Anyone with an internet connection knows what email is. It’s a means of communication that has become a staple in our lives, and people will ask for an e-mail address way before asking for an address or even a mobile number.
Email is the perhaps the perfect means of communication – it can be formal or informal, it can be to one or many, and it can sometimes provide you with enough of a safety blanket for you to do things you might normally feel awkward doing – like saying hello to a complete stranger just because you thought their site was cool.
Of course we’re not saying email should replace face to face communication – but it’s definitely the perfect mediator.
There are a variety of ways to use email. Whether to simply communicate between your team, update people on the latest events through a newsletter, or use email campaigns to promote your latest products or offers. There’s a lot that can be done with a bit of creativity, but there are certain things which you should keep in mind, especially when emailing large groups of people.

1. Be Friendly

Just because you’re emailing someone it doesn’t mean you can’t be friendly. We’re not telling you to act like you’re their best friend but do your best to make yourself sound like a real person (you are a real person right?) People receive many e-mails each day and they get tired of reading the same kind of thing. So allow yourself to stand out.

2. Be Subtle

The last thing you want to do is remind the person you’re emailing that he or she is one out of a couple hundred people on a mailing list. Use personalisations where necessary and as much as possible make it sound like you’re speaking to them and no one else. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

3. Be Responsive

There are two sides to this story. First of all if you’re sending out newsletters make sure they’re mobile friendly – most people check their emails from their phone, so it’s no use having a beautifully designed newsletter if it can’t be read properly on mobile.
Secondly, if someone emails you – respond. It’s that simple! Oh, and while we’re at it, never use a ‘no reply’ email address, you’ll be completely destroying the communication cycle.

4. Be engaging

Since we just mentioned communication, remember to interact with the people you’re emailing. Sometimes you’ve got to forget about all the fancy html coding and just drop them a line asking what they think of the service.

5. Let them Opt Out

The truth is that they might have really wanted to subscribe at some point in their life, but now no longer enjoy seeing your name in their inbox. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it happens. So at least make the process simple and provide them the option of opting out.
These are just five basic insights, think of them as the five bases you’ve got to cover. If you’re curious to learn more about email marketing then check out these 10 tips or pop in for a chat.

The post E is for email appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

I know one thing: that I know nothing

The more I learned about email marketing, the more I realised that there is more to learn.
One time, for example, we realised that “less is more” might apply in most regions, and were optimising all our emails to go straight to the point and reduce unnecessary information. We started testing, and noticed that even though this worked well in most regions (it gave us slight, but significant increase in click-throughs), the German market reacted in exactly the opposite way.
Email marketing is a subject that gives you better results with every little bit of effort you put into it, which is why I lap up every little bit of information and data I can find about the subject.
I find Hubspot’s content marketing resources to be an invaluable asset, but I can appreciate that we don’t all have time to go through all their material every time. This is a real pity, because some of their ebooks contain phenomenal insight into various areas of content marketing, including email. The 2014 Science of Email Report, for example, is one of them.
So today I’ve decided to make life a bit easier for you. I went through the 70-page document which is filled with some great data and I’ve condensed it into just over a thousand words and some graphs.
The report is interesting because it combines data from self-reported preferences (which are always interesting) with numbers gathered from Litmus and Signals – two tools that process thousands of emails a day. It’s fascinating to see how people’s self-reported preferences do not always tally with their actions.
I’ve split the report’s findings into a slightly different set of logical groupings than the ones chosen by Hubspot’s team of writers for one simple reason, I’m more interested in the findings and what I can learn from them than the research in its own right, and this is what I’ve learnt:

Less is indeed more when it comes to images

• Users interact more with emails with less images. Even though users reported that they prefer mailers that include more images, in actual fact their behaviour indicated otherwise. Readers tended to interact more with emails that included less images.

• Smaller images work better. As the height of images went up, click through ratio went down. The width of images did not really affect click-through, but this makes sense because even a simple line crossing the page can be considered to be a wide image.

It’s not as easy as we think

• Email marketing is becoming a bigger challenge. Users are buying less via email, they’re reading less emails and a are filtering their email automatically much more (using tools like gmail’s priority inbox). This does not mean you should worry – this is just an opportunity for you to excel and thrive in an inbox which is free of spam.

• Users will report you if you Spam them. 50% of recipients said they report spammy emails. People reporting your email as spam can have devastating effects on your campaigns because it impacts your deliverability significantly.

• Users will give you a dummy email address. 1 in 2 subscribers will use a dummy email address to avoid being spammed. So always reassure visitors to your site that you will not be spamming them, and clean your list from inactives on a regular basis.

It’s time to change your sending patterns

• Forget Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even though it was always recommended to send out your emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with everyone sending out emails on the same two days of the week, effectiveness has dropped. Shift the days and times you send your emails at, even weekends work for some companies. Then test, test and test.

Your readers are going increasingly mobile, so you should too

• Desktop remains king. Even though more and more people also check their emails from phones and tablets, desktop remains the main platform for reading emails. Users will read their emails on their phones as they come in but then mark them as unread if they want to take further action later.

• People check email on their phones and tablets. Despite the fact that I just told you that desktop is king, it’s being dethroned. 47% of users open their marketing email on phones or tablets. You can’t afford to send out emails that are not responsive.

• Desktop emails are being read in web clients. As more and more people switch to hosted services (Gmail, Google Apps, Office 365), the number of people reading their emails in Outlook or Apple Mail is in decline.

• iOS has 39% of reported opens. And iOS supports media queries – which means you can design and code versions of your email specifically for iOS. Do so. Every time.

And in the end…

This is just our summary. If you’re running full fledged email marketing campaigns on a regular basis, however, you have to consider reading the 2014 Science of Email Report.
Yes, you have to give Hubspot your email address, but heck, it’s worth it. And they never spam you, they just keep on sending you informative stuff, so worry not.

The post Improve your campaigns with these 4 lessons from Hubspot’s Science of Email 2014 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.