Blog: Observations & Answers

The other day, Laura at Word to the Wise got me thinking with her post, 'Email is different'. To loosely recap, the post answered a question which likely echoed the sentiments of many towards issues like anti-spam legislation and permission, being:

'Why do so many feel that email should be somehow held to a higher standard than other direct marketing channels?'

In comparing TV and radio segments to email, Laura made some clear distinctions - the former two have been marketing channels from the beginning. They're broadcast mediums. They've been created by marketers, are wholly paid for by owned by marketers and therefore marketers are entitled to pester each and all who choose to tune in with marketing messages.

Email is different because it's not solely a marketing channel. The cost of spam isn't borne simply by the sender, but by hosts, ISPs, recipients and everyone in-between.

Nonetheless, it must seem strange to those with limited email experience that it's not okay to purchase an email list, while the practice of buying and selling personal information remains widespread amongst telemarketers and direct mailers. Why should email be put on a pedestal? After all, consumers don't pay phone line rental in order to receive unsolicited calls at dinnertime... But they still happen, without consequence to the call center, or their clients.

I'm sure a lot of designers, perhaps you included, have had conversations along these lines. Personally, I think senders of unsolicited email should be held accountable because they cost ISPs and ESPs a supreme amount of development time - all those super-intelligent engineers working on spam detection and filtering tools could really be off making the world a better place in other ways. Senders can create worldwide, widespread inconvenience, with very little time and effort. They should also be held accountable because it's technically possible to do so.

However, this is a can of worms I wanted to share with you. When your clients ask why they can't purchase lists and send unsolicited email, what do you say? We're looking forward to your opinions in the comments below.

Use of mobile email clients is set to surpass desktop and webmail client usage by July, according to the results of a recent study by our friends at Return Path. After examining data from over 90 email clients, amounting for more than 130 million data points over a 6 month period, Return Path found that while webmail clients overall are on a slow decline, mobile views increased by 82.4% over the same period (March '11 – March '12). Mobile devices currently claim 16% of overall email client market share, with 85% of mobile email opens occurring on an Apple iOS device. This is comparable to our earlier findings.

Return Path also found that there is an uptick in mobile email readership during the weekend, which can be attributed to email recipients switching from the desktop to a smartphone outside of office hours. Conversely, it's at its lowest on a Wednesday, when presumably folks are at their most busy tackling their Outlook, or OSX Mail inboxes.

The implications for email senders like you and I are fairly clear. As Tom at Return Path states in his summary:

"... those that aren’t tracking which device their subscribers are reading their emails on, or optimizing their emails or websites for mobile devices stand to lose out.  A poor user experience could mean no response, no action, or plainly put, no ROI."

If you aren't already optimizing your emails for mobile, now is the time. To set you on the right path, we've got a practical primer on email design, not to mention a neat template builder which can whip together mobile-ready campaigns in a matter of minutes.

Out of curiosity, will Return Path's findings change the way you send campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.

When justifying the time and effort that goes into email marketing, it's always good to have a few stats on your side. It's likely you've heard some of the big reasons (like its return of $40.56 for every $1 invested in 2011), however in a world that's still social media mad, there's two stats that show that email is still on top, being sharing and conversion rates.

'Forward to a friend' the most common share method

"A food delivery service gets 70% of its shares through email and another 15% via Facebook."
- Social Sharing: Twitter has highest amplification rate, email has highest conversion rate

While Twitter and Facebook may be where many consider social sharing to be at, email dominates social referrals.

MarketingSherpa's blog reported on this in, 'Social Sharing: Twitter has highest amplification rate, email has highest conversion rate', which reflected on the experiences of a recent referral program by Extole, a consumer-to-consumer social marketing company. The study found that Extole customers who participated in the referral program shared with almost three and a half friends on average, with most of those shares occurring via email.

For us, this isn't unusual behavior. For example, here's a snippet from the social sharing reports following our most recent monthly newsletter, sent to over 130,000 subscribers:

Despite featuring equally prominent Twitter and Facebook share links, 83% of shares were via the 'Forward to a friend' link in the campaign. This means that subscribers were over six times more likely to share the campaign via email, versus Twitter and Facebook combined!

Email results in more conversions

What's important to many business owners is not so much how many clicks an email or tweet generates, but how many of these result in actual conversions, let they be a sale, an opt-in or a coupon redemption. Again, email rules. Based on the same Extole study, email shares resulted in a "21% open rate, 80% clickthrough and 17% conversion (the highest conversion rate of any channel), which breaks down to .17 clicks per share." This is impressive, considering that Facebook had a conversion rate of only 1.21% and the overall average clickthrough rate for social referral programs using Twitter, Facebook, personal URL and email combined was 42%. Or as Angela from Extole noted, "We’ve always known that word-of-mouth marketing was very powerful, and converted at an estimated three to five times higher rates than other channels".


The great news is that it's easy to add social sharing to your email campaigns, let it be a 'Forward to a friend' link, or Like / Tweet button for Facebook and Twitter respectively. Here's our walkthrough on adding sharing to campaigns... Or you can add your own links on the fly to templates via the email editor.

Many thanks to MarketingSherpa for sharing their study with us. What have your experiences been with social sharing? Why do you think email trumps Facebook and Twitter? Let us know in the comments below.

Animated GIFs are going through a renaissance. In the last few months, we've seen them resurrected from the cringe-worthy virtual graveyard of 'Under Construction' banners and funny profile pics, to be redefined as fine art. This trend is particularly relevant to email design, where GIFs and CSS animations are the only way to add moving images, given the poor video support across the most popular email clients.

But why use them? As Paul Boag quotes in 'It’s time to look at animated gifs again':

"Animated gifs can breathe some much needed life into the imagery on your website. They grab the users attention and act as design delighters, making your site stand out from that of the competition."

The same can be said for email, in which the 'stand out' -ness of a button or call to action can make a considerable difference to campaign results. Anna Yeaman at Style Campaign demonstrated how an animated video preview lifted her campaign's click-rate by 26%... And there's no reason why you can't achieve the same.

Support for animated GIFs in email

The great news is that animated GIF support is pretty much universal across the major email clients... Except Outlook 2007 & 2010 (you guessed it). In Outlook, only the first frame displays - which means that if your animation contains any important information, it has to feature on the first frame or risk being lost. Here are the full results:

Desktop email clients	Result
Apple Mail	GIF plays
Lotus Notes 6, 7 and 8.5	GIF plays
Outlook 2003, Express	GIF plays
Outlook 2007, 2010	First frame displays
Outlook for Mac 2011	GIF plays
Windows Live Mail 2011	GIF plays
Web-based email clients	Result
AOL Web	GIF plays
Gmail	GIF plays
Hotmail	GIF plays
Yahoo! Mail	GIF plays
Mobile email clients	Result
Android (default)	GIF plays
Android (Gmail)	GIF plays
Blackberry	GIF plays
iPhone	GIF plays
Windows Mobile 7	First frame displays

Support for animated GIFs is rock solid. Compare this to support for video or CSS3 animation and you'll see why the alternatives are seldom used.

Examples from our customers

We couldn't wrap up this post without a couple of great animated emails from folks like you. Click through on the images to see them animate:

iart interactive ag

Clarity Communications

Hungry Castle

Superbrothers

Style Campaign has a great selection of animated emails in this blog post, not to mention a solid tutorial so you can get started on your own animation creations!

We're really looking forward to seeing animated GIFs take off, both on the web and in email. So now, we'd like to hear from you - do you feature animated GIFs in your campaigns? Have any favorite examples? Share them with us in the comments below.

Just last week, our blog post on 'Improving the usability of email subscribe forms on mobile devices' gained quite a bit of interest. But what was particularly gratifying to us was seeing some of its lessons being put into action - by an upcoming Campaign Monitor rebrand, no less!

Cool customer Elliot Ross (of Email Design Review fame) recently took a responsive approach to designing the pre-launch page for Action Rocket, a new email design studio. What makes the page unique is how gracefully it adapts for use on mobile devices (pictured), courtesy of our little form template.

Email form validation with CSS3

Scaling for the small screen aside, this email subscribe form has two features that considerably improve its usability, both of which were achieved by using input type="email" on the Email: field. First of all, using the attribute, type="email" results in the special, email address-specific keyboard being displayed on iOS devices. But secondly, it means that the :invalid CSS3 pseudo-class can be used to highlight the field if it doesn't validate properly. Here's a sample of the CSS code used:

In times past, developers have long had to roll-their-own client-side validation using JavaScript, but with CSS3, all it takes is a snippet of code. Find out more about form validation on A List Apart's 'Forward Thinking Form Validation'.

Taking pre-launch pages to the next level

We've previously covered how to build basic pre-launch pages and add social sharing to them. With smart phones becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it makes a lot of sense to go the next step and make the email subscribe forms therein as mobile-friendly as they can be - we've even provided the code to help you get started.

Besides, what's a better way to show clients that you understand responsive design, than to create a responsive site?

Many thanks to Elliot and Action Rocket for sharing this great example with us. If you have a great tip or hack for improving the usability of your forms, be sure to let us know.