped there – in collaboration with Molly, we’ve created many beautiful and engaging campaigns for Hyde Park Jewelers since, and the holiday season is right around the corner.  Having the ability to promote and display exquisite jewelery to their permission-based audience is a joy and playful job to have.  I only wish I could afford more of the beautiful pieces!

Our Accomplishments as Award Finalists

• 2013 ExactTarget Power of One for Design for Hyde Park Jewelers
• 2012 Colloquy Awards Finalist for the Travel & Hospitality Industry for BHG Rewards featuring BHG University
• 2010 ExactTarget Subscribers’ Rule Award for BHG Rewards
• 2010 Colloquy Awards Finalist for the Travel & Hospitality Industry for BHG Rewards

The few seconds you spend converting your content from a Word document to text format before importing into ExactTarget will save you hours of frustration. We’ve created a quick reference here on how to easily convert text:

Copying from a Word Document in Windows

1. Open the Word document file

2. Go to File > Save As

3. Choose “Plain Text (.txt)” from the “Save as Type” or “Format”

4. Open the “Plain Text (.txt)” file in Notepad

5. Select all copy using your cursor or CTRL + A

6. Copy the selected content using your cursor or CTRL + C

7. Paste copied content from Notepad into ExactTarget

Copying from a Word Document in OS X

1. Open the Word document file

2. Copy text you would like to convert

3. Open TextEdit and paste copied text onto a blank document

4. Select “Format” from the menu bar

5. Select “Make Plain Text”

6. Paste copied content from TextEdit into ExactTarget

As always, if you have any questions give us a call at 859-552-5528 or email. We love hearing from you!

“We take a multi-tiered approach when planning for campaigns leading up to Hallmark holidays,” says Molly. “Our audience is our number one priority, so we strive to keep them top of mind when planning frequency and content.”

Valentine’s Campaign

Valentine’s Day tends to have a much shorter lead-time in terms of messaging (as opposed to Christmas, which builds up for a month or more), so Hyde Park typically begins messaging about 2 weeks out, and tries not to exceed 3 emails per week. “The immediacy and precise timing of email makes it the perfect tool for the gift-giving messaging that we are pushing,” says Molly.

“We take a lot of inspiration from other marketers out there as well, both within and outside our industry. For instance, during the December holiday season, we noticed a trend of category-based emails, so we decided to try this for a Valentine’s Day campaign, focusing on earrings,” says Molly. Using the subject line,  “Make Her Smile from Ear to Ear,” the ad focused on one category and helped take some of the guess work out of gift-giving. Hyde Park saw an immediate reaction after the email send, selling one of the pairs of earrings over the phone within an hour of deployment.

Design

Design of the emails is a collaborative effort. Working with RootedELM, Molly likes to keep the design of the emails clean and simple. “We are a luxury brand, so we never want to compromise our reputation as a fashion-forward, high-end retailer,” she says. “At the same time, we like to add some playful elements into our design concepts, whether it be through the use of clever copywriting, animation techniques or creative use of some of our jewelry imagery (i.e. heart shape using jewelry images).”

Sweet Success

Success of the campaign is measured in conversions, including opens, clicks, phone calls and store visits. “Since we have a high entry price-point, many of our clients prefer to shop in-store or over the phone with one of their sales associates that they have worked with in the past – they like the personal contact,” explains Molly. “It’s not an exact science, but just like in the story of the customer calling and ordering the earrings after seeing the email, it’s always a great feeling to see a campaign work – from concept to transaction.”

Molly credits the collaboration with RootedELM for the success of her latest campaigns, which feature design consistency across messaging and implementing best practices for placement of design elements. “We are light years ahead of where we were last year in terms of our email marketing,” she says. “This year, our campaigns have been well-thought out with a purpose in mind, and I believe the execution has been fantastic! I’m thrilled with how far we’ve come in such a short time and I’m excited to keep growing in this area!”

Preparing for content can be daunting, especially when you have clients and team members moving in different directions.  Over the years, I’ve worked with clients on developing a marketing calendar to stay organized but the issue of keeping it current, sharing with others and staying on task has always been a challenge.  Earlier this fall, we tested a new cloud-based task management system called Flow and it’s proven to be a huge asset with our client Hyde Park Jewelers.

Hyde Park Jewelers has three locations –  Denver, Phoenix and Las Vegas and a stand alone brand called Traditional Jewelers in Newport Beach. Working with their Interactive Marketing Director, Molly, we were able to schedule out an email marketing strategy for their holiday campaigns to match their existing brand and holiday promotions.  With an average of three campaigns per week, per location – efficiency was of the essence.

The results have been amazing.  The email marketing strategy called for two different holiday series. The first was to support holiday events such as a personal appearance and trunk show by Efva Attling, a well-known Sweden designer.  The second was an online shopping series to promote the beautiful and unique pieces Hyde Park Jewelers has available within their online store, making the perfect gift for someone special.

Within Flow, each campaign associated a task for the mock-up deadline.  Jason, the developer, was assigned the task inviting each team member to collaborate to fulfill the goal of the campaign.  For example, the task afforded Molly the ability to upload assets, clarify the audience and comment on design; Jason the ability to show the design and accept feedback; Christina, the copywriter, the ability to upload and edit copy and myself the ability to manage, comment and oversee the entire task.  A second task to launch on a specific date and time was assigned to Molly.  Checking off the task is the reward for a job well done!

We don’t stop there however.  Each campaign has an Advanced Litmus Test attached to understand engagement and subscriber viewing behavior.  Taking this knowledge, along with the campaign tracking results, we continue to collaborate on improvements for upcoming campaigns within Flow.

Efficiency is an understatement.  Since November 27th Hyde Park Jewelers has launched fourteen responsive designed email campaigns based on subscriber interest, status of their Platinum Rewards program and geographic location.  One even had animated snow flakes!  We’re not finished though – we have three campaigns in the pipeline before their final holiday campaign on Christmas Eve.  All will be completed and scheduled by Thursday, December 20th so our team can take time to enjoy the holidays with family and friends.

Flow works for us.  We’re in a grove and find it valuable for all our clients.  So to return to my original question – how do you collaborate?