Top Quotes: “Email Marketing Rules” — Chad White (Part 1)

The Email Subscriber Hierarchy of Needs

Valuable: In order for marketers to have profitable relationships with subscribers, they have to create email experiences that subscribers find valuable, engaging, and compelling as individuals.

• First, worthwhile. Discounts, deals, and buying-related info are the #1 reason people sign up for email. If you’re a retailer, restaurant, or consumer brand, keep focused on fulfilling those needs. If you’re a nonprofit, service, or B2B brand, stay focused on service info and brand building.
• Second, engaging. It’s also important to engage subscribers who don’t consider themselves in the market to make a purchase. Educational and instructional info can provide value to non-purchasers, as well as providing context that makes your products more compelling. Including non-promotional calls-to-action also helps keep your subscribers’ attention between purchases.
• Outside voices and cross-channel content can play a powerful role here. A disembodied corporate voice is far less compelling than the voices of customers, staffers, brand advocates, and outside experts — whether in the form of product reviews, testimonials, articles, videos, tweets, or pins.
• And third, compelling as individuals. Beyond simply delivering what you promised subscribers when they signed up, you can discover what individual subscribers value by collecting demographic info, preferences, purchase history, behavioral data, and social data. And then you can use that info to power targeted email content.”

“You can measure how valuable your emails are by looking primarily at email conversions and revenue. This is the point in the Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs where marketers often go wrong. Because of confusion, poor goal-setting, technical roadblocks, and other issues, marketers will use top-of-the-funnel metrics to gauge whether they’re creating value instead of the bottom-of-the-funnel metrics they should be using.”

“Subscribers need the emails they receive to at least occasionally deliver remarkable experiences — that is, something that’s worth telling someone else about. Your subscribers want to evangelize for your brand, but you have to give them something worth sharing — be it an amazing deal, exclusive content, or a special experience.”

“Creating an email that subscribers will talk about isn’t easy. Some tactics that aid with virality include:

• Targeting niche audiences with segmentation and triggered messages
• Making the most of topics such as events and charity efforts, which are innately more social and share-worthy
• Planning periodic emails with extra special content and using design to differentiate those emails from your run-of-the-mill emails
• Placing prominent ‘share with your network’ calls-to-action in your most share-worthy emails.”

“You can measure how remarkable your emails are by looking primarily at forwards and social shares.”

“In addition to raising awareness, aiding acquisition, boosting email engagement, and generating additional conversions, forwards and social shares are powerful indicators of the overall health of your email program. Used to measure the topmost portion of the Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs pyramid, they’re a sign that you’re fulfilling your subscribers’ needs at the highest level — that your emails are not just relevant, but deeply relevant.”

“An email program can be fairly successful while only fulfilling the first three needs, but a program can never be highly successful if it isn’t creating remarkable experiences that convert subscribers into evangelists.”

Transactional Emails

“To stay in compliance with CAN-SPAM’s definition of a transactional email, you should place additional content below the transactional content or in a right-hand column. Also, keep the amount of promotional content to no more than 20% of the overall email. That’s the generally accepted limit, beyond which an email ceases to be transactional.”

“Be aware that some countries, including Germany, may require consent from customers before you can include promotional content in the transactional emails they receive.”

“Also, be aware that an email isn’t necessarily transactional just because the content of an email is related to a transaction — even if that email isn’t asking the recipient to spend more. Some post-purchase emails are not technically transactional, even though they aren’t really promotional either. Examples of non-promotional post-purchase emails include ones that contain installation instructions or care info for the product purchased. The same info in these emails may have been included in printed form with the product, but the intent is to make this info easier to store and retrive. Product review request emails also fall into this category of emails. While non-promotional post-purchase emails are unlikely to attract spam complaints or legal action if they don’t include unsubscribe links, legally they should include them in most countries.”

Permission

“When renting an email list, the list owner should never share the list with the renter. If you rent a list from a company, you should supply the company with the message you want sent. The list owner then sends that message on your behalf to their list — which you never see — using their usual name and email address, not yours. The unsubscribe link included in this email is an opt-out for the list owner only, not you. The list owner typically includes a tag in the subject line (e.g. A message from our friends at or [Partner offer]) and a message at the top of the email indicating that the message is from one of their partners. This arrangement helps ensure that your message will be well received by the recipients, because the list owner would suffer unsubscribes and spam complaints if they sent a message from a partner that wasn’t a good fit for their list.”

“Make sure consumers are aware that you are adding them to your email list. If customers are unaware that you’ve opted them into your email program, then they didn’t give you permission. Hiding permission consent in your terms and conditions, or sweepstakes rules is wholly insufficient as these aren’t read. Additionally, such consent doesn’t protect you from spam complaints, nor does it constitute proof of signup when you’re trying to get an inbox provider to stop blocking your emails or to get off a blacklist.”

“In countries where it’s legal like the U.S., using a prominently positioned and clearly worded pre-checked box of adequate size can make a consumer aware that they’re opting in even if they take no action. However, the strongest permission occurs when actively given — by checking a box or completing a signup form explicitly to receive email.”

“When using a single opt-in process, treat new subscribers as conditional on the subscriber engaging with your emails. If you’re not using a double opt-in process and a new subscriber hasn’t opened or clicked any of your emails during their first 30 days on your list, you should stop mailing them. This lack of activity may indicate that they…

• Didn’t realize they opted in, which might be the result of poor permissioning practices
• Subscribed using a secondary or tertiary email account that they don’t check often, if at all
• Have ‘subscribers’ remorse’ and immediately regretted subscribing
• Are a bot
• Were signed up maliciously — that is, someone else signed them up

All of those scenarios represent a risk — or at least a lack of opportunity — for the marketer.”

“For brands that email monthly or less often, a longer trial time period would be appropriate. At the end of this period, consider sending these ‘never-actives’ a final email asking them to click a link in the email if they’d like to continue receiving messages from you. That way, on the off chance the email address does belong to a real person and they go looking for your emails, they will have a clear way of reactivating their subscription.”

“Of course, if whole segments of new subscribers aren’t engaging — such as those with a gmail address or those who signed up through your app — then a broader deliverability or process problem likely exists rather than just an issue with the individual subscriber.”

“Active confirmation uses the COI or DOI process, which considers an opt-in unconfirmed until the subscriber indicates that they truly intended to opt in by clicking a link in an activation request email or opt-in confirmation request email.

Passive opt-in confirmation uses a confirmed opt-in lite (COIL) approach, which looks for subscriber engagement as proof they want to continue receiving emails. For example, if a subscriber doesn’t open or click any of the first 10 emails you send or any of your emails sent during their first four months on your list — whichever comes first — then you should see this as a major red flag and cease mailing them. At this point, the email address represents more of a risk to your deliverability than an opportunity to grow sales. COIL reduces spam complaints from those subscribers who never intended to sign up or immediately regretted doing so, and limits the effects of reaching inactive accounts intentionally or accidentally provided by people. COIL lowers the risks posed by typo spam traps and malicious spam traps by reducing the amount of times you email them. While COIL provides less protection than DOI, COIL doesn’t slow list growth like DOI does, since at least 20% of people who signup tend not to complete an active confirmation process.”

“A DOI would be adviesd:

• When a person enters a contest (passive context) and all entrants are clearly notified on the entry form that they’ll be subscribed by entering (passive signup)
• When a person completes a lead generation form to download a report (passive context) and the opt-in box on the form is pre-checked (passive signup)”

“In the retail industry, some brands use a pre-checked opt-in bo (passive consent) during checkout or a reg process without active confirmation, and customers have been trained to look for these opt-out opportunities.”

“Accept that permission expires when a subscriber hasn’t engaged in a long time. Subscribers lose interest in your emails for a variety of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with your content or brand. People find new hobbies, discover new brands they prefer, go up- or -down-market, change jobs, and move. And even though they no longer want your emails, some subscribers will just never bother to unsubscribe.”

“Your emails also may not reach a subscriber for technical or logistical reasons, such as your emails being junked or routed into a folder they never check or the subscriber abandoning their email account altogether. And, yes, sometimes subscribers die.”

“At a certain point, the reason doesn’t matter. When a subscriber hasn’t opened or clicked in a single email for a prolonged period of time, it’s up to you to recognize that their silence means their permission has been withdrawn.”

“Individual brands can determine for themselves how long a subscriber can be inactive before they stop sending emails to them based on the impact on their sender reputation and deliverability. However, a good default is to stop mailing or at least dramatically reduce the frequency of mailings to subscribers who have been inactive for 13 months, a period that takes into consideration once-a-year buying habits. And definitely don’t send any mail to subscribers who’ve been inactive for 25 months or longer. High-frequency senders like daily deal sites may find that they need to take action when a subscriber has been inactive for just a few months to avoid negative consequences.”

Metrics

“For most brands, success is quantifiable in terms of the revenue and profits generated by the email program, email average order size, subscriber lifetime value, and other financial-focused metrics.”

“Subscriber lifetime value: The cumulative profit generated by a subscriber during their time on your list.”

“Focus on maximizing the value of a subscriber, not on maximizing the results of a campaign. Every company faces pressure to maximize short-term results; however, the ultimate goal of every business should be to maximize long-term results. In email marketing, that means looking at the lifetime value of the subscriber rather then per-campaign results, which can be deceptive since some campaigns work indirectly by boosting the effectiveness of future campaigns.”

“Although you can use a variety of methods, the simplest way to calculate subscriber lifetime value is to multiple the average monthly profit per subscriber by the average retention time of a subscriber in months. This holistic, subscriber-centric approach looks at the cumulative effect of your email marketing efforts on your subscribers. And although this view focuses on profits, it also recognizes that campaigns and content that keep subscribers engaged and primed to convert in the future are also valuable. This approach also acknowledges that tactics, content, gimmicks, and tricks that diminish trust, lower engagement, or increase unsubscribes and spam complaints must be minimized because they diminish lifetime value.”

“In addition to lifetime value — or as a crude alternative to it — you might consider looking at your subscribers’ behavior over a period of time by using open reach, click reach, and conversion reach metrics. For instance, measuring your click reach over the past quarter would mean measuring the percentage of your subscribers who clicked at least once during that time.”

“The key is to avoid a campaign-by-campaign mentality when looking at data, because that can cause you to misunderstand how subscribers are reacting to your overall messaging and unintentionally make campaign-specific decisions that reduce the overall effectiveness of your email program.”

“View email performance by subscriber segments, paying close attention to how your most valuable subscribers react. Looking at the performance of a campaign or series of campaigns on your entire subscriber base can conceal important trends, particularly how you’re impacting your most valuable subscribers. Email marketing follows an 80–20 rule: A minority of your subscribers generate the majority of your email marketing revenue. So pay extra attention to how your campaigns affect these subscribers, especially in terms of complaints and unsubscribes. If you find some of your campaigns work best on certain groups of subscribers, then in the future, segment those campaigns so they’re sent only to the groups that reacted positively.”

“Recognize that many of the actions prompted by emails are not easily trackable or measurable. Email is not nearly as measurable as it’s often portrayed. Subscribers often respond to emails in ways that are untrackable or very difficult to track. Depending on your audience and business model, more than 50% of your email response might not be readily apparent.”

“For instance, some subscribers will type in the URL of your site into their browser or search for your brand on a social media site rather than clicking through one of your emails. Others will visit your store or event offline after seeing it promoted in an email. Some use one email address to subscribe to promotional emails and another account when making purchases. Still others will forward an email to their spouse or to friends, who will take action. And then there’s word of mouth and social sharing.”

“Using promo codes that are unique to a particular subscriber and promoting printable and mobile coupons — particularly if those are also trackable back to individual subscribers — are a couple of ways to help measure the pass-along and offline influence of email.”

“Another, even better, way is to do a withhold study, where you don’t send promotional emails to a group of subscribers for a while (often a month) and then compare their activity across all channels to subscribers who received emails. Use a statistical significance calculator to determine the appropriate size of your withhold and control groups. Plan to run withhold tests during off-peak and peak seasons to get the most accurate results. This approach provides insights into the incremental lift attributable solely to email while filtering out sales that would have happened anyway without email’s influence. When you clearly forego revenue from the group you withheld emails from, the results of these studies can provide powerful evidence of email’s impact on your customers, evidence that you can use to make a business case for more investments and to get stronger buy-in from other groups from your business. The downside of this approach is that it’s difficult to execute, reduces your email revenue because you’re not sending to some subscribers, doesn’t capture passalong or word-of-mouth influence from email, and potentially confuses or irritates subscribers who had their email withheld. To mitigate the risks around that last downside, make customer service reps aware of who’s in a withhold group and allow them to add back in any subscribers who complain that they haven’t been receiving emails.”

“Don’t attach too much meaning to open rates and other surface metrics. The open rate is really a misnomer, because it doesn’t accurately reflect the percent of recipients that viewed the content of your email. In fact, some factors inflate opens, while others obscure them. For instance, an open is only registered if a recipient views an email with images enabled so that an invisible tracking pixel renders. So if a recipient reads an email with images blocked, no open is recorded. Because image blocking is fairly common, roughly 30% of email reads aren’t tracked as opens. Also, some email clients download or cache images automatically, generating false opens.”

“Benchmark yourself primarily against yourself. External benchmarks are of little use for a number of reasons. First, most aggregations of data aren’t going to be relevant to your industry or company. Even if the benchmark is for your industry, accounting for differences between companies of different sizes that operate within different sub-verticals is impossible. Second, the open rate and click rate data that is typically shared might not be very useful. Because brands manage their lists differently, these numbers don’t provide an apples-to-apples comparison. All that said, if you’re massively trailing external benchmarks, changes might be needed. Otherwise, focus on systematically beating your own performance.”

“Even absolute list growth doesn’t give you the full picture. The best measure is to look at real list growth, which factors in subscriber productivity. This is essential because replacing high-value subscribers with low-value ones degrades the power of your list, whereas the inverse builds it.

One way to measure real list growth is to factor in subscriber lifetime value (SLV) when looking at your subscriber gains and losses. For instance, if in a month you lost 1k subscribers that had an average SLV of $100 and you gaied 1,000 subscribers through an acquisition channel that tends to attract subscribers with a SLV of $10, then your real list growth fell significantly even though your absolute list growth was zero. Expressed in dollars, real list growth measures changes in the overall value of your email list. Modeling overall list value involves a mix of actual SLVs based on lost subscribers plus the estimated SLVs based on the acquisition sources of new subscribers and the average historical SLVs of subscribers from those acquisition sources.”

“Alternatively, for simpler math, you could track engaged list growth, which measures the number of subscribers who’ve engaged with at least one of your emails over the period. For instance, you could look at the number of subscribers each month that have clicked in at least one email. Although this method isn’t as good as measuring real list growth, it’s a good proxy because most engaged subscribers would eventually convert.

Conveniently, many of the actions that reduce list churn will also increase engagement and SLV, particularly sending more personalized and targeted messaging. Other activities that grow engagement and SLV include:

• Paying attention to how your email campaigns affect your most valuable subscribers
• Identifying the behaviors that differentiate high-value subscribers from less valuable ones and encouraging those behaviors

To get the full picture on the health of your list growth, you need to look at how many subscribers you’re adding and losing while factoring in the actual and potential productivity of both groups. Doing so puts the appropriate focus on list quality and ensures you’re building an email list that’s growing in power, not just in size.”

“Standard tracking can miss non-linear behaviors, as well as pass-along behavior. Here’s a few ways to better connect email content to action:

• Unique online and in-store discount codes for the email channel — or bett yet, unique discount codes for each subscriber, and then encourage or incentivize sharing of that code to identify influencers
• Email channel-exclusive discounts that can only be redeemed by clicking through an email
• A unique phone number for the email channel (even subscriber-specific phone numbers for individual-level tracking are possible)

These techniques let you trace activity back to the email channel, and can start to give you better visibility into the indirect influence of email. They can increase the accuracy of metrics like email campaign revenue, revenue per email campaign, email and sales conversion rates, email marketing revenue, and email marketing profit.”

“But even with better tracking, email’s influence can be elusive because subscriber actions can be so incredibly varied, widespread, and non-linear. Here’s a number of ways to take a more holistic approach to measuring email’s influence:

Revenue/activity on email send days: Look at what happens to your sales, site traffic, social media mentions, app downloads, call center activity, and other channels that you send an email. Chances are that you’ll see spikes, even if the email didn’t direct subscribers to those channels. That’s because — opened or not — emails prompt brand activity, not just email activity. The upside of this approach is that it’s easy to calculate and captures both subscribers’ direct and indirect action, plus word-of-mouth, social buzz, and forwards that started with your subscribers. The downside is that email’s influence will be hard to see if you’re emailing more than every third day. This approach doesn’t capture the impact of targeted campaigns very well, if at all, so it’s best for examining the influence of broadcast ones.

Total revenue per active subscriber over a period of time like a month, quarter, or year. While you can do a separate calculation just looking at email revenue per subscriber, for this metric, look at all the revenue you get from your subscribers regardless of channel origin. Include all subscribers who haven’t been deemed chronically inactive and removed from your active mailing list. Divide that total by the average number of active subscribers you had during that time period. This metric recognizes that the giving of an email address is a sign of trust and signals greater intent. Even if a subscriber doesn’t engage with your emails very much, the sheer fact that they’re a subscriber will generally increase the amount they spend or donate to your brand. Second, it captures all indirect personal activity. So if seeing an email’s SL drives them to convert in another channel, this metric captures that. And third, if your brand’s using email addresses to target customers and prospects via social media or other channels, this metric captures any success in other channels that’s due to getting that email address as an identifier. The downside of this approach is that it only captures subscriber activity, not any passalong or word-of-mouth influence. It also captures all activity by the subscriber, not just actions driven by email messaging.”

Value of an email address: These two metrics (plus withhold studies above) can give you a way to calculate the value of an email address by comparing subscribers to non-subscribers. Alone or in combination, they can help you determine the productivity of your email list, which is a deep metric that’s superior to a surface metric like list size. Knowing the value of an email address to your brand is powerful not only because it helps put a value on your email program, but because it informs how much you should be spending to acquire subscribers in terms of advertising, incentives, events, and other life-building tactics.”

Piecemeal View

“For high-consideration and long-lifespan goods and services, sales conversions may be so far between that revenue-oriented metrics need to be heavily augmented with activity-oriented metrics to see progress down the sales funnel.

The best metric here is average cost per action. How much do you spend on advertising, incentives, events, and other channel activities to get your customers and prospects to:

• Download an ebook or report
• Register for a webinar or other event
• Download your app
• Take a survey, quiz, or other progressive profiling device
• Read a blog or article
• Apply for a credit card or financing

When you have an average cost per action calculated, you can then attribute that value to your email program every time it drives that action.”

Deliverability

“Content filtering: When an inbox provider evaluates an email’s subject line and other content as part of its process to decide whether and where to deliver it.”

“Delivered: When an email makes it to the intended recipient’s inbox or junk folder, as opposed to being blocked.”

“Double entry confirmation: Requiring a would-be subscriber to type their email address in two separate form entries and requiring that the two entries match in order to reduce entry errors.”

“Feedback loop (FBL): A mechanism through which inbox providers notify email senders of spam complaints by their subscribers, using a standard Abuse Report Format (ARF), allowing senders to unsubscribe those subscribers.”

“Freemail: An email account that’s available for free like yahoo or gmail.”

“Inbox placement rate: The % of emails sent by a brand or from an IP address that reaches their intended recipients’ inboxes, as opposed to being blocked or junked, based on delivery to a panel or seed list.”

“List hygiene: Ensuring that your email list is free of invalid and undeliverable emails, role-based emails, spam traps, unconfirmed emails, and chronically inactive subscribers.”

“Open subscription form: An email signup form accessible without purchase, account creation, registration, etc.”

“Opportunistic TLS: When senders enable this, your ESP will always attempt to send your email encrypted, but if an inbox provider can’t handle encryption, your email will be sent unencrypted.”

“Statement of permission: A reminder of how the subscriber opted in to receive your emails and an explanation of why they received this particular email.”

“Throttling or rate limiting: When an inbox provider slows the rate or volume at which they accept a sender’s emails, or when a sender or ESP manages the rate at which they send email to an inbox provider to avoid throttling or bounces.”

“Unknown user: An email that’s invalid, either because it never existed or because it’s been long abandoned.”

“Recognize that 100% deliverability is not a realistic expectation nor an achievable goal. Generally speaking, inbox placement rates of 98%+ on average are excellent, and rates in the mid 90% range are good. Companies should be concerned with inbox placement rates that average in the low 90% range, and very alarmed by anything lower than 90%.”

“Factors partially or completely out of your control that may lower deliverability rates include:

• Sending email to a huge audience
• Sending email at high frequencies
• Having many non-U.S. and Europe subscribers
• Being a brand that’s frequently spoofed or the subject of spam

If your program doesn’t have any of those challenges, then you should expect to be able to achieve excellent deliverability rates. if you’re not, then you’ll need to change your behavior.”

“Use email authentication and send from a domain you control. Email authentication involves a variety of methods that help inbox providers accurately identify email sent by a brand. Authenticating your emails aids your deliverability, protects your sender reputation, and makes it easier for inbox providers to identify when spammers and phishers spoof your brand. It’s highly recommended that you use all three major authentication methods:

• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance (DMARC)

Your ESP can help you authenticate your email.

Because of developments around DMARC, don’t use a freemail address as your from address because many inbox providers will block your email. Instead, send emails from a domain you control, which makes for a stronger brand impression anyway.”

“Enable opportunistic encryption for your emails. Encryption currently only has an indirect effect on deliverability, but it may become a direct factor in the future if momentum continues. Gmail leads the way on encryption. Their interface uses a little green or red padlock icon to indicate if an email was sent using transport layer security (TLS) or not. For financial, insurance, and other similar companies, a lack of encryption may undermine confidence in those emails for subscribers.

• More widely, with email hyper-personalization on the rise, more and more subscribers may find encryption comforting and influence how they view the sender. Encryption may also get a push from governments around the world in the wake of foreign hacking.”
• Because of those factors, it’s recommended that you enable opportunistic TLS, if your ESP offers it. By doing so, your ESP will always attempt to send your email encrypted, but if an inbox provider can’t handle encryption, it’ll be sent unencrypted.”

“Send your promotional emails from a different IP address and subdomain than you use for your transactional and other critical emails. Keeping your promo emails separate is necessary because they tend to generate far more complaints and much lower engagement than other emails you send. That means they’re more prone to deliverability problems, and you don’t want those problems affecting your ability to deliver vital emails like confirmations and password reset emails, or your corporate email.

• If at all possible, send your promotional emails from a different IP address. Even better, use a different subdomain as well. For instance, if you’re sending your corporate email from yourbrand.com and your transactional emails from email.yourbrand.com, then use a different subdomain like shopping.yourbrand.com, mail.yourbrand.com, or online.yourbrand.com to send your promotional emails.
• If you send a large array of non-transactional triggered emails, you might want to use yet another subdomain for those emails.”

“Use double opt-in (DOI) and other safeguards to protect yourself from error-prone, low-quality, and bot-vulnerable subscriber acquisition sources. Using a DOI process can protect your list quality from slipping when using subscriber acquisition sources that:

• Are high-value but prone to transcription errors, such as collecting emails verbally or through a call center
• Are high-value but prone to entry errors, such as collecting emails via an app or other environment with virtual keyboards and autocorrect functionality
• Include open subscription forms
• Have proven to produce low-quality or high-complaint subscribers for you in the past
• Are outside of your org, like list rentals or co-registration

A DOI process involves sending an opt-in confirmation request email or subscription activation request email to a new would-be subscriber that requires them to click a link in it to confirm that they did indeed want to sign up. If they don’t confirm, then they receive no additional emails. Having subscribers confirm their permission ensures that you’re adding valid and active emails to your list and subscribers who have a genuine interest in receiving your emails.”

“The downside of DOI is that it adds additional friction to your opt-in process. Anywhere from 20–50% of new emails won’t be confirmed when using a DOI process. So while it protects your list from low-quality subscribers, it does so at the cost of some high-value subscribers. For this reason, DOI isn’t recommended in all instances and for all brands.

• For instance, if a current customer who’s received transactional emails from you in the past goes into your preference center and opts in to receive promotional emails, having them confirm that opt-in using DOI is pointless. You already know their email is correct because you’ve mailed it before and you know the email address holder is opting in because they accessed their preferences while logged in.
• Moreover, process improvements can compensate for the email address accuracy and signup intent risks of using a single opt-in (SOI) process for some subscriber acquisition sources. For instance, consider:
• Having subscribers enter their email in an extra field as part of a double entry confirmation process
• Adding honeypot techniques or any of the many forms of CAPTCHA protections to open subscription forms that are susceptible to bot activity and malicious signups
• Adding an email validation service to catch improperly formatted emails or those that contain common misspellings of domain names
• Adding an email verification service that checks to see if an email belongs to a real person using lists developed by the vendor
• Using engagement-based confirmation, where you stop emailing new subscribers who don’t engage with any emails soon after opting in

Even with these additional safeguards in place, SOI isn’t for you if:

• Your ESP requires all of its customers to use double opt-in
• You don’t have good visibility into your deliverability
• You’re not prepared to deal with potentially being blacklisted, or blocked or junked at one or more inbox providers
• Your industry requires stronger permission because of regulations concerning marketing to minors, healthcare, etc.
• Your company is a target of harassment”

“Send only one opt-in confirmation request email as part of your double opt-in process. Sending multiple reminder emails to try to get non-confirmers to verify their opt-in undermines many of the benefits of using a DOI process in the first place. For instance, sending reminders means that you’re repeatedly hitting any typo spam traps based on misspelled domains. That dramatically increases your risk of being blacklisted. And people who signed up maliciously or simply had second thoughts may resort to marking your emails as spam to get you to stop mailing after they see more than one email asking for an opt-in confirmation.”

“Don’t add role-based email addresses (webmaster@, support@, info@, sales@, press@, test@, etc.) to your list. These pose a serious risk to your deliverability. First, emails sent to those addresses are likely seen by or forwarded to multiple people, all of whom might not be as interested in receiving your messages as the one person who opted in. Because of that, messages sent to these addresses are more likely to generate spam complaints. And second, these addresses tend to be published publicly on websites, which menas they are scraped, harvested, and collected by spammers, who send the addresses a lot of spam and sell the addresses to others. Inbox providers are aware of this, so having role-based addresses on your list may be seen as a sign that you’re harvesting email addresses or buying lists. Either gets you labeled a spammer and gets your emails blocked. Reject these emails at the time of signup, asking people to instead use their personal email address to subscribe.”

“Keep your spam complaint rate under 0.1%, preferably well under. Consult with your ESP for their recommendations and understand your contractual obligations to them, but in general keeping your complaint rate under 1 for every 1,000 emails you send keeps you in the good graces of both inbox providers and your ESP. Your ESP will report your complaint rate to you based on the feedback loops of inbox providers.

• Exceeding that 0.1% limit puts you at risk of having your emails junked or blocked by inbox providers and of being sanctioned or terminated as a client by your ESP
• Although that’s the recommended limit, be aware that most brands are able to maintain a complaint rate of less than 0.05%, so it’d be wise to aim to be in their company. If the standard does change, it’s more likely to get tighter than looser.”

“When worrying about content filtering, focus more on the code of your emails than the subject lines, text, and images. Although it used to be a major concern, nowadays your subject lines and the words and images in your emails have relatively little weight when inbox providers determine whether to deliver your emails. Using exclamation points, all caps, and words such as free and offer in your subject line will not affect your deliverability unless you have other serious factors that cause inbox providers to view your emails as spam.

• Foreign languages are one of the few areas where the words you use can cause you filtering trouble. If an email user hasn’t received other emails written in a particular language before, an email in that language will likely get flagged. So make sure that your language preferences and targeting are good.
• That said, content filtering is now much more focused on the coding of your emails. For instance, a very poorly coded HTML email with many unclosed tags and other imperfections may raise red flags. Excessive code comments can also, because it looks like you’re trying to conceal content.
• While filters don’t react negatively to the use of responsive design or most interactive email elements, they do react harshly to HTML forms, Javascript, Flash, and <object> and <embed> tags because of their ability to carry malicious payloads. Inbox providers will strip out this code and may block or junk your email because of it.
• Inbox providers also pay attention to the sites you’re linking to and take note if you use shortened URLs or IP addresses as URLs, which are routinely used by spammers to conceal the destination of a link. Only link to reputable sites using full, unmasked URLs, although redirect links created by your ESP for tracking purposes are fine.
• Corporate email filters might give more weight to subject lines and email content, so B2B email marketers face some additional uncertainties that B2C marketers don’t have to worry about as much. Content scoring tools exist that can help you identify potential problems.
• The good news is that more and more on-premise email systems are being replaced by cloud-based ones provided by Google, Microsoft, and other email vendors that run consumer email platforms. As a result of this consolidation, deliverability is becoming a bit more predictable and uniform across both B2C and B2B audiences.
• An erratic email frequency can also get you in trouble because spammers often operate in random bursts. Seasonal variations that increase volume are ok if they aren’t extreme, but long quiet periods followed by short periods of high activity will raise red flags with inbox providers. (How subscribers react to the frequency at which you email them is an entirely separate issue from the sending patterns providers like to see.”

“One way smaller brands and brands with uneven mailing patterns can get around frequency issues and some of the hassles of sender reputation management is by using a shared IP, in which other companies are at least partially affecting each other’s reputations. ESPs that specialize in serving smaller senders typically offer shared IPs that they manage, smoothing out sending patterns and monitoring the sender reputation of each of their IP addresses to maintain high deliverability. They also generally require their users to use confirmed opt-ins in order to protect the sender reputation of these shared IPs. These ESPs also handle warming up IPs, where email volumes going through a new IP are slowly increased, which gives inbox providers an opportunity to get used to this new source of email volume and ascribe it a sender reputation. Large senders manage enough volume to have their own dedicated IPs, where they control all aspects of their reputation.”

“Big email marketers are more likely to have their emails blocked or junked by inbox providers. That makes it even more important for high-volume senders to pay attention to the health of their email list in terms of unknown users, spam complaints, engagement, inactivity, and other factors.”

“Depending on how well you manage deliverability, your emails that don’t bounce could be:

• Blocked globally, so that none of the users at one or more inbox providers receive your emails
• Blocked locally, so that some individual users at one or more inbox providers don’t receive your emails
• Junked, so that some users at one or more inbox providers have your emails delivered to their spam folder”

“One element that’s outside the scope of deliverability is tab placement. Which tab in the inbox an email lands under is of no consequence when it comes to deliverability. All tabs are considered part of the inbox. You should try to see tab placement as of no consequence as well and refrain from asking subscribers to re-tab your emails. You should also refrain from trying to game your tab placement, as you risk angering inbox providers, many of whom can penalize your brand’s performance in search results and other areas, in addition to the inbox. Tab placement has proven to have little impact on email performance.”

“Don’t include attachments on your commercial emails. Customers are very hesitant to open attachments because of the risk of viruses. For that reason, inbox providers and corporate servers are more likely to block your emails if you include attachments. They also provide a poor subscriber experience because they can dramatically increase the time it takes for subscribers to download your email, which can be frustrating.

• Instead, host any PDF coupons, documents, or other files on the web and link to them from the email. That approach allows subscribers to download these materials and then easily navigate to other pages on your site.”

Rendering

“Before you even send an email, your ESP alters them, like

• Adding tracking pixels to measure opens
• Replacing links with redirects for tracking clicks
• Changing your email’s DOCTYPE
• Stripping out certain kinds of code

Most of the time, these changes don’t affect the rendering of an email, but sometimes they do. Often there’s ways to circumvent this, but it’s wise to ask your ESP if and how their platform modifies your code.”

“The operating system affects the rendering of an email through the functionality it supports for web and app-based email clients.”

“If a subscriber views an email in webmail client, then the web browser they’re using can also affect the rendering.”

“After all this, emails are then affected by webmail and app-based email clients — of which there are an increasing number. Email clients don’t all support the same code, with each one stripping out unsupported code before rendering the email. This can lead to significantly different email rendering across clients. This rendering layer is complicated further by the fact that it’s not stable. Updates to clients are made regularly, tend not to be announced, and changes affecting email rendering are almost never documented. Of course, that’s on top of the updates to OSs and browsers.

Past email client changes liek this have led to images in emails suddenly having a 1px border; inbox display preferences overriding the default styling of background, text, and link colors; and special characters being converted into 16px by 16px email images. Email marketers were left to scramble for workarounds to regain control over how their emails looked.”

“Rendering may be affected by whether the message is imported from another email service using IMAP/POP. In webmail clients, whether an email is native to that email platform can affect rendering. For example, emails viewed in gmail may display differently if the person has a gmail address than if they import emails into gmail from their aol address. In that first case, the emails are delivered via a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). In the second case, the emails are imported using either Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) or Post Office Protocol (POP) — both of which can affect email rendering in rare instances.

“While screen size considerations aren’t unique to email development, it’s been more challenging to email developers because support for media queries, which enables responsive design, has been less than universal across clients. Because of that uneven support, email marketers have embraced a range of mobile-friendly design approaches — some of which employ hacks — as they migrate away from the desktop-centric design that used to dominate.”

“Analyze your subscriber base and focus your attention on the most popular combos among your subscribers, while only occasionally auditing how your emails render in the other environments.”

“Email marketers have embraced progressive enhancement, which is the idea of creating ‘platform-perfect’ emails that maximize the email experience made possible by an email client or device. Those enhanced experiences are backed up by fallbacks that ensure the graceful degradation of your emails when they’re viewed on platforms that don’t support those enhancements.”

“The available enhancements and corresponding fallbacks range widely. They also fall into two buckets: one for email elements and one for the entirety of the email. For example, an email element enhancement would include using Google fonts and web fonts but listing a web standard font in your font family coding as a fallback. And an email structure enhancement would include using multipart MIME and including an HTML part and a plain text part as a fallback for devices like smartwatches that can’t handle HTML.”

“When enhancements aren’t supported, your default design is the fallback. And for some email elements and structures, there simply are no fallbacks at all. They’re either supported or they’re not and the element is just gone. For example, that’s the case with emojis in SLs. Support varies and they might not be displayed, which can leave your SL impaired if you’re using them as subs for words. For that reasons, it’s best to use them as visual enhancers or as a form of punctuation to separate SL message components. Otherwise, you should be very confident in your ability to segment your list and send emoji-filled SLs only to those subscribers who tend to open your emails in clients that support them.”

“Instead of playing down to the lowest common denominator and creating mediocre email experiences for all of your subscribers, use progressive enhancements to play up to the widest reasonable diversity and create the most compelling email experiences feasibly possible for each of your subscribers.”

Acquisition

“Tracking the performance of your subscribers by their acquisition source will allow you to see how each is performing and make decisions about which sources to continue, improve, or abandon.

• Signup mechanisms can break. And the performance of a subscriber acquisition source can change dramatically over time because of new tech, process changes, or shifts in consumer behavior.

But you won’t notice any of those changes if you’re not keeping an inventory of all your acquisition sources and tracking their performance. For each source, note:

• The name or description of the source
• A log of changes or AB tests, along with screenshots, call center scripts, and other materials documenting those iterations
• Performance metrics, including signups, net list growth (signups minus hard bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints during first 30/90 days), hard bounces, unsubs (all-time, first 30/90 days), spam complaints (all-time, first 30/90 days), opens & clicks, sales conversions and revenue, and subscriber lifetime value.

Consider tracking those performance metrics on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. This will allow you to follow trends, fix breakdowns in a source’s signup process, and identify which source you should further optimize and which you should perhaps abandon. Common acquisition sources include:

• Homepage signup form
• Lightbox, overlay, popup, slide-in, exit intent, and similar signup forms
• Checkout opt-in
• Lead generation form
• Report/asset download form
• Webinar reg form
• Post-survey/petition opt-in
• Sweeps/contest entry opt-in
• Mobile app signup form
• Text to subscribe to email
• Facebook tab email signup form
• Twitter cards
• Social ads targeting lookalikes with email opt-in messaging
• Call center script signup prompt
• Customer support emails
• Chat
• Store signage
• Checkout via POS, tablet, etc.
• Kiosk
• Product packaging
• QR codes in magazines, etc.
• TV commercials
• Radio commercials

In addition to tracking each of these sources, you’ll likely also want to track individual signup campaigns. Doing so allows you to measure the effectiveness of different signup messaging, processes, and other variables.”

“Consider adding some social proof to your signup form, nothing how many subscribers you have and why they love to receive your emails. This can lower signup anxiety.”

“It’s also worth reassuring would-be subscribers that your brand won’t ever share their email address with anyone else. Some brands also include this reassurance on the opt-in confirmation page.”

“Consider using a social sign-in for email opt-ins. This convenient option for customers has the added benefit of providing brands with useful profile info, such as birth date.”

“Explain to subscribers how sharing additional info with you will benefit them. For instance, if you require their zip code so you can send them news about local events or merch carried by stores near them, make that clear. If you require their birth date (perhaps for regulatory reasons) and will use it to send them a special birthday offer, tell them that and make sure you’re prepared to follow through.”

Welcome Emails & Onboarding

“Use the signup confirmation page as a ‘pre-welcome message’ to continue to engage new subscribers. When a person signs up to receive your emails, they’re reaching out and expressing a desire to hear more. So don’t stop talking after they subscribe.

• First, use your signup confirmation page to clearly confirm that the person successfully signed up to receive promotional emails from you, showing them the email address they signed up with so they can verify they entered it correctly
• Second, capitalize on the moment and engage the new subscriber further. For instance, it could be used to ask subscribers to add your email address to their address book, to collect optional preferences and other info, to drive them to key webpages, to educate them about sister brands, or to expose them to your social channels.

If you plan to send a welcome email immediately, you can tell the subscriber to look for that. Moreover, you can use the signup confirmation page to remind subscribers to check their junk or spam folders if they don’t see the welcome email in their inbox.

• Although a signup confirmation page could be used in all those ways, focus on one or two of them, because asking subscribers to do too many things at once dilutes your message and lowers response.”

“Message new subscribers differently depending on their acquisition source and customer history. Tailor your onboarding messaging to the individual subscriber based on what you know about them and what you know about other subscribers who opted in via the same acquisition source.

• For example, people who subscribe through your homepage or while entering a contest are more likely to be prospects, in contrast to the customers opting in during checkout. So consider delivering a richer offer to those prospects to spur their first purchase, while giving your existing customers, who already see your value, a less rich offer.
• Similarly, you probably shouldn’t use your welcome email to push someone who subscribed via your FB page to ‘like’ you. Instead, promote something they’re more likely to be unfamiliar with, such as your app or Twitter.
• Additionally, analyze the behavior of your subscribers by acquisition source and look for patterns of behavior you can amplify or address in your onboarding messaging.

“Include an unsub link in your welcome emails. Even though they’re transactional under CAN-SPAM rules, brands should always include an opt-out link in their welcome emails for two reasons:

• First, well-crafted welcome emails are promotional emails. These emails should be promoting your products and services, offering deals and discounts, and otherwise trying to get subscribers to convert.
• And second, even if you don’t take advantage of the promotional power of welcome emails and only send a transactional email that confirms the signup and nothing more, denying subscribers the opportunity to unsub drives them to use the Report Spam button instead.
• Similar to using a confirmed opt-in process to protect your list from low-quality acquisition sources, you can use a more prominent unsub link in your welcome email to give regretful subscribers a clear way to opt out, rather than marking your email as spam. A prominent opt-out link also builds trust by signaling to subscribers that you’ll make it easy for them to unsub in the future as well.
• Making an opt-out link prominent typically involves positioning one in the upper right corner of the email opposite your logo or incorporating it into your welcome message, in addition to the usual one at the bottom. Font size and styling — in particular, color — can also ensure that subscribers who go looking for your unsub link can easily find it.”

Subject Lines & Envelope

“Keep your subject lines short, but still coherent and descriptive. People scan their inboxes quickly to decide which emails to open. Overly long SLs are a turnoff to many consumers and generally don’t lead to more clicks or conversions among those who do open.

At the other end of the spectrum, very short SLs often generate higher-than-average open rates, but lower-than-average click rates. These SLs tend to be more intriguing and mysterious, but as a result, attract curious subscribers rather than the subscribers most likely to respond to the CTAs in the email. Additionally, using too many vague, short SLs might cause fewer subscribers to open your emails over time because the email content has repeatedly disappointed them.”

“Although growing smartphone readership and the rise of smart watches and other wearables will continue to put downward pressure on SL length, the sweet spot appears to be 20–40 characters, which generally produces above average conversions and clicks, as well as opens. This range includes enough characters to clearly convert two or more aspects of the email’s content — perhaps some details about the offer plus a time factor to create urgency or some emotional appeal — while staying true to your brand’s voice.

• If you decide to use an SL that’s 40+ characters long, consider frontloading it with your keywords and main CTA to limit the impact of it being truncated.
• Be aware that word choice can affect perceived SL length because several long words can be easier to read than a bunch of short words.
• The perfect SL lies at the intersection of your brand voice, message goal, and audience preferences.”

“Subject line and preview text content can be Contextual, Urgent, Emotional, Detailed, Intriguing, Visual, and Earned (the CUE-DIVE method).”

“Contextual: The SL and preview text content pertains to the subscriber and their context — whether it’s their location, recent behavior, or circumstances. It includes content that’s…

• Personalized, localized, behavior-based, segmented, relevant, requested, or anticipated

This attribute helps explain the strong metrics of transactional, triggered, segmented, and highly personalized emails when the SL is closely aligned with the content and purpose of those emails. For example, it explains the performance difference when the SL “Buyer’s Guide to SLR Cameras” is used for a broadcast email to everyone on a retailer’s list and when it’s used for a browse abandon email sent of subscribers who browsed SLR cameras but didn’t buy one.”

“Urgent: This content is time-dependent or sensitive. Urgency is a key messaging tactic because it answers the question: Why should I give you my attention now?

• Deadlines, limited quantities, new, seasonal, holidays, events, alerts, topical, newsjacking”

“Emotional: This content suggests how people should feel or appeals to subscribers’ emotions to motivate them. It involves or appeals to their:

• Lifestyle messaging, pop culture references, aspirations, happiness, responsibility, gratitude, generosity, compassion, charity, duty, activism, competitiveness, greed, guilt, vanity, anxiety, shame, fear, slang, profanity, or shock.

Emotion can motivate when logic doesn’t. It’s a key messaging tactic of lifestyle brands, political groups, and nonprofits.”

“Detailed: Describing the primary CTA in a straightforward manner. It provides details about or entails:

• Offers, value, news, info, content, exclusives, uniqueness, branding, or brand positioning”

“Intriguing: This attribute relies on creating questions in the subscriber’s mind, questions they’re compelled to find out the answer to by opening the email. Often, this is referred to as creating a ‘curiosity gap.’ This approach involves or includes content that’s:

• Questions, curiosity, mysterious, chance, surprise, strange, pop culture, humor, puns, weird

While this content can be effective, it’s also risky because it encourages marketers to play games with their subscribers’ time. If the content of the email ends up being disappointing, that can make subscribers feel manipulated and lead to opener’s remorse. While this might boost the opens of the campaign it’s used for, it might suppress opens for subsequent campaigns, creating a net loss of engagement. Use this tactic thoughtfully and sparingly. Sometimes we focus too much on grabbing our subscribers’ attention and not enough on not wasting their time.”

“Visual: The SL and preview text draws the eye and has an impact before any words are read. It entails using:

• Very short or very SLs, abbreviations and all caps, unusual spellings, unusual or heavy punctuation, special and unicode characters, emoticons, or emojis

The artful and judicious use of all-caps, dashes, asterisks, plus-signs, and other characters can be eye-catching. But there can be higher risks associated with visual elements. Overuse or going too far can make your brand seem desperate for attention or too casual.”

“Earned: This attribute pertains to content related to earned media — what other people are saying about you. It includes content from:

• Reviews, testimonials, endorsements, media coverage, community activity, user-generated content, or hashtags

Customers give more weight to what others say about you than what you say about yourself. You should look for opportunities to use this content in your envelope content.”

“SLs generally incorporate two, maybe three, of these attributes. Preview text incorporates another one or two, which may or may not overlap with the attributes used in the SL. Detailed, contextual, intriguing, and earned tend to be primary attributes, while urgent, emotional, and visual tend to be secondary attributes that pair well with any of the primary ones. A couple of interesting combos include:

• An intriguing SL to grab attention but then using a detailed preview text to close the curiosity gap and reduce opener’s remorse
• Highly visual preview text or white space, perhaps with some branding, to create emphasis on the SL”

“Many email clients cut off SLs after 40 characters, so if yours is longer than that, it could be affected. Be careful that a critical attribute or bit of content isn’t lost. For instance, truncation can potentially turn an emotional and detailed SL into an emotional and intriguing SL because some details were lost. If you don’t want to change the wording of your SL, consider using your preview text to clarify the details or other attribute or content that’s being truncated in certain email clients.”

Email Design and Body Content

“Good content should be appropriate for your business, for your users, and for its context. Appropriate in its method of delivery, in its style and structure, and above all in its substance.”

“Bulletproof button: A non-graphical button created from styled and linked HTML text inside a table cell with a background color that suffers minimal or no degradation when email images are blocked.

Cinemagraph: A picture composed of both static images and 1+ GIFs, which give motion, often subtle, to a small portion of the overall picture.

Defensive design: Design techniques that allow an email to communicate its message effectively when images are blocked.

Desktop-centric design: Email design approach that uses basic coding techniques to create a single-email rendering that’s optimized for viewing on large-screened desktops, which can easily handle multi-column designs, small text, and tightly clustered links and buttons.

Forward to a Friend (FTAF): Providing a link in your email that takes subscribers to a form that allows them to forward all or a portion of your email to 1+ people they know.”

“Mobile-aware design, or scalable design, involves basic techniques to create a single email that functions well across a range of screen sizes, but is deferential to smartphones. Those techniques include:

• Employing a single-column layout (two-column product grids are ok)
• Using large text, with at least 14px text for body copy and 18px for headlines
• Using large images, as well as large, easily tapped buttons that are at least 44x44px
• Spacing out links and buttons — including those in navigation, social, and administrative bars — so subscribers can tap them accurately
• Using high contrast values and colors for ease of reading outdoors and in other less-than-ideal environments”

“Responsive design has become a general term for a basket of techniques that use CSS media queries and other progressive enhancements to produce renderings or versions of an email that are optimized for particular screen resolutions or email clients. These approaches include:

• Liquid or fluid design, which uses 100% width images and table cells to have the email content expand to completely fill the subscriber’s screen, up to a max width that’s set using media queries
• Adaptive design, which uses media queries to establish 1+ breakpoints at set screen widths at which the email content is reformatted, rearranged, or hidden so it’s optimized for the subscriber’s screen size.
• Fully responsive email design, which uses adaptive design’s breakpoints to reformat, rearrange, and hide email content at set screen widths and uses fluid design’s 100% width scaling to optimize the size of images, fonts, buttons, and other elements between those breakpoints.
• Spongy or hybrid email design, which generates the effects of adaptive or fully responsive design without relying on media queries
• Responsive-aware design, which uses responsive design just for the header, nav bar, recovery module, and footer of an email, and uses mobile-aware design for the rest of the email

Each of these techniques involve extra email design and coding, with hybrid email design involving the most complex and heaviest coding, and responsive-aware email design minimizing the extra work by allowing you to build most of the responsiveness into the header and footer sections of your email template, which tend not to change very often.

Beyond ensuring that your email displays and functions well across a range of screen sizes, media queries can also create device-targeted content. For instance, they can be used to display CTAs to download your app and to display tap-to-call CTAs that take advantage of the ability of smartphones to make calls.

Consult with your ESP or an email design specialist to determine the design approach that’s best for your brand and circumstances. Consider the subscriber experience, but also keep in mind the workload that your design approach choice will create. Depending on the content and frequency of your emails, the more efficient design approachs like mobile-aware and responsive-aware may make more sense than the more sophisticated ones like adaptive and hybrid. That said, be sure to focus on the returns from your email production rather than just the cost of those efforts.”

“You can create emphasis and better mimic the images-on version of your email by applying inline CSS to change the font type, size, weight, and color of your alt text. However, support for styled alt text is inconsistent.”

“Use HTML text at the very top of your emails before the header to create preheader text, which most often communicates the primary CTA or builds on the SL. HTML text can also be used for your nav bar links; throughout your primary and secondary messaging blocks, particularly for headlines, coupon codes, and CTAs; and in the product grid. And of course, HTML text should be used for all footer text and admin links, like your mailing address and unsub link.

• Traditionally, HTML text has been limited to just a small # of popular web safe font families — like Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana — because these fonts are universally supported. And in most cases, these fonts can also be styled in different sizes and colors.
• However, web fonts are also a possibility now, although they aren’t universally supported. So you’ll need to use web safe fonts as fallbacks.
• Background colors can be used in table cells to stand in for blocked images or to otherwise recreate the structure, patterns, and flow of content blocks, images, and text in your emails. If you’re feeling ambitious, create pixel art of mosaics using this technique.”

“Provide context for products featured in your emails to inspire subscribers to purchase. Don’t assume that subscribers know what your products are for, how to use them, or the differences between similar products.

• For instance, an apparel retailer might show the same blouse used in two outfits, one dressed up and one dressed down, to show its versatility. An electronics retailer might link to an article or blog that explains the different kinds of HDTV display technologies. A B2B software vendor might explain how their software integrates with other software or works within an overarching workflow. And a home improvement retailer might promote a video that demonstrates all the uses of a power washer.
• Think of ways to strengthen the appeal of your promotional content by weaving in elements of content marketing. All brands should think of themselves as publishers.”

“Offer subscribers non-promotional content and CTAs. Subscribers are not always in the market, so incessantly asking them to buy can be off-putting and cause them to tune you out or unsub. Keep your subscribers engaged between purchases by including educational, instructional, editorial, social, inspirational, and other non-promotional content in your emails. This content could include:

• Promotions of blog posts, articles, infographics, ebooks, podcasts, videos, and other content — whether they were created by your company, a partner, or someone else
• Surveys and polls, which have the added benefit of giving you progressive profiling data
• Updates on social media activity, like event pics shared on Insta, most insightful tweets from a Twitter chat, etc.
• Info about your charity, conservation efforts, volunteer work, etc.
• Season’s greetings and other messages of thanks”

“Use faster channels to help determine the content of your emails. Improve the results of your email learning by incorporating learnings from faster channels like site search, pay-per-click (PPC) search campaigns, and Twitter.

• For instance, look at the terms that visitors are putting into your website’s search box and use the most popular terms in your SLs or body copy.
• You can also fine-tune the landing page of a PPC search campaign before using it for an email campaign or use insights from PPC search ad headlines and body copy for SLs and preheader text. And tweets that generate high engagement should be used to inform SL and headline copy.
• The converse is also possible. You can use the results of your email campaigns to inform slower channels. For instance, you can test product images in emails and use the winners in your product catalog.”

“Give your customers and other people a voice in your emails. Customers trust what others say and do more than they trust what companies do, so give your customers, outside experts, media outlets, bloggers, celebrities, and others a presence in your emails. Consider promoting user-generated content — pics, videos, testimonials, reviews, tweets, and other content provided by customers. Promote top-selling, top-rated, most-liked, most-Tweeted, and most-pinned items. Poll your customers and include the results in an email.

Outside experts boost your credibility, too. Consider including advice, curated product assortments, and other content from outside experts, as well as pointing out media coverage of your products.

And don’t forget your employees. The voice of your staffers can also ring more true and authentic than anonymous, disembodied corporate content.”

“Keep the weight of your emails reasonable to avoid long load and deliverability times. When the file size of an email is too large, inbox providers might display only a portion of the message or block it completely. Very large emails also load more slowly for subscribers, causing some to hit the Delete button in frustration.

• To avoid trouble, aim to keep the HTML weight of your emails to around 60kb or less — and be very wary of exceeding 100kb.
• The HTML weight excludes the file size of web-hosted images associated with an email, which could be an additional several hundred kbs — or even upwards of 2mb for graphic-heavy messages. For a quick load time, it’s best to keep the loaded or total weight — email coding plus images — to less than 1mb, especially if you have subscribers in countries with slow internet speeds.”

“Don’t avoid creating long emails. Although higher email frequencies and more consumers reading emails on smartphones are driving many marketers to send shorter emails, subscribers will engage with long emails. Beyond compelling content, marketers can use several techniques to encourage subscribers to scroll and in doing so, expose the recipient to more of the content in your emails.

• First, use a single-column rather than a two-column format to make it easier to subscribers to scroll. Including product grids generally doesn’t impede scrolling, as long as the grid isn’t 3+ columns on mobile devices or 5+ columns on desktop.
• Second, look for opportunities to use an S-curve layout, where a content grouping with an image on the left and text on the right is followed on the next row down by a content grouping with text on the left and an image on the right, and so on. Subscribers often find this arrangement easier to read than having all images on the left and all text on the right, or vice versa.
• Third, use images with strong vertical or sloping lines, as subscribers’ eyes naturally follow them, especially if the image is only partially revealed. For instance, if subscribers see the top of a Christmas tree or the top of a necklace’s chain, many will be intrigued enough to scroll to see the entire thing.
• And fourth, consistently place some high-value content deep in your emails. If you stick with a consistent layout, you’ll train your subscribers to look for certain types of content throughout your email. For instance, if you always place a coupon at the bottom of your email — and perhaps refer to it in your SL, preheader, or header — subscribers will learn that they have to scroll down to find that coupon.

When you send long emails, be thoughtful about the content that you place at the very bottom before the footer, as that content tends to attract more attention than the content in the middle.

You can determine if your email is scroll-worthy by looking at a heat map of where the clicks are in an email. If there are little to no clicks on the content toward the bottom of your emails, then they’re too long or you need better content.”

“Expecting subscribers to scroll to the bottom of very long emails is reasonable; however, expecting them to scroll back to the top is not. For that reason, consider using content with a high link density at the bottom of your email to give subscribers alternatives to the message blocks higher up.

• One tactic is to include a recovery module, which is a content block that contains many links to different product categories, product sub-categories, price points, or brands, for instance. Sometimes recovery modules relate to the theme of the email, but other times they just promote sale or clearance items in various product categories.
• Another tactic is to repeat your nav bar before your footer or elsewhere in your email.”

“Use a consistent email design, but don’t be afraid to deviate from it occasionally. Having a consistent email design makes you more recognizable in the inbox and creates familiarity among your subscribers. However, it can also give the false impression that all of your messages are equally important. Monotony can lull subscribers into paying less attention to you. Significantly changing your design on a one-off basis every once in a while can deliver a wake-up call to get your subscribers’ complete attention again. Occasions where it might make sense to deviate from your usual design and use a breakout design instead include:

• A major product launch
• Entry into a new product category
• Collabs with other brands
• A charity effort
• A big social media or mobile campaign
• A reengagement campaign aimed at subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in a long time
• A winback campaign aimed at subscribers who haven’t converted in a long time

In situations like those, consider one of these options for deviating from your usual template in a significant or even dramatic way:

• Depart from your usual color palette
• Drop your nav bar and similar links to draw attention to the primary message
• Send a plain-text email to express urgency
• Use a video as the main CTA
• Break the grid, where a portion of an image extends past the usual boundaries of the email”

Seasonality

“Message your subscribers differently during the holiday season. Customers use emails differently during November & December. People are extremely busy, travel more, might have to deal with bad weather, and have longer-than-usual to-do lists. In short, they’re more stressed. They turn to promotional emails to make their lives easier by helping them find great gifts and great prices — and that’s about it. Marketers can adjust their email content by simplifying, reducing, or eliminating video or social media CTAs, contests, advice and lifestyle content, and other content that requires too much of a time commitment from subscribers. The holiday season is the time to simplify messaging. It’s also a time to increase customer service messaging, such as clarifying return policies, promoting order-by deadlines, and highlighting store hours.”

“Recognize that once-a-year gift-buying makes subscribers’ interests less predictable during the holiday season. Customers are mostly buying for others during this time, so downplay or disregard content preferences and previous browse and purchase behavior when making decisions about the content to send individual subscribers. Instead, promote a wider selection of products and product categories and direct subscribers to a gift guide that helps them find gifts by interest, gender, age, price, or other variables. Also, consider promoting fewer product category sales in favor of more sitewide sales. Similarly, be wary of using December behavior to send targeted messages in January.”

“Signal the arrival of the holiday season and other seasonal events by altering your email designs. Email design should signal to subscribers that it’s time to start thinking about gift buying. You can accomplish this in a few different ways.

• First, add seasonal imagery to your email designs, particularly your header, because it appears above the fold
• Second, add a link to your nav bar that directs subscribers to seasonal merch or your gift guide. You might also consider adding a holiday-themed secondary nav bar dedicated entirely to promoting your seasonal merch and content
• Third, add a gift services footer, which pulls together links to gift guides, order-by deadlines, return policies, and other important seasonal buying info into a single content block”

“Make your opt-in forms, welcome emails, unsub pages, transactional emails, and other email marketing components seasonally relevant. For instance, the email singup CTA on your homepage could be changed in November to read Don’t miss our exclusive Black Friday and Cyber Monday email deals. That makes for a much more compelling CTA because the value statement is much more pointed and urgent with those two key shopping days approaching. Similarly, you could add a Valentine’s Day gift services footer to your order confirmation and shipping confirmation emails in January and early February. This’ll spur additional purchases from customers who were buying things for themselves.”

Inactivity Management

“Recognize that inactive subscribers and inactive customers are different and require different remedies. Managing inactivity typically requires a two-pronged strategy.

• Inactive subscribers, email recipients who haven’t opened or clicked any of your emails in a while, to maintain engagement and deliverability
• Inactive customers, subscribers who haven’t converted in a while, to maintain sales and profitability.

Each of these kinds of inactivity is unique, with different causes, risks, and remedies.

Address inactive subscribers by sending reengagement campaigns, with the goal of getting them to open or click. These campaigns tend toward non-promotional messaging such as:

• Asking the subscriber to update their preferences or take a poll, survey, or quiz
• Highlighting the social media activity of the brand or, better yet, its customers
• Promoting educational, instructive, or entertaining content, including events and webinars

If your reengagement efforts fail, then send a repermission campaign, asking those subscribers to indicate if they’re still interested in your emails.

Address inactive customers via email by sending winback campaigns, with the goal of getting them to convert. These highly promotional campaigns almost always offer a brand’s richest discounts.

We miss you is a common SL for both reengagement and winback emails, which is perhaps an indication of the confusion between the two.”

“Send your inactive subscribers different messaging at a lower frequency. Once a subscriber has been inactive for many months, the chance of them becoming active again is small but worth pursuing. To try to reengage inactive subscribers, send them different emails than you send the rest of your list. The easiest way to do this is take them off your active email list and put them on a reengagement list. This reengagement segment should receive any combo of:

• Your best, most compelling broadcast emails, like your Black Friday campaign
• Winback emails, which tout your richest offers with the goal of getting the subscriber to open, click, and convert again
• Preference update emails, which aim to get the subscriber to change the topic, frequency, and other options available to them in your preference center, if you have one
• Progressive profiling emails, which are polls, quizzes, surveys, or guided selling pathways that seek short-term info about a subscriber’s needs or interests.

Those first two tactics address the chance that your offers just haven’t been good enough to drive action. While the aim of the offer is to generate a conversion, for the purpose of reengagement, what you’re looking for is an open or click. Those last two tactics acknowledge that it may not be the strength of the offers that’s inadequate but that the offers or content are just wrong. Preference updates and survey results should give you info you can use to send them targeted email. Gaining additional insights for targeting is key because, otherwise, they’re likely to go inactive again.

Whichever approach or combo of approaches you use, inactive subscribers should receive significantly fewer emails than your active subscribers. This is necessary because inbox providers use engagement metrics in their filtering algorithms, so having lots of inactive subscribers poses a risk to your deliverability. You can reduce that risk by emailing inactives considerably less frequently. For instance, if you send daily emails, reduce that to weekly for inactives. Or if you send weekly months, reduce to once per month.

Doing so can have a dramatic effect on how engaged your subscribers look in the eyes of inbox providers. Generally, if a third to half of your list is inactive, reducing your mailings to inactive subscribers by 75% can increase the engagement level profile of your sends by 30–60%.

In addition to protecting your deliverability, less frequent mailings to inactives can cause some of them to actually pay more attention to your emails and reengage. In that same vein, sometimes withholding inactives for a period of weeks can be effective, because some of them will notice the absence of your emails and then respond when you start sending again.

If you have the capabilities, you might also consider reaching out to inactive subscribers via other channels, such as direct mail, SMS, and targeted display ads, in order to reactivate them. This approach might be particularly warranted for reaching customers who were high-value before becoming inactive.”

“If someone acts on your reengagement campaign, that’s a great time to send a great offer because they’re really paying attention.”

“Send a series of re-permission emails before you remove a chronically inactive subscriber from your list. If your reactivation efforts fail, then it’s time to work toward removing a chronically inactive subscriber. However, don’t just remove a subscriber from your list without warning.

Send a series of re-permission emails asking the subscriber to indicate either Yes, I’d like to continue receiving special offers or No, please unsubscribe me — or language along those lines. Send up to three re-permission emails. Use different SLs and send them on different days and at different times of the day to increase the response rate.

A Yes click in any of these emails puts the subscriber back on your active email list, as this action reconfirms their permission. Selecting No should take them to your preference center or opt-out page. And if the subscriber doesn’t respond to any of the re-permission emails, then you should unsubscribe them.

Response rates for re-permission emails tend to be very low, but they’re worth the effort. Setting up an automated program to send these triggered emails takes relatively little work after you’ve set up a program to recognize chronically inactive subscribers. Additionally, subscribers lost due to inactivity may react positively to your courteous efforts if they discover the re-permission emails later.”