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 »
You’ve been in email marketing for a while, and have enough subscribers to make it a worthwhile endeavour. You’ve run a few campaigns, improving a bit each time, but you seem to have reached a plateau. The graphs are not inspiring. Let’s assume that, like most people in your position, you’ve checked all the … READ MORE »
You have a brilliant idea that will secure you an increase in completions. You have confidence that it will be something of a revolution but as you’ve been in email marketing for more than a few months you accept that you need to split test your next campaign to prove how good it is. Split … READ MORE »
You will have designed a top-class marketing email. The customer will have been captivated by your offer. They have clicked through to a landing page. Ask yourself what they will want to be presented with. I prefer a clear and uncluttered design of marketing email and, more importantly, the landing page as well. Call me … READ MORE »
It is no exaggeration to say that a good, and we’ll come to what it meant by good, landing page design is the keystone of email marketing. So what do I mean by landing page? For the purposes of this article, a landing page is a special page on your website where people who click … READ MORE »
Learn from the criticisms of others. These are comments from subscribers to e-newsletters (from now on just newsletters) gleaned from forums and blogs. Some appear to contradict which merely means you have a choice. 1/ Clear, simple and short For a newsletter which arrives every morning containing a précis of, for instance, news of a … 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 »
Have you ever had that feeling when reading the latest ‘in-depth’ report on email marketing that ‘I knew that already’? Some conclusions would have been remarkable only if they’d said anything different. Yet even the expected results can make you exasperated. A recent report stated that fewer than 50% of companies segmented their email marketing … READ MORE »