Why are you doing email marketing in the first place?  You have a goal in mind, right?

Well, if you are like most email marketers, you may be getting lazy about tracking conversions from your email marketing campaigns. Opens and click-throughs are great, but they don’t bring home the bacon. So why aren’t you doing more to figure out if your emails are actually resulting in business value?

Conversion tracking isn’t limited to those conducting e-commerce transactions. You can track any number of meaningful actions taken by your email recipients. Those may include:

1. Visits to a specific web page, such as a home page or landing page
2. A newsletter opt-in
3. The completion of a web form (sweepstakes entry, webinar sign-up, etc.)
4. A download (whitepaper, software update, etc.)
5. The initiation of a chat session
6. A purchase

The purpose of conversion tracking is to help you understand if your email marketing is helping you meet your business goals. Any user action that can help you learn more about a recipient, move the recipient further along in the sales cycle or result in fulfillment of a specific business objective is something that warrants conversion tracking.

Some things you can learn by tracking conversions from your email campaigns:

1. How many recipients that click-through complete the desired objective?
2. What do they do after they click-through?
3. How long do they spend on your site?
4. Where are you losing their interest?

Setup of conversion tracking is usually fairly painless. In many cases it simply requires installing a piece of code on the web page where the desired action takes place. After it’s set up, the same code should be usable on all future campaigns, so you’ll have no additional work after setup is complete.

The long term value you’ll receive from taking the time to implement conversion tracking makes it a worthy investment.

For those of you already using conversion tracking, share your success stories in the comments below. For anyone who would like to learn more, feel free to contact us.

Note: Conversion tracking is free to all Email Transmit users. You can activate it in the Tracking area of your account.

The biggest mistake made by email marketers is… is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

The following are six tips that will help with creating an email design that is clean and clear enough to be read on smart phones while also looking good on desktop readers.

1. One Email

If you had the time and budget you could create different emails to perfectly fit each of your targeted devices. However, unlike setting up a website to automatically serve up a specific version for the user’s screen resolution, with an email you would need to provide links to your various mobile versions at the top of the email. That’s not ideal and not necessary. It’s actually pretty easy to create one design that will work for both desktop and mobile email clients.

What it requires is designing with a simplicity and clarity that will allow it to work at half its size while not looking too clunky at 100%. One method that helps with this is to design by using a grid system. Most designers do this anyway with their print and web designs but it is just as important with emails. If the elements of your design are made according to a proper grid, their relational proportions will scale down in proper ratio to each other.

With the addition of a line of code in the header of your email called the Viewport Meta Tag, you can assure that the email scales and fits to the width of the iPhone screen.

<meta name = “viewport” content = “width = 320”>

Without this you’ll notice that the view is initially zoomed out too far with a lot of extra white space on the side. This will only help with scaling on iPhone but it doesn’t adversely affect the way it displays on other devices.

2. 640 Divided by 2

The standard width for emails have been stuck in the 600-pixel range for a while and that doesn’t look like it’s going to be changing since 600 divides in half pretty nicely. To be more specific, the iPhone has a width of 320-pixels and since right now that device is considered the standard for smartphone screens you may want to design your emails at a width of 640-pixels for a more exact scaling. Also, be aware that an iPhone screen in landscape format is 480-pixels wide.

3. Don’t Divide it Any Further

Since we need to concern ourselves with the narrow width of a mere 320-pixels it is probably a good idea to not try to divide that space any further by adding columns or sidebars to your designs. This is part of the need for simplicity and clarity. Rather than try to cram a lot of information towards the top of the email, you’ll need to think about directing your reader down through the content. One method to handle this is to think about stacking your information into related and easily scannable blocks.

4. Plan for Clumsy Fingers

This might be the biggest new consideration for email designers. We need to accommodate for how fingers are going to navigate the clickable areas of our email on a smart phone’s touch screen. Apple suggests a pixel space of 29×44 (I have no idea how they landed on these numbers exactly) for clickable areas. The Style Campaign blog has an excellent illustration that shows how that actually compares with the average finger. It looks like you might want to go a little bigger than that if you can. Regardless, what may be more important than the actual size of the area is how much padding you allow around that area. Somewhere in the range of 10 pixels between clickable items should give you enough leeway for inprecise fingers.

What this means is you may have to get used to creating larger button areas than you are used to and giving them all a lot of breathing room. That 29×44 button space will need to be about 88-pixels high on the full size email. If you’re someone that prefers small, delicate graphics then this is going to pull you out of your comfort zone (but in a good way). While keeping padding between buttons in mind, a navigation bar with more than four items in it is going to be a tight fit and tricky for some people to click on.

5. The Children’s Book Approach

When it comes to the written content of your email it’s best to think in terms of the bold simplicity of a page from a children’s book. Fewer words. Shorter sentences. Straight to the point. And written in a large, clear font. What is becoming the standard recommendation for mobile is 14-pt for body text and 30-pt for headlines. At that size for a headline, the less words you use, the better.

6. Don’t Stop with the Email

In many cases, your email is going to be clicking through to a custom landing page which of course will need to look good on a smart phone screen as well. A lot of the same considerations above apply, though you will probably be working from a larger starting point than 640-pixels for a web page layout.

Oh yeah, and get rid of those Flash animations, they aren’t going to work on an iPhone. Keep it simple.

6 Design Tips for Mobile Email is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Due to the small screen size, marketers are going to have to do more with less. Along with a small display area, marketers will have to consider other strategic and technical best practices when upgrading their campaigns to perform properly on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Windows mobile platforms and other devices.

Here’s a list of 5 tactics to help you get your email campaigns mobile ready:

1. Write Short Subject Lines
Write subject lines of 5 or 6 words or less. That’s all that displays in most mobile displays (see image), so anything more than that runs off the screen. This offers very little room to be creative, so get to the point.

2. Rethink Your Pre-Header
On most mobile devices the pre-header or opening email text will display below the subject line (see the 2 lines of gray text below the from name and subject line). Take advantage of this by mentioning your offer or other important information here. It can compliment the subject line and assist in helping you get subscribers to open the email.

3. Write Less Copy
Because your message will be read on mobile devices by one-quarter to one-third of your recipients by the end of 2011, you’ll need to trim back the amount of content in your email. Use the bare minimum needed to get across your offer or information. This may mean using small amounts of copy and linking to your site more often, or simply reducing the amount of textual content in your campaigns.

4. Revise Your Creative
Mobile devices will either scale down your email creative (like on iPhone and iPad) or force users to scroll to see it at natural size (Android devices).  Because of the vast amount of iPhone/iPad owners using their devices for email, you’ll need to redesign your email with scaling in mind. Our next blog post will cover this topic in detail.

5. Tweak Your Code
Mobile display scaling can create some issues, as font sizes and other visual relationships can appear either too small or unreadable when scaled down. In order to manage this, there are several coding techniques that will help you retain readable font sizes and ensure your messages take up the full width of the mobile display. We’ll also cover these coding best practices in a future post and provide code examples for you to implement in your campaigns.

After several years of slow growth, it seems email subscribers are rapidly moving towards using their mobile devices to manage their email. With such rapid growth in this area, all email marketers need to adopt mobile marketing best practices in the very near future. The small screen is here to stay, so get ready now!

If you’re interested in improving your campaigns to be mobile-ready, contact Email Transmit for reduced rates on mobile email preparation services.

5 Tactics For Successful Mobile Email Marketing is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Our most recent EEC post looked at strategy and consumer trends we learned at this year’s Email Evolution Conference. Here are some technology and tactics takeaways.

…

Inactives and Win Back Programs

Hotmail defines unengagement as someone who hasn’t opened or clicked on an email in 6 months.
Don’t keep sending emails to inactives. Isolate the inactives.
Ryan Phelan: Look at inactivity based on a multi-channel view
Two types of win-back programs:  Offer-based: e.g. coupon or limited duration discount, etc. And non-offer programs, which are relationship-oriented.
Try strategies like seasonal emails or Black Friday.
Ryan Phelan: Rest before you reactivate — stop sending and then send win-back campaign to boost response.
Think outside the box: text-only, last alert email sometimes works with the sleepers and peepers (less engaged customers); others try snail mail one last time to reactivate that dormant user.

…

Technology Deployment

Technology deployment is never easy. Panelists agreed that process and testing are key.

Whether you’re revising an email template, building a preference center or rolling out a new piece of software, testing is key. Test with a logical customer experience. Test with different demographics and psychographics. Test with a logical customer experience. Don’t skip the proof of concept phase.

Email Design and Coding: Mobile and Social

Email has to work very hard. We know that. A marketing email has to break through a lot of clutter, appeal to diverse audiences and now has to work across—and reach out to—multiple platforms, from mobile devices to social platforms.

Depending on your audience mobile email usage for your message is increasing at up to 300% per year. It’s vital to design and code mobile-friendly emails.
Trendline Interactive: Email offers where all links direct to the same page have a 48% higher conversion rate.
Design emails that scale well (reduces in size, still usable and readable) (450 pixels wide)
It’s not sharing if it takes more than two clicks (instant, pre-populated)
Social graphical cues are vital (use the common imagery that we’re all used to, like talk bubbles, T for Twitter logo, simple person/avatar image)
We learned a new word. “Editweeter” is someone who searches for, collects and reposts social excerpts
Newsletter design: “Relax, people scroll.”
More and more mobile devices adopting WebKit  standard to render HTML.
Go on a “word diet” when copywriting for mobile emails.

…

Watch This Space

We will focus a more in-depth look at how to design emails that work across mobile browsers. Watch this space for more.

Tech and Tactics from the Email Evolution Conference 2011 (EEC Takeaway #3) is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Movie: Email Evolution Conference Chat is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Here are some of the strategy and customer trends, stats and industry tidbits we learned at this year’s Email Evolution Conference in Miami, January 31 – February 2, 2011. (Twitter hashtag #eec11).

Email is Going Interactive

There was a lot of talk about the future of email, much of it focused on more interactive, dynamic email content.

• Online marketing is going more one-to-one and more multichannel—at the same time. More on the “Convergence Clash” in this recent post on the InfoCenter.
• Email, while the lingua franca of the Internet, is not very interactive. Facebook and social media have given customers different, broader expectations.
• Email is becoming more like a website—interactive, content updates, dynamic.
• What’s coming to your email client? Video email, geo-targeting, and interactive elements within the email. You won’t have to leave the email; you take action, comment or reply inside the email.
• HTML5, java and other technologies are improving the customer experience and enabling video and interactivity.
• Hotmail recently rolled out  Active Views platform. Yahoo is doing the same thing, allowing dynamic content w/ user permission.
• When you open a dynamic content email, the server pulls content from a server, so that the email is updated w/ new content. (You can’t change the subject line, but you can update/replace the body elements).

Email is Part Art, Part Science

Go with what works. For some that means rigorous testing and poring over tracking results. For others the key to success is more artistic inspiration. I guess the solution is: both. Create emails like an artist, test them like a seasoned lab technician.

• Travelocity: Always test unique and creative ideas to determine what’s best for your business.
• Stephen Epple: Let the data drive your email triggers and plans, not your personal opinions or those of upper management.

Customer Focus is More Valuable Than Ever Before

With a plethora of social media, customer choices, channels and noise, customer service becomes a huge differentiator for marketers.

• As Gary Vee puts it, “Doing the right thing for the customer can never be wrong.”
• As channels and marketing objectives become more complex, it’s important to have customer data accessible. So even if there are multiple databases, as is often the case with big companies or entities that are a single company to the customer but many internal companies (like FedEx), sales and marketing folks need a single view of the customer, all in one place.
• And the customer is going to want an integrated, easy experience. As the Aprimo team advises, figure out how customers are interacting with your brand across channels and where you would like them to be.

Ready, Set, Email

We’ll continue to post more lessons and followups from the EEC conference. Look for a tech and tactics wrap up at the end of the week, and more about mobile and iPhone email design and coding soon.

In the meantime, if you attended and have any key takeaways, please share them with us. If you didn’t attend and you have questions, please ask us.

Strategy and Consumer Lessons from the Email Evolution Conference 2011 (EEC Takeaway #2) is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

The One-to-One Multichannel Conversation

At this year’s Email Evolution Conference (#eec11), held in Miami, January 31^st to February 2^nd, there was a lot of talk about customer relationships, a lot of discussion about the one-to-one marketing paradigm and a series of panels about new applications and channels. Online marketing is becoming a one-to-one to one conversation and going multichannel—at the same time.

Both are good directions for marketers and consumers. On the one hand, marketing becomes more personal, dynamic, relevant. On the other hand, consumers live on different platforms, using different devices. Marketers must integrate email and social platforms and communicate more directly and across more platforms. Not surprisingly, several problems arise.

Problem #1: Who is the customer and where do they live?
It’s hard to know where your customers are and how they want you to talk to them. Marketers must begin to allow users to self-select their channel preference and use behavioral metrics to make those decisions in the absence of customer choice. For technologists, a database problem arises. If email is no longer the unique client identifier, how do you build and manage your customer database? The answer, of course, lies in allowing customers to choose their preferences, using behavioral tracking, and creating smarter, nimbler databases.

Problem #2: Where do we want to talk?

So we’re having more one-to-one conversations. The customer picks the time and place and platform. But when the customer chooses the engagement platform, the marketer must relinquish control. Is that the platform you want them to be on? Smart marketers will need to both listen and direct conversations. A conversation on any channel is better than no conversation at all, but a conversation that occurs in the most engaging (or lowest cost or highest ROI-yielding) platform may be the best solution of all.

Problem #3: How to design for difference?

Websites, email, social channels will all face design and programming issues. For email it will be tough to design a single email that works across all desktop email clients, plus mobile devices (a diverse crowd from iPhones to Blackberrys to Android, Nokia, etc.). Tough, but not impossible. Email design and coding will need to creat more scaleable, shorter, smarter emails, with a new design and code rubric so that they scale and render correctly on mobile devices and old-fashioned email clients alike.

Convergence Clash: When One-to-One Meets Multichannel (EEC Takeaway #1) is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

The rise in popularity of the iPhone has been a leading reason for the shift. A new Knotice study shows that 13.36% of emails are opened by a mobile operating system or device, with the iPhone leading the way at 8.74%. The iPad (at 2%) and Android (at 1.9%) are gaining ground quickly, with other Windows, Blackberry and Palm devices making up the remaining users.

With the rise in smartphone penetration, which is projected at 35% of all mobile users now and expected to reach 50% by the end of the year according to Nielsen, the mobile user base is only going to continue to grow.

With growth occurring across all mobile categories, its no wonder that the daily use of email showed an increase of 40% (to 43.5 million users) as mobile users turn to their smartphones on a regular basis to check their inbox.

In a relatively short period of time, the adoption of mobile email has reached 78% of the smartphone population. It shows how quickly shifts can occur in the digital landscape, and how brands need to prepare themselves to reach their subscribers across multiple platforms and devices.

In upcoming posts we’ll show how you can improve your campaigns for mobile users. Stay tuned!

The rapid growth of mobile email is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Here’s 3 of the most recent innovative features for the email inbox:

1. Hotmail Active Views
For years we’ve thought of email as being static, non-interactive and requiring you to link to the web for any dynamic content. Hotmail aims to change that thinking with Active Views.  Active Views allow users to interact with brands (like booking an airline ticket) without leaving your inbox. Watch the video for a full example of how it works.

2. Yahoo! Mail Beta

Yahoo Mail has a new upgrade currently in beta that any Yahoo user can try now.  The new system is faster, offers better spam protection, unlimited storage and better integration with mobile devices. You can also integrate it with your social channels and you can chat via IM or SMS with your contacts.

The social integration features of Yahoo! Mail aren’t revolutionary but are useful. From within the platform interface you can post status updates to Twitter, Facebook or to your Yahoo contacts and see the status updated of what your contacts have posted. You can also import email addresses of your Facebook friends into Yahoo Contacts.

3. Gmail Priority Inbox

Gmail hasn’t had any major updates since Priority Inbox was released last September, but its impact is still one of the more monumental  inbox developments. If you are using Priority Inbox, you may find these 5 tips for using Priority Inbox helpful.  I’d expect that prioritizing your inbox based on your interactivity and history is going to be standard practice for all inboxes in the near future, so hopefully Gmail got things started in the right direction with the Priority Inbox.

What do you think of the recent webmail developments? Do you expect these to impact the ways that you use email?

3 Ways Webmail is Leading Inbox Innovation is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Tis the Season
We buy stuff for the holidays. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, free shipping, save on your favorite stuff, those great sales after Christmas… they’re all effective. That’s why marketers do them, and why consumers like them. So go ahead, throw your hat in the holiday shopping email promotion ring, but make sure your email competes creatively, is well targeted and differentiated, because there’s a lot of noise out there and we don’t just mean the carolers on the corner singing “Jingle Bells.”

Christmas Clutter
Some B2C marketers sent over 20 emails in three weeks to some recipients during the holiday season. If it’s the right list and the right offer, that might be a good idea. But be wary of list fatigue. Just because you want to sell products doesn’t mean your audience wants to get your email. Especially when inboxes are cluttered and time is scarce, your recipients may be more likely than usual to unsubscribe.

One Little Christmas Tree
The right email works. B2C marketers find that the free shipping and discounts work. Cyber Monday was a huge success, and many retailers saw strong results from their email marketing efforts at the end of the year. And they weren’t alone. We’ve seen successful campaigns from B2B marketers and organizations. Some of our nonprofit clients ran fundraising email campaigns and most boasted impressive results. One nonprofit, for example, saw a 45% increase in online donations over the previous year as a direct result of their email campaign.

Santa’s Spammers
One study reports that as much as 50% of “Seasons Greetings” email in 2010 were spam. This is the season where even email marketers send spam (at least two that we heard about). Holy rubber reindeer! When is it okay to send spam? Never.

Timing and Targeting Help
So you have to break through the clutter. Our successful clients did that by targeting emails and timing their transmissions. Some marketers see strong results after Christmas, while nonprofits and B2B companies try to beat the rush by getting their holiday email campaign out the door earlier. More time for eggnog and office parties. Be relevant, be different. Don’t be bad. See below.

Bad Santa
This is also the season when usually smart tasteful marketers decide to post that hilarious video of Aunt Agatha singing Christmas songs or a really bad Flash animation. No, now is not the time.

Happy New Year
Remember, the end of the year is just one part of your marketing plan. Make sure you’ve looked ahead to the new year, with a marketing plan that looks past Dick Clark and new year’s eve. Hopefully the successful holiday emails, new subscribers and happy customers will get you off to a good start for the new year. Happy 2011!

Holiday Emails in Hindsight is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!