5 Things Email Can Teach Us About Design and Marketing
In my career both as an in-house designer and as an entrepreneur I’ve been given the opportunity to design a variety of things. From brochures to building signs, it seems like I’ve done close to all of it. One of my favorite things to design is an email.
Many people say that email marketing is a dead medium. Try telling that to my clients for whom I design more emails than you probably get in your inbox. Not only is it still alive, it’s thriving. Recently my favorite email marketing provider, Mailchimp, had their one millionth user.
Whether you believe email marketing is dead or alive I think there are some things we as designers, marketers and entrepreneurs can learn from email. Below are just five of the things I love about email marketing that can translate to other areas of marketing.
Keep it Short and Sweet
In email marketing you only have a brief moment to get someone’s attention and convince them to take action. You are one of many emails in their inbox and they already have their finger on the delete button. You can’t spend your time on long introductions. You’ve got to get them now.
We tend to just add another web page or go from 8.5×11 to 11×17 for our printing and it is killing our marketing efforts. People think that the “elevator pitch” is just something you keep in your bag for when you’re forced to talk quickly. I use an elevator pitch EVERY TIME. If you’re not interested in those 30 seconds then I won’t waste your time or mine by going further. Keeping everything in your life short and sweet will go a long way.
Single Purpose
The most effective email campaigns have only one job to do. This is very similar to direct mail. You need to identify your primary goal in each piece and direct all of your design efforts toward reaching that goal. Now days we want people to call us, email us, stop by our website, download our white paper…oh…and also give us their money. If you can’t focus neither will your prospect and that means you’re wasting your efforts (and money).
I once put together a direct mail campaign and money was tight so we needed to get the most out of the piece as possible. Do you think we wanted them to do 50 things? Nope, I needed a clear cut objective so that I could figure out if we were going to get the right response. A clear cut goal allows you to keep the reader/prospect focused and also allows you to test your effectiveness which leads me to the next point.
Culture of Testing
Email marketing isn’t just a call to action and a pretty picture. Effective email marketers are scientists. There’s the old sales mantra, “Always be closing” but I would say email marketers would say it should be “always be testing.” We want to know if changing the call to action to orange instead of blue will create a better response or if changing one word in the subject line matters. It’s like going to the eye doctor “better, or worse.”
This is probably one of the most important things you can do for your business and in your life. “If I do this will things be better or worse?”
I’ve always said that if you’re an entrepreneur, no matter what industry you’re in, you are in the marketing business. To be successful in the marketing business you must always be testing. Test different fliers, web pages, colors and copy. Always be testing.
Limitation Sensitive
This is actually what I hate about email marketing. With all of the advances in technology over the last ten years email seems to be the slowest to evolve because everyone uses a different email provider and reads their emails in different browsers. As an email designer you have to design for the person with the crappiest email browser….I’m talking to you Microsoft Outlook.
This sucks for designers because we are limited in what we can do but it does teach us an important lesson. You have to make sure you can reach the lowest and slowest in your demographic. Don’t spend money on a killer Facebook page if the majority of your demographic still looks for you in the yellow pages. Learn who your customers are and how to find them. It doesn’t matter if I’m running sexy ads in GQ. If your customers aren’t there then quit trying to be like me. Go find where your fish are and park your boat there.
Above the Fold Still Matters
Blogging teamed up with varying screen sizes and killed the whole idea of “above the fold.” In email, it still matters. Remember, we’re keeping things short and sweet so we need to take that single goal, make it into a call to action and place that thing as close to the top as possible.
In a world where we’re too wordy and think communication volume maters more than communication quality we need to trim our words down and put the most important ones at the top.
Bonus: You’re Punished for Irrelevance
In direct mail, if you send something that’s irrelevant to someone they just toss it in the trash. In email marketing they click the “junk mail” button. While the reader may think they are just pushing a glorified delete button they are actually notifying their ISP who then notifies the sender’s provider (read as tattling) and it can then shut down the marketer’s ability to continue doing their job.
To combat this marketers must always ensure that their readers actually want to hear from them and are finding value in what they are saying. In a world where “if you don’t like it you can turn the channel” nobody cares if what they are saying really matters. This wastes your time and can also bruise the perception of your brand. Even more, you often pay more for how large your list is. That means that you’re paying to keep people on your list who may not click “junk” but they aren’t reading it either.
We should tailor everything to our audience and care about being relevant to them. Sure the ones who don’t want what you’ve got can move along but it doesn’t take much for a reader of 13 months to start clicking “junk” the moment you stop being relevant to them.
There are plenty more lessons we can learn from email marketing but I clearly have a hard time listening to my own advice to keep things short and sweet. We’ll just have to wait for next time.
I hope you’ve found a few ways you can improve your marketing through these lessons.
