The aim of creative formatting is to produce a pleasing visual design that enables us to connect emotionally with our recipients, while at the same time achieving the emphasis to attain our goals of Do, Think, Feel! Getting the right balance between visuals and text is important for this. For consumer brands, images will be […]
Before we go on to look at best practice for creative and copy, let’s look at the constraints under which we operate. There are two main issues we need to bear in mind when designing e-mails. First, there are the technology constraints. To the majority these are boring technical issues, but we shouldn’t unleash our […]
To write successful e-mail copy, we need to adopt a mindset based on how readers interact with e-mail. If you are familiar with writing copy for print, consider these three important differences, which are discussed below:
1. Readers scan, don’t read, e-mail
2. E-mail is conversational
3. E-mail readers are cynical.
Readers scan, don’t read, e-mail
As the reach of the information superhighway grows, assumptions about equal access to its benefits are increasingly made. These range from the expectation that students have used email and surfed the Internet, to claims that the Internet overcomes global disparities between more and lesser economically developed countries. Companies from all over the world can compete […]
Many well-established companies are using the Internet as an additional channel to reinforce brand awareness rather than focus on transactional e-Commerce capabilities. Migrating existing brand names from the real world into the virtual one is the simplest and most common approach. The best chances of success are those companies with strong, established brands, such as, […]
Various Internet access mechanisms have been developed over the past few years. At this early stage, companies need to address a number of challenges when considering the development of multi-channel strategies that allow customers to access online content from a range of devices:
The extent to which they should invest in these relatively untried technologies, with […]
Smith and Chaffey (2005) use the acronym CRABS to summarize effective web-page copy. This is even more appropriate to e-mail copy, since we typically have even less space to communicate. CRABS stands for:
Chunking. Chunking means that paragraphs must be shorter than in paper copy — think one or two sentences, three or four maximum.
This is a traditional segmentation based on the type of customer. For B2C e-retailers this will include age, sex and geography. For B2B companies, this will include size of the company and the industry sector or application they operate in.
It is worth trialling different forms of segmentation and targeting. These may not have previously been […]
You will also need to decide how focused to keep your calls-to-action. For specific campaigns, it is best to have a single landing page with multiple calls-to-action leading through to this. What you don’t want is a hyperlink leading to a home page giving general detail about the company. However, for an e-newsletter multiple links […]
Given that price comparison sites can supply reliable, branded services and products potentially at the lowest available prices, why do you think that their growth has been relatively slow?
PROMOTION
`Promotion‘ is equivalent to Communication in the 4Cs. First thoughts on promoting the e-Business must be that it is unnecessary — the business can rely on its […]
In the 1990s, online brands evolved with amazing speed. Yahoo! took just five years to become a global brand, whereas Coca-Cola took fifty. Now that the online market has matured, the degree of clutter means that brands find it harder to stand out from the crowd. In addition, the anonymity of the Internet medium me […]
Translations
Thai dry cleaner: ‘Drop your trousers here for best results.’
Sign in a Hong Kong tailor: ‘Ladies may have a fit upstairs.’
Moscow guide to a Russian Orthodox monastery: ‘You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily, except Thursdays.
Spanish sports shop called ‘The Athlete’s Foot’.
French dress […]
Dell’s online support offerings extend the company’s unique direct relationship with is customers. Intuitive, comprehensive and customized, these offerings include Dell Online Knowledge Base, the ‘Ask Dudley’ area, file library downloads and an entire suite of customized capabilities based on system service tags. By entering a systems service tag number, customers can get support information […]
Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, sells its products and services in more than 140 countries to customers ranging from major corporations, government agencies, medical and educational institutions, to small businesses and individuals. The firm employs 36,500 people from offices in thirty-four different countries. Dell is commonly quoted as one of the success stories of […]
Decision 12 - frequency
Think of the frequency of most e-newsletters you receive. They tend to be daily, weekly or monthly. Why is this? Perhaps we are still in the print mentality of dailies, weeklies and monthlies?
With so many e-newsletters out there, it may be of benefit to both subscribers and publisher if the frequency is […]
Decision 9 — naming
There are many newsletters called Newsletter, eNews or eAlerts, so think about using a name that stands out. The name should summarize the proposition and be a clear differentiator — What’s New in Marketing, AvantMarketer and Flesh and Bones (for medical students’ textbooks) are good examples. However, if the newsletter is branded […]
There are now many techniques that are used by different types of anti-spam software to identify spam. We will now review some of the most common ones, which are often combined in a single anti-spam tool, and describe the type of steps that marketers can take to avoid being wrongly identified as spam.
Keyword and key […]
To evaluate and improve e-mail marketing requires good reporting capabilities, and for me this is a key differentiator between e-mail management services. Almost all packages should report these basic campaign metrics:
i. number of e-mails broadcast
ii. deliverability rate
iii. open rate (unique and total)
iv. clickthrough rate (unique and total)
v. unsubscribe rate for campaign.
Note that some of the […]
Decision 7 — format
Options to consider that are related to format are as follows:
MIME — the normal approach to be used is to send out a multi-part MIME e-mail which will be displayed according to the capabilities of the e-mail package used. If resources permit, HTML e-newsletters should be used; these not only get the […]
A good approach to avoiding problems is to think about the difficulties you may have with your community-building efforts. Typical problems are:
1. Empty communities. A community without any people isn’t a community. Traffic-building techniques need to be used to communicate the proposition of the community.
2 Silent communities. A community may have many registered members, but […]