2017 was a banner year for email. Email client creators started acknowledging the need for more standardized support of CSS. Additional industries doubled down on their email marketing as Facebook and others continue to make it increasingly difficult—without ad buys—to reach an audience. We also saw a dramatic rise in machine learning being applied to email journeys to allow for more personal and targeted campaigns generated on-the-fly. With that in mind we think it’s time to take a hard look at what you should be thinking about for your email marketing program this year.

Better Personalization

At RootedELM, we’ve always been a big proponent of tailoring your messaging to match your audience. This year Email Service Providers (ESP’s) across the board have made available newer and more in-depth tools to help you personalize your email campaigns better than ever. Take advantage of these tools and you’ll see a marked increase in your engagement and conversion rates.

Don’t just personalize with a name, but make your content unique to the audience and your subscriber. Delivering content that’s relevant and timely results in a more engaged subscriber. So go ahead and forget the old “one-size-fits-all” campaign and increase personalization that will draw attention.

• Campaign Monitor: How to Personalize Your Marketing Strategy with Behavioral Targeting
• Salesforce: New Retail Research from 150 Million Shoppers: Personalization Drives Revenue and Results

Interactivity in Campaigns

Interactivity in email campaigns can come in many forms. While we’ve all seen retailers and even B2B companies use large animated GIFs that only scratches the surface of what you can and should be doing. From simple button hover effects to complex in-email forms, it all serves to delight the subscriber while drawing their attention to essential elements of your email.

With more significant support for CSS across the major email clients now is the time to add some interactivity to your campaigns.

• Medium: Does interactive email have a place in the B2B industry?
• Litmus: Interactive Email for Beginners: 6 Interactive Elements You Can Add to Your Emails Today
• Litmus: Interactive Email Opportunities and Challenges
• Campaign Monitor: 5 Ways to Integrate Interactive Content Into Email Marketing
• Tower Data: 6 Interactive Email Ideas for Rookies and Pros

More—and Better—Automated Campaigns

Transactional and automated campaigns consistently have better engagement rates because their content is always timely and pertinent to the subscriber. Whether it be appointment reminders, a re-marketing email or a lifecycle campaign it’s going to have a much higher chance of being opened by the subscriber.

More than half of all B2B companies use automation with even more B2C companies doing the same. With that knowledge, ESP’s made immense pushes to advanced automation tools to their product suites last year; making it an ideal time to evaluate your automated campaigns and possibly introduce more. What are you waiting for — get with your web team and get those API triggers flowing!

• Email Monday: The Ultimate Marketing Automation statistics overview
• Litmus: Q&A With Wishpond: How To Use Automated Emails To Reduce Product Churn
• Mail Chimp: How Happy Socks Spreads Happiness Through Automation

Artificial Intelligence

You might not realize it, but a substantial portion of the retail email messaging you receive has some form of artificial intelligence (AI) manipulating or creating it. AI is increasingly handling everything from the content to the subject of some marketers campaigns.

Over the years AI has become cheaper and readily available to the masses with the marketing world is making full use of it. A great way to get started with AI is to use it for better automated and personalized campaigns. Gone are the days of blindly trying to guess what a subscriber might like; let machine learning tailor the content to feature products or services that interest the subscriber. The result is a timely and relevant email that is even more tightly targeted resulting in even higher engagement.

• Venture Beat: 4 ways AI can improve email marketing
• ClickZ: How artificial intelligence is changing email marketing
• Salesforce: How to Turn AI into ROI

Better Design/Accessability

With email clients on the march towards fully embracing all CSS has to offer, now is the time to take your email design out of the dark ages. The days of no semantic markup and designing for 600px width are disappearing fast. Today we can create an email much more like a website; some people are even ditching tables all-together in their email campaigns. While most can’t take such drastic steps, it is high-time to reevaluate your templates and codebase.

With better designs, we can also build in better accessibility into our campaigns. Wrapping our paragraphs in their proper <p> </p> tags and using header tags like <h1> </h1> and <h2> </h2> can help ensure better understanding of our emails by those using screen readers. Another advantage of developing our emails with more semantic markup is that it’s easier to adjust designs to fit the device/email client it’s being read on. It also makes it easier and faster to edit emails.

• Litmus: Ultimate Guide to Accessible Emails
• Campaign Monitor: The All-New Guide to CSS Support in Email
• Type E: 06. The Web Font Issue
• Type E: 04. The Accessibility Issue
• Litmus Communities: How Litmus didn’t use tables for its first email newsletter of 2018

Halloween is the start of the something great — a time to be someone else, the guilt-free indulgence of extra-yummy treats and fun, colorful decor. To honor this devilish day, I’ve updated this post by pulling together some old and a few new seasonal email campaigns that evoked emotion, enticing me to shop, create, bake and most importantly convert.

Hyde Park Jewelers

My absolute favorite campaign of all “Halloween” time was designed by our own Jason Meeker in collaboration with the digital marketing team at Hyde Park Jewelers. In this email campaign, the intricate jewelry of Stephen Webster is stunning and flies right off the page. The creative way Jason intertwined the spooky season with the unique characteristics of these beautiful pieces is perfect. Viewing this campaign, I become a fan of the Stephen Webster instantly, and am intrigued to shop.

PETCO

Being engaged came easily with a subject line of “Boo! Your October bonus offers are HERE!” and preheader of “Plus, a few Halloween safety tips for you & your pet!” Everyone likes a bonus — especially when it involves spoiling their pet. Being that my big baby, Messi, is a huge scaredy-cat when it turns dark outside and LOVES to counter surf to sniff out anything resembling food, the “Fall Do’s and Don’ts” were helpful. This cute and colorful campaign led to an online purchase of two 50 lb bags of premium dog food and enough snacks to fill a trick-or-treat bag for all the pups in the neighborhood!

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Yummly #1

After viewing the email with the subject line “Easy spooky snacks 👻,” I’m tempted to throw a Halloween party even though my children are a wee-bit old and would refuse to attend. In all of their email campaigns, Yummly captures their audience with beautiful photography and creative real text vs text as an image, leading to the click through to get the recipe or search for something similar. You can get the recipes by accessing the email scope for either of the two campaigns below.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Yummly #2

The subject line “Pumpkin spice up your life 🍁” put me in the spirit to eat and bake. Like most, I enjoy everything pumpkin flavored, and these colorful photos make me think most of these recipes are healthy. Using Litmus, we’re able to capture the rendering of the desktop version (above) and the mobile version (below) for this clean email template used by Yummly.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Happy Halloween. Enjoy the season and have fun! Try not to overeat candy, or if you’re like our team — drink too much pumpkin beer. Cheers!

Issue 9
July 20, 2017

With all the emails that end up in your inbox, there are always a few that stand out. Here at RootedELM, we’re email geeks — we admit it. Whether it’s outstanding content, design or development, when we see it, we want to share it. Watch for our insight here, direct from our own inboxes, and use it to inspire your next campaign.

JASON’S PICKS

REI Co-op

SUBJECT
Ready to Get Outside?

Abandoned cart and no purchase transactional emails can be extremely engaging and profitable too. Retailers often make the mistake of making these emails seem a little creepy in nature — no one likes a stalker. REI has taken a less “stalkery” approach to their remarketing emails and crafted them so they aren’t too different from their standard marketing fare. All this while of course keeping everything branded and multiple device friendly. Proof that remarketing emails can be profitable and look good as well.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Nike

SUBJECT
Nike Air Max for the Littlest Feet⁩⁩

For some time Nike has used a single column mobile friendly approach to their emails and just recently I noticed they’ve made the switch from all images to using webfonts and real text instead. This is great example of how a company that is very protective of their branding can create emails that are in-line with their brand and easy to read for everyone.

I also love the image choice and main title…it actually ended with me purchasing a pair for my niece.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

CHRISTINA’S PICK

American Girl

SUBJECT
This week’s AGenda: National parks for newbies

Design wise, I really love all the bright colors and I liked how the CTA buttons are translucent as the background in the two top boxes. And, as a content writer, I like how “AGenda” is on brand with the AG overall theme. It’s a perfect name for this newsletter and lends to a nice hashtag should readers choose to share photos of their adventures on social (as prompted in the email).

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

LISA’S PICKS

Help Scout

Twice a week I receive a beautifully illustrated email from Help Scout. They are colorful, vibrant and unique. In fact, I recommend you read the post featured in the first email example I’ve included, titled Portrait of a Post: Illustrating the Help Scout Blog.

A couple of years ago I subscribed to Help Scout because of a referral that came out of a MarketingProfs course I took on content. Help Scout is a superb example of what a blog should be and how to promote it through email. The blog is written to help the reader think. They offer insight through stories, real life examples, experiences and tips. What I love most about these posts is that they don’t sell. It’s just really good content that drives me to click through on other pages of their website to learn more.

I’ve included two examples here to show the consistency of their emails. The friendly from name is always the author of the post and the subject is the title. For example, Sunett at Help Scout, with the return email address yourfriends@helpscout.com. The informative lead-in paragraph is typically three lines or less with a bold title. This is the only company I’ve seen use this style, but I may test it out myself in our next few emails. Help Scout always includes a clever, friction-free CTA button that intrigues me to convert. For example: “Say Sorry The Right Way” or “Get Inspired.”

SUBJECT
Portrait of a Post: Illustrating the Help Scout Blog

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

SUBJECT
How to Apologize: 5 Elements of a Successful ‘I’m Sorry’

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

So you’re ready to expand your email marketing program, but not sure how to create all the content? Below, we offer four steps and five sources to get you thinking.

STEP 1

Segment your subscribers into your audience and your customers to draft at least one persona for each. Their needs for content are different.  A customer has had an experience with you. They have self-identified their needs. Therefore, you have knowledge of what products they would have an interest in to sell to. An audience, on the other hand, needs content other than the product or service. You need to build trust, nurture them. An audience anticipates an experience with you. Most likely you’ll have more than one persona for each, but designating at least one for your audience and one for your customer will be a good starting point in defining goals and curating content.

STEP 2

In addition to your overarching email marketing program goals, you need to set goals for each of your email campaigns. What do you want to happen for each email? For example, the central goal for our monthly newsletter called “From Your Email Horticulturists” is to have our audience click-through to the content we offer guiding them on email marketing best practices, how to’s and lessons with specific functionality within their email marketing tool.

STEP 3

Begin to compose your content for your email campaign(s) using the knowledge obtained and data collected through the five sources below. Keep in mind; it’s essential to test your email content and email design before you launch to your segmented audience.

STEP 4

Draw. Whether it’s in a notebook, on a program like Omnigraffle or even a scrap piece of paper, I find that drawing helps me visualize a subscribers journey. It guides me from where I am today to where I want to be. Best of all, it creates an original task list on where I need to focus.

5 Sources to Curate Content:

1. Their lifecycle – birthday, anniversaries, account renewal, changes to account detail. The goal is to recognize a personal event or behavior.

2. Your staff – on a continual basis, schedule time with all client-facing staff, including customer service and call-center departments. Listen and document questions, concerns, pain points and positive feedback that is presented by your customers for each product offered. Record timing as well – when did the question/concern, etc. arise? Was it at the beginning of the relationship with the product or service or after several years because of changes, etc. This will help you pinpoint what and when a gap in content should be addressed.

3. Feedback – send an ongoing customer questionnaire to look for trends in opinion, concerns and intent to move to a new product or the next step in their relationship with you. Ask for a customer testimony to use in future email campaigns or on your website while you’re at it! We use Survey Gizmo if you would like to test out an online service.

5. Industry trends – spy on your competition. What are they writing about?  Do you see this happening with your clients?

Personally, if I write to an individual, the content comes together much easier. It may take time, but building your email marketing program using content curated from such sources as mentioned above will not only increase the value of content leading to greater subscriber engagement but offer deeper insight into their minds for use with other channels.

If you are looking for examples of outstanding content, visit our Emails We Love category on this blog. Every other week, we feature the best content we’ve received in our very own inboxes to inspire others.

Let us know, what are you doing to curate content?

Sometimes the answer to one person’s question can help the next person and so on. Consider this a FAQ of email marketing. We’ll post actual questions from our customers, along with the expert solutions so you can tuck them away in case you run into the same issue later.

Issue: Font changing in email when it’s sent
ESP:  Campaign Monitor

Ok, so apparently for some of the templates in Campaign Monitor they’ve hardcoded fallback fonts to be changed from the settings section. So since the hardcoded fallback was serif for when Merriweather was chosen, changing to Helvetica in the text block wasn’t changing the font-stack except for adding Helvetica to the front of the code.

I fixed it by going to the settings for the template and changed the Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 and Normal Text to Helvetica and it changed the font stacks accordingly. I’ve also alerted Campaign Monitor to the issue with this template (and potentially others as well).

In the email marketing world, there is nothing greater than when an email campaign hits the sweet spot. As a consumer of Lilly Pulitzer clothing, I am aware that they hold a massive final sale in July. What I wasn’t aware of is they do the same thing in January! Thanks to a perfectly executed email campaign, now I do. Over three days I received eight unifying emails as part of the same “After Party Sale” campaign which caused me to spend a small fortune. Because Lilly only goes on sale twice a year, when you have two teenage girls that love their Lilly…you stock up!

The first email came in the night before the “After Party Sale” (below left). Somehow I missed it but the second email (below right) with the subject line: Just released sale styles have landed! sure caught my attention.  I did just what the email said to do: “Freak Out!” After a brief wait in the online line for my turn to shop –  I was glued to lillypulitzer.com for the next hour (well maybe a little more), but luckily it was toward the end of the day! I sent my oldest daughter a text to call me immediately when she was free. She was in her study hour and wanted to know what was so urgent; My reply was “the Lilly sale is going on now!”  She had the same response I did and headed to the Lilly website, sending me her favorite choices. Needless to say, her friends just rolled their eyes at her when she told them what was going on. By now, my shopping cart was full of beautiful dresses for upcoming formals, spring break and graduation and I had to make a decision fast on what I was going to purchase. I had already lost out on two perfect dresses as they were selling fast!  Now do you understand the havoc?  Back to email marketing.

After feeling success with combing the Lilly website, I made my purchase. My girls were excited and so was I because this time, I was able to purchase a few items for myself. The excitement was contagious, and during a project call, I informed Christina Noll of the sale and she also jumped right on the website and was able to purchase a few items as well. I went to tweet my findings and discovered others were in a frenzy just like myself. An entire community of Lilly aficionados were on a mission to get these great deals! This led to me following @LillyPulitzer now on Twitter and Facebook, so I could be even more a part of this community.  I even found a resale community on Facebook to sell our gently used items now.

But here’s where the story gets juicier. That evening just before nine, I received the email below (on the left) with the subject line: What?! New styles added to SALE, which caused me to go back and make another purchase! Twelve hours later another email came with the subject line: Just dropped: new to SALE with even more sale items added to the website. Then the countdown began two hours later with: Don’t miss out! Sale ends soon.

Lilly had done it right. Each of the emails had animation, rotating photos of the new items that had been added (shown below) to peak my interest even more. The voice and tone used in the copy matched just what I was saying to myself in my head. My attention span was in their hands for two days now. I had emailed, tweeted and posted the sale to my friends and colleagues. I had spread the word and so had others. The campaign was a huge success.

The next morning Lilly sent one last email just in case I wasn’t done shopping. This was sent just before 11 am with the subject line: Don’t miss out! Sale ends soon…And finally the following evening, I received this animated Thank You email with photos of other shoppers showing their excitement.  This had the best subject line yet to sum up the experience: What. A. Wild. Ride.

When my purchases did arrive in the Lilly signature pink palm packages, I opened to find a note saying “You Have the Best Taste. You Ordered….”

I received my final email asking to review one of my purchases. This is a campaign that is all too often missed by companies, but probably one of the most important and easy ways to obtain feedback directly from your customer. Well done Lilly Pulitzer! I’ll see you in July.

In Anne Lamott’s bestselling book Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life she recounts a story of how her brother, aged ten at the time, struggled to complete a report on birds he had put off until the last minute. Her father consoled him by explaining that the task would only get done by taking it, “Bird by bird.”

Sometimes, when we look at our list of emails that need to go out, it can feel overwhelming. But we, too, need to remember to take it “Bird by bird,” or one step at a time. When you design your email intentionally, without rushing, you produce a better email–one that is ultimately engaging to your audience and renders correctly for viewing on all types of devices.

One way to facilitate the process is by creating a template, such as the one used by Hyde Park Jewelers in the three examples below. This template started from a custom HTML email campaign that tracked good results, and the digital marketing team liked the layout. Jason Meeker, Strategic Partner for RootedELM, took his custom design and converted it into a Campaign Monitor template. Jason continues to work with the Hyde Park Jeweler’s internal designer each week on coding and design recommendations. Since then, Hyde Park Jewelers has been able to save time on design and editing because their designer uses the layout specs to create the design assets and messaging.

Once your template is in place, take each email you create and put it through the checklist:

• • Determine the CTA: why are you sending the email and what action do you want your viewer to take?

• • Customize your template: each email should be unique with a variation of assets and content.

• • Test for rendering: just because your email looks good on your screen doesn’t mean it will look good in your customer’s inbox.

• • Test links: double check they work the way they should and link to the right URL.

• • Conduct an A/B split test: subject line, time of day or asset placement  – which version received the most engagement? Send to your remaining audience.

• • Monitor results: is the template still producing the results you need? Tweak before your next scheduled send.

Some of the best creative comes out during the holidays. In the spirit of the season, our team has pulled together a few emails we’ve admired over the past few weeks.

Below – Nordstrom Rack: The “Love, Nordstrom” campaign theme reminds me of warm feelings of a friendly Christmas Card. Each of their email campaigns have been colorful, eye-catching with clear call to action buttons. The theme is extended throughout the website for a cohesive online shopping experience.

Below – JCrew: When I opened this one morning it immediately drew me in because it made me feel like I was getting an exclusive scoop on a deal. The enticing graphic design featuring the bold bird kept this email simple, yet effective in conveying the message.

Below – Target: As a content writer, I’m drawn to any kind of clever play on words in the subject line.  This one from Target caught my eye, and even though I was not in the market for family pajamas, convinced me to click open. Subject Line: Our 50% off pajama sale ends in one sleep.

Below –  MOO: Moo is one of our favorite brands to follow. The content in this email is oh so original and let’s say spicy! The email design is clean, crisp and functional.

Well….that’s a wrap! Which one was your favorite? Our eyes will stay peeled for even more exceptional campaigns. Please send us any good, or even bad campaigns, that cross your inbox.

Happy Holidays!