At least a third of your subscribers will check their email on a mobile device at least some of the time. And as mobile devices get faster and more reliable, that number will mushroom. That’s good news, because it means that people access their email more often and may be more likely to open messages they receive. But it also means that they’ll be talking to the person next to them on the subway, checking their heart rate at the gym, getting ready to fall asleep in bed, and eating lunch while trying to absorb the content of their email as well.

For email designers, all those distractions mean that people aren’t paying quite as much attention to the content on screen as they used to. And because most people now have touch phones, it means that they expect to be able to do everything you need them to do with one finger—one finger that’s a lot less precise than a mouse cursor. As you think about your next email design, ask yourself these questions to make things a little easier on your mobile subscribers.

• Are clickable elements big enough?

Can your subscribers easily click on the element they want without having to expand the screen size, an action which requires two fingers and therefore two hands?

• Is there enough space between clickable elements?

When a subscriber clicks, can he easily hit the right button or do “too close” elements encourage misfires?

• Can the call to action be seen at a glance?

Have you designed your call to action so that it stands out from surrounding content? It should be big, bold, and easily tappable by either the right or left thumb.

• Is there enough contrast between text and background?

Because mobile emails will be viewed in a variety of contexts—bright sun, fluorescent light, dim home lighting—it’s essential to provide sharp contrast between text, images, and background so the subscriber never has to squint to make out your creative.

• Can subscribers easily operate your navigation bar from a mobile device?

Lots of emails do great on the creative, but then stick a tiny, barely readable navigation bar across the top of the email. Experiment with other navigation options so subscribers can find what they want more easily.

At econnect Email, we want to make your email creation process as snafu-free as possible. Use our creation templates and email testing options to create messages your subscribers can easily open, read, and interact with, no matter where they happen to be when they click.

People who perform eye tracking studies and user behavior online tell us that only 20% of your email subscribers take the time to scroll down and see content below the fold. That can be a discouraging statistic, especially if you put a lot of time into designing those emails and including information that will be of interest and use to your subscriber base. But the good news is that you can significantly affect the number of people who scroll down by incorporating some creative design elements that draw the eye downward and create interest in below the fold content.

• Non-Horizontal Lines

Both diagonal and vertical lines that extend beyond the fold can pull the eye down and put a question in the viewer’s mind about what’s down there that they can’t see. Horizontal lines have the opposite effect. They create a hard break which becomes a natural stopping point for the eye and communicates in effect “All the important stuff is above this point. Don’t bother scrolling.”

• Creative Section Breaks

Some emails naturally lend themselves to breaks between sections: portions of text, product feature blocks, coupon blocks, etc. You can soften these natural breaks by again avoiding the over-used horizontal line and trying other dividing elements such as an arrow-shape that points downward or overlapping graphics that extend past the fold.

• Partial Creative Visibility

Another way to draw the eye downward is to incorporate extra tall elements that extend beyond the bottom of the screen in your creative. Whether it’s a person, a stocking in a Christmas email, a bag full of products, or an image collage, including elements that don’t all fit on one screen creates interest in content that may be further down.

• Connective Design Elements

Dotted lines, arrow trails, treasure hunt paths, and swirly patterns can all be used to connect images and text blocks to guide the eye as it moves down the page. When these elements extend below the fold, it’s more natural to keep scrolling and see what else is next in sequence.

Take advantage of the customizable templates and design testing available from eConnect Email to create emails that keep your subscribers scrolling. With unlimited image hosting, an everything-you-need image manager, and instant image editing, you can build email creative that defies the 20% scroll statistic every time.

Email newsletters are a great way to communicate with your customer base and keep them interested in what’s happening with your company. But don’t get so enamored with newsletters that you forget all of the other excellent ways you can use email marketing to your advantage. Ready to add some spice to your email campaign? Try one of these email approaches:

• Marketing Email

Use your emails to promote sales events, offer limited time only specials, give discounts to your best customers, and remind subscribers about special deals and offer deadlines.

• How-To Email

Keep subscribers interested in the messages you send by showing them how to do something, providing expert tips on a particular topic, or building credibility with industry knowledge.

• Event Management Email

Manage both online and in-person events by using email to send invitations, provide conference or webinar details and reminders, and ask for feedback after the event. Your subscribers will love the personal, interactive touch, and you’ll love the ability to receive instant responses from subscribers.

• Branding Email

Sometimes, your subscribers just need to see your company name and logo in their inboxes in order to strengthen their familiarity and trust with your brand. Branding should be part of every email you send as you seek to retain current subscribers and make new contacts.

In addition to specific types of emails, you can also use every email you send to accomplish multiple purposes. By avoiding the rut of single-purpose emails, you can accomplish all of the following and more:

• Gain customer data

Keep an eye on key performance indicators such as open rates, click throughs, forwards, and unsubcribes for each of the various types of emails you send in order to determine which ones are most effective.

• Build relationships

People love to know you’re thinking about them. Give them chances to interact with you via email and you’ll build lasting relationships based on loyalty over the long term.

• Determine email ROI

ROI is much easier to monitor for email marketing than it is for social media venues. With a good analytics program, you can determine exactly which email formats and strategies lead to the greatest sales and conversion results.

At eConnect Email, we make monitoring your email campaigns simple using easy-to-understand analytics reports and statistics. We’ll also help you design custom emails that deliver your message in a unique and memorable format to every subscriber, every time.

With every email you send, it gets easier to fall into old habits. Before you know it, they all start to look the same, or even worse, to incorporate some flagrant email marketing errors. If you haven’t taken the time to flesh out your “To Don’t” list, start by correcting these common mistakes:

1.  Failing to Design for Mobile Devices

With roughly 20% to 30% of users checking the majority of email on their phones and almost 90% doing so at least occasionally, you can’t afford to fall off the bandwagon. To get you started, here are some quick tips that will make your next email more mobile friendly:

• Use fonts that can be easily read on tiny screens.
• Put space between clickable elements to accommodate touch screens and clumsy fingers.
• Enlarge the call to action buttons, making it stand out from surrounding content.

Continue…

People love to play online. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that it gives you so many opportunities to interact with people and with the companies you’re following. Email has traditionally been less interactive than websites or social media, but the current trend in email marketing is to enable interaction with the subscriber. That way, you can capitalize on the surfer mentality (give me something fun to do) while still taking advantage of the more personalized and intimate communication venue of email. Here are some ideas to get your subscribers involved.

• Ask for a vote

Whether it’s a vote on a new ice cream flavor, a cutest photo contest, or a new logo, asking for a vote gives readers a chance to click a button and get involved!  It also makes your subscribers feel valuable by encouraging them to influence the decision you make as a company.

Continue…

Social media has undoubtedly been in the spotlight for the last couple of years. It’s time email marketing received its due praise. While it’s true that social media can accomplish things like reaching a broad audience and encouraging conversations with customers, email marketing offers its own list of benefits that social media will never be able to emulate.

• Guaranteed Exposure

Does your post make it on your fans’ news feed? With Facebook’s algorithm, only the pages deemed most popular or relevant will make it on the “worthy to be seen” list. Even if you do make it, your post will disappear from your fans newsfeed within hours. Email, on the other hand, always makes it to your subscribers’ inboxes (forget about bounces for now), giving you a better chance of grabbing your subscribers attention with a carefully crafted subject line. In addition, even unopened emails can remain in an inbox for days, with each new visit by the subscriber an opportunity to snag his attention.

Continue…

Your call to action is arguably the most important element of your email marketing messages. Because it provides the link between passive reading and active clicking, it supersedes even the supremacy of the subject line. But many businesses fail to treat it with the respect it deserves. Subject lines tend to get all the attention because they provide the first point of contact and the incentive to open. And while that is undoubtedly a vital role, the call to action requires the subscriber to take decisive action towards your conversion goal.  That’s why it’s essential that you put some serious thought into creating a single call to action that will funnel your subscribers toward the decision you ultimately want them to make.

Why a Single Call to Action?

Simply put, too many calls to action paralyze the decision process. For instance, one email I received offered me the opportunity to donate, review new merchandise, visit the store website, and make a purchase, all in the same email. Just reading it burned through my allotted attention span for this email campaign; forget about actually deciding which call to action was most enticing. Studies show that you’ll make more sales by offering fewer choices than you will by offering a smorgasbord of options. Why? Ever try to choose between twenty-four different flavors of barbecue sauce? After a while they all start to taste the same.

Continue…

When was the last time you created an email and sent it out to your entire subscriber list? Last week? Lifecycle marketing offers a more personal approach to creating emails by targeting them toward customers at various stages in their relationship with your company. By segmenting your audience based on their current interest level, you can create emails designed to elicit the next logical response. Still not convinced? Take a look at how lifecycle marketing approaches these three common groups of subscribers.

Subscriber #1: The Newbie

• Profile: This subscriber has just expressed interest in your company by signing up for your email list.
• Email Type: Send the newbie a welcome email that makes him feel appreciated and that encourages him to engage immediately.
• Email Goals: Encourage a first purchase, educate him about your company, promote your website, and let him know you’re glad he’s on board.
• Email Approach: Thank him for signing up and offer him a discount off his first purchase. This is also a great time to let him know what benefits he can expect to receive as a member of your subscriber list.

Subscriber #2: The Supporter

• Profile: This is the loyal gal who loves to shop at your store and opens every email you send.
• Email Type: Respond to the loyalty of this customer by giving her the VIP treatment. Make her feel like a valued customer and she’ll reward you with return visits and recommendations.
• Email Goals: Encourage increased purchasing, offer excellent customer service, and increasing loyalty
• Email Approach: Offer sneak previews for upcoming sales, give special valued-customer discounts, target email creation based on viewing history, send abandoned cart reminders, and provide immediate customer service interactions when appropriate.

Subscriber #3: The Bystander

• Profile: This person has been a member of your email list for a while but has no recent purchases and may fail to open or click on any of your email campaigns.
• Email Type: Seek to win back the loyalty of this subscriber with special offers and “we miss you” messages.
• Email Goals: Jump start re-engagement, understand her concerns, and keep her from transferring loyalty elsewhere.
• Email Approach: Solicit comments by asking for social media involvement or survey responses, offer incentives for purchases or website visits, and seek to make her feel like a valued member of your list.

The goal of lifecycle marketing is to segment your subscriber list based on their customer behavior and then to create targeted emails that encourage greater levels of participation. eConnect Email can help you reach these goals by managing subscriber data, analyzing list metrics, and building segments based on custom criteria.

A couple weeks ago I received an email from my favorite aquarium store. Being a fish geek, I’m always interested in fish store sales. But this particular email caught my attention with an explosive subject line that read “Fourth of July Blowout Sale!” Sadly, the subject line was all that was explosive about it.

Upon opening the message, I discovered that the image did not display in my email browser and there were no text tags to give me clues about this fantastic sale. Not even a link to the website. Being a sucker for fish sales, I typed fishstore.com into my browser and came up with nothing. After trying a .net extension and landing on a fish taxidermy site, I Googled said store and discovered that their website was “fishstore.us.” Okay. But here’s the real kicker. Nowhere on their site could I find anything about a Fourth of July Blowout Sale. Slightly disgruntled, I closed the tab and deleted the email.

So what’s the takeaway from this experience? I think there are several things to be learned about what to do and what not to do as you’re developing an email marketing piece.

1. Subject lines aren’t everything. We tend to talk about them like they are the holy grail of email marketing, but a fantastic subject line accomplishes nothing if it’s not supported by the email itself.
2. Always, always, always include alt text tags and links that communicate your message even if your image fails to display.
3. Don’t forget to include a link to your landing page in the body of the email, especially if your website has a weird extension like .us.
4. If you’re going to send an email about a sale, make sure sale information can be easily found on your website.
5. If you’re advertising a blowout sale, it better really be a blowout. If it’s not, people will begin to be skeptical of your email pieces and may skip them altogether.

Creating a stellar email goes beyond dotting all your i’s and crossing your t’s. You need a certain amount of creativity in order to be in touch with what will speak to your target audience. eConnect Email can help you design customized email templates, organize and integrate images, and test your emails before sending to ensure that they display correctly and accomplish the goals you have in mind. Don’t make the mistake of losing customers to a poorly designed email. Take the time to work out the kinks before you send, and you’ll not only increase sales, but also build loyal customers who look forward to your messages.

How successful is your email marketing campaign? That can be a tough question to answer, especially since so many elements must work together to create measurable success. The real question, then, should be how you can quantify success in order to know when you’ve got it and what you can change in order to generate it. And that’s what testing is all about.

Before you start testing every metric out there, let’s take a look at two of the most important measurements of email marketing success as well as some of the elements you can test to determine how you can improve.

Open Rates

Sometimes viewed as the holy grail of email marketing, open rates let you know just how many people actually open the messages you send. There are three primary elements you can test to improve your open rates:

• Subject Lines

Test content topics such as price, incentives, benefits, and offer end dates. Also, test different wordings once you’ve chosen the content.

• Sender Name

Try using your company name, a person’s name, or a combination of the two as your display sender. Beware of making drastic changes too frequently, however, since your subscribers may not recognize you or you may be tagged as spam.

• Send Dates/Times

It’s usually best to test just one element at a time (i.e., either date or time, but not both) in order to get a true picture of when you’re likely to get the most opens.

Click Rates

Click rate refers to the number of subscribers who click on a link within your email once they’ve opened it. Here are a few elements you can test to boost your numbers:

• Link wording

Keyword-rich links tend to do better than simple “click here” links, but the important thing here is what works. Test several options to find out.

• Link color

Make sure your subscribers can recognize your clickable text as a link. Test basic blue against other colors, perhaps matching them to your overall color scheme.

• Call to action

Call to action tests can deal with wording, button size, button placement, color, and several other elements. Get creative to determine what elements you might change to produce the best results.

There are plenty of other elements and metrics you can test to boost the success of your email marketing campaign. The important thing to remember is that testing is the only way you can gather the information you need to achieve that success. Take advantage of the testing options available from eConnect Email to view vital stats in real time as well as printable reports and campaign statistics.