Litmus | Rooted Elm | Email Marketing

Improve Your Email Marketing Program with a Checklist

Lisa Wester — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 20:22:43 +0000

In his thought-provoking book,“The Checklist Manifesto,” Atul Gawande walks through vivid examples of how both the airline industry and the medical field radically reduced errors and improved safety issues by using a simple checklist. Since reading his book, every time I board a plane I envision the pilot and co-pilot working their way down that checklist to ensure that everyone on my flight makes it to our destination. Atul Gawande convinced me, and countless others, that every industry, every person, and every project would benefit from a checklist.

COLLABORATE

Typically multiple people are involved with the email planning, design, copywriting, development, testing and approval of an email campaign. Most often, these same people have several emails and supporting landing pages progressing at the same time. Trying to keep everyone aligned can be daunting! It makes sense to work from a centralized list — giving each member the ability to check off their completed task, leading to a streamlined process, stronger collaboration, and most importantly a reduction in errors and improvement in quality overall.

START HERE

To give you a solid foundation to build on, we took our experience and knowledge with email marketing and content marketing to create an Email Marketing Checklist. The first five steps involve organization, collaboration and a lot of listening. All of this is needed to get to know your audience better to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time — the purpose of email marketing. As you build your checklist or tailor the one we’ve drafted for you, allow the members of your team to have a voice in what needs to happen. Obtaining input will break down barriers, find missing tasks and set timing accordingly.

CUSTOMIZE

The second five encompass the action of composing, building and testing each email campaign. Litmus, our partner with email rendering and analytics, has made it easy to check off and approve each of these actions with their Custom Checklist feature. For example, the image below shows the custom checklist we utilize for our monthly newsletter “From your Email Horticulturists.” You’ll notice that a few of the last five tasks from the Email Marketing Checklist are applied here. We’re able to mark each task as complete, as well as see who completed which task.

Because of the checklist process, we’re learning more about our audience as a team. We’ve stayed on track with our email campaigns, content, measurement and ongoing education for continuous improvement. Our clients are benefiting from the expanded communication and collaboration.

You can do the same. Get started on your checklist.

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Emails We Love

Lisa Wester — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 20:00:03 +0000

With all the emails that end up in your inbox, there are always a few that stand out. Here at RootedELM, we are 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
Member Coupons are Here!

REI knows their market, their members, and their non-member customers very well. This is another perfect example of them tailoring their campaigns to their members and the devices they’re reading these campaigns on. While the email is very much on point when it comes to the REI brand, it also ensures that regardless of where you’re viewing the email you get a great experience and can easily read the email.

Too many retailers tend to focus on a desktop only approach to their emails, which can make it difficult to convey your design properly and extremely difficult to read. With mobile opens of email approaching 60% of the market, one would think that retailers would move this direction en masse; unfortunately, they aren’t. This email is a perfect example of having the best of both worlds; using the same assets from the traditional desktop version of the email to create a perfect experience for mobile users.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Harry’s

SUBJECT
The easiest way to try Harry’s

The razor and men’s grooming market is a crowded space and Harry’s is using email to stand out from the pack. Upon signing up for their email campaigns you’re greeted with a welcome journey that is on brand, short and to the point and explains what Harry’s is and how it works. While most have some sort of on-boarding for new subscribers, a lot of marketers seem to struggle with what those welcome emails should be. Harry’s has hit it spot on; this campaign is clean, simple and gets the point across.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Litmus

SUBJECT
Litmus Live 2017 tickets on sale now!

Tickets for Litmus Live 2017 went on sale Monday and Litmus sent an email with all the bells and whistles to let everyone know. Expanding on several of the methods they’ve used in previous emails, they sent an email that for the large majority of their audience was an interactive ordering system. Select which location you want to attend, then select how many tickets you need from the live updating price list (notice that the early birds were gone by the time I took this screenshot). Once you click the checkout button at the bottom you’ll be taken to an Eventbrite page that’s ready for your billing information; one more click and you’ve purchased your tickets.

As always Litmus is a great example of what email can be when you use progressive enhancements to make a much better experience for your largest audience. In the case of Litmus, most of the recipients of this email are opening it in Apple Mail or another Mac OS email client. If you opened this email on a Mac OS email client, you got the awesome live ordering view. If you opened it on mobile or somewhere else you still saw an informative and on-brand email that let you order the tickets.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

CHRISTINA’S PICK’S

Aveda

SUBJECT
Smooth Solutions, Just for You

As someone with enough hair on my head for 3 people, I can’t live without my Aveda products to keep the frizz under control. This subject line is clear and to the point; I opened right away to access the “Smooth Solutions.” Inside, it was as if Aveda had read my mind with content that says, “Take control of Frizz.” I’m also a big fan of the way they design the images so I can clearly see what the offer entails and choose the best option for my needs. I’m loving the color scheme as well: very soothing–much like their products are for my hair!

Target

SUBJECT
New, now, wow home items

This email was timed perfectly & delivered to my inbox on the first day of Spring with a preheader that reads, “Celebrate Spring with a refresh. Style, priced right.” I’m not normally big on home decorating, but something about the start of Spring has me in the mood to clear out the clutter, open all the windows and start anew. The design of the ad, with square photo boxes, each featuring a singular item refreshing the home, makes it easy to skim and then click for more options in that category.

LISA’S PICKS

Shutterfly

SUBJECT
Your memories from this week three years ago…

Shutterfly took an approach similar to what Facebook does on a regular basis with previous posts. They presented the past to evoke emotion by showing photos that had not been developed yet from three years ago. With hardly any text, this simple email would make the perfect “missed you” or reengagement campaign.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

J. Crew

This ingenious campaign series from J.Crew stood out because of its wittiness, timing and vibrant colors used for the Spring theme. J.Crew, while always creative with their campaigns, rotates on a regular basis between product emails and off-the-wall concepts like the three shown below with the springs. With very little text, it’s clear the goal of this email series is the sale, much like the Gap email Jason talked about in our last “Emails We Love” post.

SUBJECT
It’s spring! Celebrate with 30% off your purchase.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

SUBJECT
Spring to it with 30% off your purchase

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

SUBJECT
Act fast! 30% off your purchase ends tonight.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Wistia

SUBJECT
Friends don’t let friends miss discounts

This simple B2B email to me screams perfection — including the subject line! This is another example of using minimal text for clean email design, but have a significant impact on the content. Unlike the J.Crew campaigns, Wistia used formatted text to support the large header image to make it possible to read the content with images off. The blue geometric shape below the crafty friction-free call-to-action looks like a background image, but it is formatted text as well on a blue background. The images surrounding this content area gives it that geometric shape. The same theme is carried over onto the branded landing page to provide more information about the Wistia event so you know are in the right place.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Emails We Love

Christina Noll — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:38:46 +0000

With all the emails that end up in your inbox, there are always a few that stand out. Here at RootedELM, we are 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

Litmus

SUBJECT
Play to win a ticket to Litmus Live

Litmus has been hosting THE conference for email designers for the past several years. Their Save the Date email, while conveying the necessary information, has become a showcase of what email can be; each years more complex than the last. The #emailgeeks community treats it like Christmas Eve as we await to see what bleeding edge designs they incorporate each year.

Litmus did not disappoint, once again proving conference emails don’t have to be boring. As they did last year they incorporated a game to find golden tickets into the email which would grant the first finders of the ticket a free ride to Litmus Live. On tap this year we have dynamic images and text achieved via style sheets dynamically generated server side, a Litmus quiz, a live pageable twitter feed, and an live update on which tickets had been found and who won them.

The bar for next years LitmusLive Save the Date email is stratospherically high.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

GAP

SUBJECT
📆 We owe you code HAPPY (plus, a bonus 10% off!)

GAP’s emails have gotten progressively better over the years. While most are still close to 100% images – when much of them could be pure text – they have at least made efforts to make sure their images are focused towards how they’ll be viewed on mobile and provide progressive enhancements. This email however stands out for the brevity of it’s main content.

Far too often B to C retailers tend to treat their emails as extensions of their print/in-store campaigns. This results in too much content and too many images in their emails. Sale emails don’t have to showcase a bunch of product images or flowery pun filled language to grab consumers. GAP has proved that with this 40% off email; the message is simple and straight forward. While I don’t necessarily like separating numerals from their percent sign, this is still a great design and a wonderful example of what a sale email can be.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

CHRISTINA’S PICK

BEAUTYCOUNTER

SUBJECT
It’s a customer fave

I liked the subject line. Seeing, “it’s a customer fave” made me want to find out what everyone else is using from Beautycounter that they love so much. Maybe I would love it, too. Inside, the email continued with the theme with a “Rising Star” headline and then, to back up their claim of “customer fave” they included actual customer testimonial quotes. Overall, this email hit home with the content and I also liked the clean and polished look.

LISA’S PICKS

Homage

SUBJECT
Hey yooo! BOGO 50% OFF in store and online

I love this witty and creative email by Homage. The copy and concept of sharing the offer with a friend by text is so realistic because who talks on the phone these days? Everything about this email stood out to me including the Refer A Friend section and the on-brand call-to-action (CTA) button at the bottom. A suggestion for Homage would be to convert the text used through the email as actual text, and not text placed within an image. This will help with the reader’s experience and conversion.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

petco foundation

SUBJECT
Let love change your world

Call me a pet-loving sensitive schmuck but I LOVE the content of this email! It started with the subject line: “Let love change your world.” My favorite part of this email is the use of actual photos. I was instantly drawn and didn’t need to read the text below, or the CTA, to want to read more. The the main, cartoon image is cute and tender evoking emotion.

Just like I mentioned with the Homage review above, Petco Foundation could convert the text toward the bottom of the image and CTA button to actual text instead of an image with text. This will decrease the time to download the image, while making it clear what the email is about. The branding with the cartoon image is carried through to a landing page telling me more about the upcoming adoption event. The Donate Today CTA is perfectly placed in the bottom right where my eye finds itself to click through to another branding landing page — reassuring me I’m where I need to be.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

A Sweet Story on Subscriber Engagement

Lisa Wester — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 13:46:29 +0000

A&W Restaurants ® has been an American icon since 1919 serving up frosty Root Beer Floats, infamous Coney Dogs and more. This original post from just over a year ago examines their subscriber engagement metrics for their email marketing program over time.

Understand Subscriber Engagement:

When A&W began their email marketing program,they wanted to take a deep dive into their subscriber engagement. Subscribers receive a monthly coupon or special offer along with a free Root Beer Float during their birthday month. Almost always, the monthly campaign includes an intriguing video to support.

RootedELM, A&W and Team Cornett, their agency of record, analyze their email marketing program through a metrics dashboard using Klipfolio. A trend line incorporating data displays an average open rate of 32% and a unique click-through rate of 6%. These metrics may sound pretty good compared to industry standards, however, when broken down by year we found a different story – a decline. More importantly, although we change content each month, acquire and churn subscribers, the average click-to-open rate (CTOR), or sometimes referred to as the “effective rate,” basically remained the same at 18%.

CTOR: unique clicks ÷ unique opens × 100

To identify how many subscribers were unengaged, we ran a report in their Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) account. Our criteria was the subscriber had to have received a minimum of three emails over the past 90 days, but did not open or click once. This gave us about 44% of our audience — YIKES!

Now let me step back a bit. A&W ONLY obtains subscribers that have opted-in on their website to join the Mug Club and, on average, experience active subscriber growth of 4% each month. So, you can see why this number was a little shocking to us.

Time for a study:

During one month, the unengaged audience received the same monthly Mug Club email as the engaged audience, however each had a unique tracking and analytic code added to study their behavior. We use Litmus for this.

Here’s what we found in SFMC – the engaged audience had a unique open rate of 42% and 6% unique click-through rate and the unengaged audience — a whopping 6% open rate and 1% unique click-through. What a difference.

However, when we went into Litmus their engagement seemed very similar. As shown in the chart below, of the 42% engaged audience that opened the email, 67% spent greater than eight seconds reading the campaign. The majority used a mobile device. The unengaged audience had 72% (of the 6% that opened the campaign) spend greater than eight seconds reading. Even more interesting, we repeated this segmentation & send process over the next three months and found similar results.

What does this tell us?

Those that open the monthly Mug Club email spend time reading, but getting them to convert is a challenge. We can do better with the call-to-action and content. This outcome is also reflective where the average CTOR has remained at 18% for all three years.

Where to go from here?

A&W is taking an active approach to listening to their audience through engagement metrics as well as online surveys to determine interest. As a team, we’re working on an updated plan to nudge those unengaged back to life.

RESOURCES FOR YOU TO GROW ON:

Measuring Email Effectiveness with CTOR

Email Marketing Metrics Report – Click to Open Rates – October 2015 Edition

Email marketing: how to tempt back the emotionally unsubscribed