We live in a world where almost 90% of consumers read emails on their mobile devices. It is therefore imperative for marketers to ensure that their sites and email marketing is optimized for all channels - especially mobile. Download the slides and discover practical methods to help you create the best mobile emails in 2016.
2. 2 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
The dotmailer team
Best examples of
responsive emails
Phil Draper
Marketing Director
Deliverability
myth busting
James Koons
Chief Privacy Officer
Planning for
mobile
Matthew McClelland
Channel Relationship
Manager
5. 5 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
DELIVERABILITY MYTH #1
Sending plain text messages to
subscribers is good for your
deliverability, inbox placement
rate, and open rates.
7. 7 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
DELIVERABILITY MYTH #2
If I get recipients to click links within my
email, the ISPs will see that I am sending
to engaged users and therefore my
deliverability will be improved.
9. 9 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
DELIVERABILITY MYTH #3
Subject lines should not exceed a
certain size, nor should they contain
special characters or certain words.
11. Slide 11
‘With nearly 90% of people checking and reading their emails
on a smartphone, you have to be thinking mobile alongside all
the other channels.
Mobile, as you know, doesn’t mean that you’re just sending your
emails to a smartphone or tablet.
Making sure you’re getting the right impact with mobile email
marketing requires a rethink in strategy, as well as technology‘
12. Slide 12
Are your customers engaging with
you as a brand on mobile devices?
23. Slide 23
Quick Tips
Avoid:
• Flash
• Any plugins that take forever to load or may be incompatible with your customers’
devices
• PNG-24 images.
Use:
• HTML5 and jQuery to improve page load times.
• CSS image sprites.
• JPEG images.
25. 25 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
What’s changed…
Broadcast media joins in.
Still one size fits all.
But the modern marketing has
many different sizes and triggers
many different behaviours
Traditional print media
was one size fits all.
44. 44 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
A push to the app
appears only when
users view email on
a mobile device.
45. 45 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
Images off
• Ger Black Friday email. Important if looking at stuff on the tube
46. 46 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
#2 – Opportunity for horiz/landscape
• Example still to find
• Opportunity
• Video as landscape
OPPORTUNITY
Automatically go to video when in
landscape. Like YouTube does
47. 47 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
#4 - Ergonomics
• Big buttons
All message is visible.
Very light file size as
image is few colours
52. 52 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
Responsive
templates
A wide choice to suit
all needs and sectors
Fully customisable
with your own brand
and colour palletes
53. 53 | Responsiveness Reaps Rewards
And were here to
help if needed
Email design
Campaign Management
Consultancy & Strategic Services
Deliverability
Honestly, I’m not sure which is more baffling: the fact that this myth was ever created or the fact that it has persisted for as long as it has.
In reality, the sending of plain text emails has zero effect on your deliverability, meaning the plain text has zero bearing on the ability to pass your email off to any receiver (ISP).
Plain text messages also have zero impact on your inbox placement rate. There are a lots of factors that weigh in on your ability to get into the inbox (as opposed to the spam or bulk folders) – among them are domain reputation, IP reputation, content, etc. – but whether your email is HTML versus plain text isn’t one of them.
But the biggest part of this myth that needs to be busted is that emails composed in plain text receive better open rates than emails that are composed in HTML. I guess the idea here is that if it’s in plain text, the ISP will just pass it through straight to the inbox, having concluded, “This must be a personal message,” or “this is just a transactional message” and the recipient will be able to read it no matter what device or browser they’re using, so they’ll open it every time.
Not only is that logic wrong because one doesn’t correlate with the other, it’s also impossible to prove because plain text emails don’t process opens at all! If it’s in plain text, there’s no image pixel to be downloaded, so there’s nothing to tell the ESP Platform that the recipient opened the email.
In February of 2015, I sat down with some key email program personnel from Comcast, Microsoft, AOL and Google to discuss how they measure activity within the inbox and what senders of commercial email should be doing from their point of view. Matt Moleski from Comcast, Paul Rock from AOL, John Scarrow from Microsoft and Sri Somanchi from Google were all at the meeting. User click behaviour was one of the many topics we talked about when discussing how they measure engagement vs how email marketers measure engagement.
When asked about monitoring and or measuring user click behaviour, each receiver agreed that they don’t look at that. None of them track what a user clicks within the message itself. In fact, they all view tracking what a user does inside of an email as a violation of privacy. Google showed me an internal privacy policy which prohibits the monitoring and/or tracking of what a user clicks on within an email! Whether a recipient clicks on a link within a message or not, has no impact on the reputation score that they give to a sender. Therefore, clicking links in an email will do little to improve deliverability.
Back to that meeting I had last year…. Subject line came up.
One very interesting point shared by all of the receiver representatives was the fact that subject lines don’t matter. That’s right - subject lines don’t matter (not size, not content, not special characters, not even FREE FREE FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – yes, you can have as many exclamation points as you want). They are not looking at subject lines at all.
That being said, if a subject line happens to trigger a user behaviour that is a negative signal, this will have an impact on inbox placement for that recipient. This means that although the receiver isn’t looking at the subject line, the users are, and if the users react negatively, it can hurt. When a user marks a message as SPAM, it will definitely affect any future emails to that particular recipient. If the negative reactions are large scale (meaning many users take the same negative action), there will most likely be a global issue as a negative reputation score will be assigned to you. I would also caution any sender that words like FREE still matter to the FTC – so if you use it, make sure it isn’t misleading.
We’ve all seen these stats. These stats are probably what got you in this room today.
Equally we know ourselves how often we check our phone, anyone get those phantom buzzes in your pocket when you think your phone is going off but its not. That flutter when you hear your ringtone going off in the supermarket but its not your phone. They’re and will always be an instrisic part of our daily lives. No longer 1000 songs in your pocket or a method to phone home if you’re running late, they’re a portal into our personal and work lives… FOR SOME
An important question to ask at the start of your planning “ do my customers engage with MY brand on their mobile device”
Just because your competitor has invested 50k into a mobile app to drive customer engagement that will deliver increased lifetime value and ROI.
Does not mean that it was the right route to go…
How do I find this out?
Review google analytics, what do customers want when they come to your site.
Do you have a high Drop off rate on certain pages i.e. for dotmailer its our office locations
Email marketing, what devices are your customers opening and engaging on, where do they go after they click?
Is their user journey different from desktop customers
Do they on average drop off
What is your product or service? Put your customer hat on.. You have found a need or been asked to find XYZ or solve ABC, where and when would you start.
On the train into work, asking social media, using directories… follow your customer, map it out and then you will know.
And not just know… have justification internally to solve your mobile problems.
This is a shocking statistic! Cit?
Stats tell us that we have 3 seconds to engage a customer, watching commuters into London on their phones it’s more like 1 second as they triage through emails both professional and personal.
For this I have 10 areas to focus your attention when you walk out of here today.
This is not anything new. Part of any successful campaign is getting “who you are sending from” right..
Some puzzled looks but marketers have been experimenting with sending from the brand, the parent company, a named individual and many more..
Whatever you try, remember how your customer knows you and send accordingly.
80% of the battle on mobile is getting
Remembering that mobile does not mean the device…
All phones can be customised, as in the two examples with large and small text. Equally, preview and no preview.
-finally, we work with a large pharmaceutical client in the US and something they need to consider is the size of font that a user has on their phone. Anyone tried to use parents or old family members phones and felt like the phone needed to be out here to read the HUGE font size?
Anyone know what it is?
You can see in the example on the left as well the first few lines of the email.. OR you can have a second subject line, hard hitting, informative and supporting your subject.
Talk through the good the bad and the ugly
Next we have the call to action… Mobile call to actions need to be a minimum of 32px … Why… because of fat finger people like me. But also its easier for your recipient. The goal of any campaign is to drive someone to purchase, this can not be acieved in an email and therefore a CTA is their to get them to where we want with the information they need…
The information that they need if it’s not on the website.
Is not accessible
Your website does not have a responsive design or hides crucial information in the design that this person needs.
Then consider landing pages, nothing more frustrating than navigating to a website and on a train using your fingers like pincers to find that one piece of content or zoom in on next you can’t read. Finally – FORMS, this is my pet gripe so apologies. If you have sent me an email saying “ hi Matt, please tell us your thoughts” then on the form / survey you ask .. What’s my name and email address, please take this as the reason I am abandoning. Equally, don’t ask questions that you wont use.
One retailer saw a 275% increase in form submissions by removing the need for the customer to enter a mobile number. A further 30% increase by reducing from 5 to 4 questions..
Which nicely leads onto minimialistic. Time is money, time is a commodity we don’t have when on mobile devices, we want it now and the way we want.
Keep it simple, avoid over complicated processes and streamline the journey for the customer.
Thinking Minimal: Keep forms as short and as easy to complete as possible – think one field for their name and another for an email address. If you can make it any easier, do so. Guest logins that don’t require too much input are great – and they can let you then upgrade them to sign-up later when they’re on a desktop.
You can also look at designing your mobile landing page so that forms can be pre-populated as much possible, especially if the user has engaged with you before. This is especially useful with payments as it removes the need to type in long card numbers.
One area to focus on is
Anyone clicked a email signature telephone number and had to save it to your phone, adjust it for your mobile i.e. remove the +44 or Zero and then dial… YAWNNN!!
Think Ease for your customer: but also, tracking. Recently econsultancy reviewed the value of tracking where your calls are coming from, does anyone use Call tracking software??
Over half of marketing spend wasted IMAGE / SLIDE
It is cliché that “half of the money spent on marketing is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
The ultimate irony is that marketers cannot even agree on the attribution of one of our most famous quotes. If you are from America, then you know that this was first uttered by John Wannamaker a Philadelphia retailer. If you are British however, then William Lever founder Lever Brothers is your man.
As humans, we are always searching for one theory that will explain the nature of the world and the universe. As marketers we are no different, we are looking for one methodology that will help us measure, learn adapt and optimize our campaigns. We are always searching for the silver bullet of campaign metrics?
Honestly, I’m not sure which is more baffling: the fact that this myth was ever created or the fact that it has persisted for as long as it has.
In reality, the sending of plain text emails has zero effect on your deliverability, meaning the plain text has zero bearing on the ability to pass your email off to any receiver (ISP).
Plain text messages also have zero impact on your inbox placement rate. There are a lots of factors that weigh in on your ability to get into the inbox (as opposed to the spam or bulk folders) – among them are domain reputation, IP reputation, content, etc. – but whether your email is HTML versus plain text isn’t one of them.
But the biggest part of this myth that needs to be busted is that emails composed in plain text receive better open rates than emails that are composed in HTML. I guess the idea here is that if it’s in plain text, the ISP will just pass it through straight to the inbox, having concluded, “This must be a personal message,” or “this is just a transactional message” and the recipient will be able to read it no matter what device or browser they’re using, so they’ll open it every time.
Not only is that logic wrong because one doesn’t correlate with the other, it’s also impossible to prove because plain text emails don’t process opens at all! If it’s in plain text, there’s no image pixel to be downloaded, so there’s nothing to tell the ESP Platform that the recipient opened the email.
Moon landing. Epitomy of hightech in 1969
Changed customer behaviour
Ipads, samsung, nokia
Changes size according to real estate available
Simplify.
1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
But it is more than just 1 column
Layout & size
Data in and out slide
No helpful links at the top
Changed nav
Changed background colour
Button propotionally bugger
Massively clear call to action
1 column grid
Data in and out slide
Data in and out slide
Data in and out slide
Data in and out slide
Behvaiour
An app is better than a website????
Experia will own the full experience
Build branbd loyaly
Images off.
Ger Black Friday email. Important if looking at stuff on the tube
You can now do this in dotmailer
Size and speed
All on one scree – although scrolling not something to avoid now.
Very light as images are prob 64 colours
Ergonomics
Big buttons.
Colour making clear action