One of the great advantages with an email marketing provider is the range of free email marketing templates, all of them designed and researched by professionals. When starting out, their use will cut design time to the minimum. Later on, once you’ve got your feet under the table, you will almost certainly wish to modify … READ MORE »
Here’s a little experiment you can try. I first saw it used by a content manager, whom I was assisting, against the owner of a website, but it works just as effectively for email marketing. She asked the chap, “What’s your favourite bit of your website?” He mentioned a feature that I had already identified … READ MORE »
You have free email marketing templates on tap; a selection of designs you can, and indeed should, modify to ensure your campaign is targeted as precisely as possible. With our data, that’s very targeted. These templates look so good, and are so easy to perfect, there is the temptation to use them for other channels: … READ MORE »
When the suspicion that the designs of your marketing emails are a bit bland starts to form, it’s almost impossible to ignore. You convince yourself you’ve fallen behind the curve and that most of your subscribers are thinking that you’ve lost your cutting edge. Before investing in a process of redesign, compare what you are … READ MORE »
Sorry to start on a rather depressing note, but I’ve recently read an obituary of a book illustrator who revolutionised her art. The way she used, one could say targeted, the pictures was intriguing. Email marketers should learn from her. We have never been so spoiled by choice of image, with a plethora of companies … READ MORE »
It’s one of the most repeated rules of testing in email marketing; only test one criterion at a time. If you test two, the results are no longer statistically clear and precise, which is the what makes testing such an essential tool. Do it properly and you know. Anything else is a guess and will … READ MORE »
You might think that by using the word ‘limit’ we are setting the bar much too low. Wouldn’t eradicate, eliminate, remove be better options? If my years of copywriting have taught me anything it is mistakes will happen. Errors can run the gamut, from wrong colour for the banner headline to a double entendre going … READ MORE »
Anyone new to email marketing would, no doubt, search online for best practices in order to ensure they make as few mistakes as possible in their introduction to our craft. However, it is all but impossible to be prescriptive. The number of ‘You must do this’ and ‘You must not do this’ are very few … READ MORE »
Bandwagon is normally used as a pejorative. It contains contempt for those who can’t think for themselves and instead merely follow others. There was a talk by a chap who thought he’d cracked the system when, in a previous recession, competing shops around his closed, leaving him as the only retail outlet selling his particular … READ MORE »
When Volkswagen’s advertising agency, the wonderful Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), produced the genre-confounding Think Small series of adverts for the VW Beetle, it was as much due to a change in the way their teams were organised as the actual graphic design. Their system has since been accepted as the norm across the industry, and … READ MORE »