Designing a Successful Email Creative for Consumer Email Marketing

Designing a Successful Email creative and what to watch out for with consumer email marketing (plus understanding result expectations)

So how do you know what to look for and to do when running your own email campaign?

Well that is a very good question, what I do know from my own experience with running email campaigns daily for our clients is simplicity is key and of course content is king – having a strong eye catching subject line is the first port of call, the creative itself needs to look modern not with too much text, ideally in a way use sound bites to grab the intention of the consumer, the images need to look crisp and clear but stay away from just having one large image – remember its only worth running an email campaign to new potential customers if you got something to shout about, so if it’s a new product at a discounted rate, a competition or a giveaway – if you don’t have anything like this then it’s unlikely to achieve the results you are after. Especially now consumers are interested in saving money and getting the best possible deals around. Email marketing is a quick, easy and cost effective option to do so that.

The Strap line should serve to entice the user into reading further, we do not read from left to right when it comes to websites and emails, in fact evidence suggest we adopt a more complex scanning process whereby we purposefully seek out keywords and areas of interest that may then grab our interest enough to warrant further investigation.

This scan and evaluation takes on average just 7 seconds to achieve and it is within those seconds you have to grab the users attention, whilst not the only area of importance to utilise in gaining the interests of your reader is should only really be presented in plain html mark-up to ensure any message being delivered is viewable by the user regardless of the content blocked by the email client on delivery.

Use of images or artwork can be a very powerful tool if used correctly. Provide a clear call to action in the first 250 – 300px, this is prime email real-estate, and commonly called ‘above the fold’ it is invariably the first area of an email that a recipient will see though the preview pane of email clients such as outlook. This area should contain your brand and/or your logo to identify you as the sender of the message, by doing so the consumers will become comfortable with your brand and give you recognition, plus it greatly helps reduce your communications being incorrectly identified as unsolicited.

Knowing your ideal or current customers is a real must, but if you don’t know, then email marketing can be used in a way to help you find out who your ideal consumers are, by running several different campaigns to different profiled consumers is a great why of understand the specific type of consumers interested in your products and services.

Understanding expectations of email marketing and could it bring back a return to at least pay for itself, this is one of the big questions that needs to be asked. We have turned clients away and directed them down different paths as we knew that they are unlikely to see a good enough return based on their profit margins on the products. When using lifestyle consumer email databases the general rule of thumb is 5% to 15% open rates and around 5% to 10% click through from open, of course you may achieve better than this or you may achieve worst but by taking these percentages in to consideration you can gage the potential return, using more specific or specialist email databases, you can achieve results anywhere from 20% to 50% open rates and the same again for click through, the difference between specific and lifestyle databases is how they are collected, specific or specialist databases are generally collected via 3rd party opt-in policies from shopping sites, news sites or entertainment sites and the lifestyle databases are collected generally online via websites that run competitions or surveys.

When a campaign fails the first thing that gets the blame especially if the expectations haven’t been set, is the data, this is rarely the case if you are using a repeatable company and data source,  a repeatable list broker or data owner would pick the most suitable email list for your campaign, however unfortunately yes there are some companies that are just interested in your money and will use the cheapest data they have or can source probably send to double what you have ordered and only show the results based on the volume of data you ordered to make the results look better. This brings me on to a new trend I am finding with new clients who keep asking for us to release consumer email data to them so they can run their own broadcasts, this I don’t understand as generally it will cost them more because they have to pay for the broadcasting and they will generally get the same sort of results, I have also noticed that those clients who ask for the data to be released are generally the companies that have been burnt in the past running email campaign by a list broker or data owner and have lost trust but still want to explore email marketing.   

This brings me onto another trend that I have noticed a few competitors offering, guaranteed open or click through rates of around 4% to 5%!? if you remember earlier in the article I mentioned about 5% is the lower average you want to achieve for lifestyle databases, most people who have run or work with email marketing campaigns will understand its not possible to guarantee click or open rates unless you do it in what I would class as an under hand way of working. Why you might ask well no-one (unless the force is strong with you and you have Jedi mind trick powers) can’t make anyone open or click on a link once opened, yes you can have a clear understanding of the database you are using from historic evidence to set expectations of how a specific campaign/product should perform but its no guarantee,  so how its done well there are a couple of options, the databases used are full of consumers who are only interested in freebies so when the campaigns go out there maybe headers and footers on your creative that relate only to the database used saying earn points or get a free voucher by clicking on this email, yes the link may still go to your webpage but then its false traffic to your site as the likelihood is the consumers have only clicked on your email to get their free points or vouchers, the other option is they email to the same consumers more than once if the first broadcast didn’t produce the guaranteed rate now this brings up another problem, you might ask why – well if you get the same email more than once or even every day for several days you are likely to think that they are a spammer or it will put you off the brand, so it can in the end have a negative effect on your brand and company. I personally would recommend staying away from anyone who would guarantee response rates.

If you are looking to run a consumer email campaign then why not talk to Marketing Data Ltd today about your requirements and they will be happy to help – 0844 414 2363 / www.marketingdataltd.co.uk