MindComet

Editorial Calendars for Email Campaigns

When you are planning the long-term goals for your email marketing campaign, consider the frequency of your messaging and prepare an editorial calendar. 

Editorial calendars, when planned correctly, allow you to get an overall view of the year and will provide enough insight to make changes and adjustments to your planned sends.  You also have the ability to lay out your testing plan, approval dates and deadlines for content. 

Let’s discuss a hypothetical email newsletter that is scheduled to be sent on the Third Wednesday of each month.  As straight forward as it seems, when it’s laid out on a calendar, you may find that you need to make small adjustments to your send days.  For example, the third Wednesday in November is the day before Thanksgiving.  This is not the best day to send an email newsletter.  On one of the busiest travel days of the year, you can assume that at a good portion of your subscribers will be traveling and your email may end up buried in the inbox. 

By planning your editorial calendar in advance you can see early on that the November send should move to the second Wednesday in November.  Content due dates, testing and approvals can all be adjusted accordingly to remove the potential for the fire drill that may have occurred without proper preparation.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 28, 2007

Email Marketing - Random Points of Interest and Such :: Vol. 2

Brush Daily
Remove any invalid or “dead” addresses from your list as soon as you encounter them.  If your EMS doesn’t do it dynamically, immediately remove any unsubscribed addresses.  This is also relevant for any addresses that bounce three times consecutively.

Mini-Marketing
If you don’t already, start testing your emails on mobile devices.  With the iPhone on its way, it’s likely that this niche-specific avenue for email marketing will only continue in popularity.  Buy and test your emails on any email-equipped phones and / or PDAs such as the Blackberry, the Treo and the Zaurus PDA.

Mouse = Compass
Utilize the implementation of Image Maps.  The following emails exemplify the good use of image maps.  Although they’re just screenshots, only the specific products are clickable; such as the bikini top and bottom and the t-shirt.

To read last month’s Random Points of Interest post, click here.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 27, 2007

EMP101 Continued: A New Web Site

Welcome back.  Our last post on this topic, Email Marketing Meets Politics discussed the sweet simplicity of Barack Obama’s email marketing campaign.  But compared to Hillary Clinton’s efforts, it was, perhaps, a little too simple.  Obama’s camp took it up a notch with their latest targeted email message I received announcing Obama’s new site:

Each subscriber of Obama’s email marketing campaign can become an opinion leader, the call to action creates the appeal of exclusivity.

The link in the email brought me to the new site.  There were features such as “This Campaign is About You.“  The bubbly, Mac-like icons offer blogging, a personal profile and social networking.  There are links to Facebook and YouTube.  You can watch Barack TV, shop at the online store, or register to vote.  The revamped Web site taps into trends.  Reaching out directly to the masses is a popular tactic in email marketing for politics.  That’s the latest update, but check back in the near future for more.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 26, 2007

Show Your Appreciation With A Surprise

Sending a message to thank new subscribers is a common gesture and a best-practice method.  So take it a step further—to a “prizewinning” practice, if you will – and exceed expectations with instant gratification.  Thank newbies with freebies, just for signing up.  Recipients won’t see it coming.  They’ll say, “What a pleasant surprise.“  And then, the tables have turned and they’re thanking you. 

I found a hidden treasure buried in the sign-up process for a national restaurant chain’s E-club.  Free food! I’m all over it.  Who wouldn’t be?

Most email programs start with a welcome message, but the first piece of email marketing I got from a concert venue included a buy-one-get-one coupon.

The element of surprise is something powerful.  Using cost-effective methods to meet and exceed expectations builds brand loyalty and creates satisfaction for consumers and marketers at large.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 23, 2007

Outlook 2007 Rendering

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you are probably aware, Microsoft has made some changes to Outlook 2007 - primarily using Word as the rendering engine as opposed to Internet Explorer.  We told you about this in our January 16th post.  According to eROI there was 3% adoption rate of those already using Outlook in the first 10 days after the release.  According to MarketingSherpa, all versions of Outlook make up about 79.6% of business email clients.  Think about the implications this can have on your email marketing campaign.

Within the next six months, we can only assume that the adoption rate will continue to increase, meaning that email design standards will need to be adjusted accordingly and quickly.

Your design team should be aware of the following:

The most important thing to remember is that Outlook 2007 does not support background images.  If there is text that is over an image that is not one solid color, the text will need to be hard-coded into the image. 

Some other points to keep in mind include:

For more information, click here, here and here

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 22, 2007

Explosions in the Inbox

Have you seen the movie “Friday Night Lights”?  Wait - not the recent television adaptation, but the actual movie with Billy Bob Thornton?  It came out a few years ago.  Got it?  Ok. 

One of the standout elements of the film was the score.  It was written and recorded by Explosions in the Sky—a four-piece post-rock (vocal-less) band from the same West Texas area that the film was set in.  They haven’t released a proper full length since 2003’s opus, “The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place”.  Their epic new album, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, came out yesterday (which I highly recommend picking up).  And to promote the album’s release, they sent out a newsletter.

It arrived in my inbox at 10:35 AM. It was a simple, yet effectively designed newsletter for a band. It had a column on the right with a link to buy the new album, along with their upcoming tour dates.  Plenty of links to their website… even a refer-a-friend link.  Nothing too flashy.  Just the facts.  The only problem was a broken image – which was intended to render their new album’s cover art. 

Then, exactly three hours later (1:35 PM), I received the same email again.  Only this time, it seemed as if the email had exploded (pun intended) in my inbox. It had no subject line, and the copy in the “Latest News” section had vanished.  Oh… and the cover art image was still broken.

Their emails are developed and managed by a company called Altamont Design Studios.  Altamont serves such diverse artists as Rev Run, Shooter Jennings and Hatebreed, along with EITS’s management company, Constant Artists.

Now I know I may have come off sounding a little irritated about all of this, but it’s for a good reason.  Explosions in the Sky are one of my favorite bands.  They’re the only band I’ve ever dropped hundreds of dollars on plane tickets to see.  It’s frustrating to see the people working for them drop the ball, especially in such a careless fashion.  In the future, I hope their management company communicates better with Altamont to keep their email sends as tight as the band’s live set.

Explosions in the Sky
Altamont Design Studios
Constant Artists

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 21, 2007

Create a Better User Experience

In a recent article on BtoB Online the question was raised if emails should follow a specific template.  The answer, quite simply, is yes.

Over time your subscribers will know exactly what to expect.  The familiarity of the navigation will allow readers to get to the information they are most interested in quickly.  This doesn’t mean you can’t ever update your look and feel or change your logo.  However, the makeup of the template should remain the same.

Without a comprehensive usability study, reviewing the metrics following a campaign can give you a better understand of how your emails are being navigated.  What gets click-throughs?  What doesn’t?  Overlaying the data from multiple issues will assist you in formulating a correlation between the ease of navigation and relevancy of your content.

Using a standard template has other benefits too.  Thinking about what elements you will need before deployment can help copywriters produce succinct copy for available space and it will greatly decrease design time for your production team.

Creating a better user-experience will help you increase your readership and retention.

Source

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 20, 2007