Email Best Practices: Part 5 - Engagement

Posted by Adam Peck on 25 August 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: email marketing

Welcome to the final post in our five-part series about maximizing email performance. In this post, we'll focus on engagement and conversion - also known as getting your recipients to take action. Click-through rates are one of a handful of traditional metrics used to measure the performance of email campaigns. With email newsletter campaigns, average unique click-through rates are approximately 3% among opened emails, but when you follow some tried-and-true best practices, you can elevate click-through rates all the way up to 10% - and higher.

GET THEM TO ACT: Engage the recipient and get them to Click There are two major factors that influence email click-through rates - design and content.

Design/Coding

• Use only "W3C" compliant code when programming your HTML. W3C HTML is accepted as the universal standard for the web. This will help to ensure the design is rendered correctly in the recipient's email client.

• Place a "view this email in a browser" link at the top of your message. This way, if there are any rendering issues, the recipient will be able to link to an online landing page with dynamic personalized content (the more personalized the content, the more likely your recipient will click through).

• Perform email message rendering tests (using a software application such as Litmus at http://litmusapp.com/) to ensure leading ISPs and email clients will interpret your message/design correctly. Each ISP and email client work a little differently, so this is an important step. Make sure to test all the major clients - Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird, Yahoo and Gmail.

• Use an "F" design structure.When you first open an email, your eyes naturally scan the top of the page and then move down and across. This approach should help you prioritize highest-value messages and graphics.

• Design your email for the preview pane. Statistics show that many people scan emails in the preview pane first before actually opening or clicking on them. Make sure you have a compelling, clickable call-to-action at the top portion of the email.

Preview Pane Examples:

Bad usage of preview pane (no content to click)

Very good usage of preview pane

(clickable text at top of page)

Content/Messaging

• Use Dynamic content tailored to the recipient whenever possible. As you might expect, the more personalized the content, the higher the likelihood of a click-through.

• Make sure your offer(s) and call-to-action are easy to find with a quick scan, and you have communicated a clear benefit to clicking. When browsing their emails, your recipients are thinking: "What will I get by clicking? Hopefully, I get more of the content I want."

• Use short, snappy copy in bullet form to encourage click-through for more details and information

• Only show intro/teaser copy of articles, and cut-off the message mid-sentence to entice users to look for the rest of the message at the "click to read the full article" call-out.

Example of Dynamic, Personalized Content

And this concludes the email best practices series. Good luck with your email campaigns. Feel free to contact me with any additional email performance optimizing questions at apeck@garfieldgroup.com.