Category: Email Marketing

Email is a proven channel for generating revenue. For every $1 you invest in an email campaign, the average returns can be as high as $42. If you have an eCommerce presence, then it’s essential to conduct email marketing – By 2022, 333 billion emails are expected to be sent each day. Despite such huge numbers, not every email that gets sent out is equal. There’s a huge gap between the effectiveness of the two main types of emails that exist in the world.

Two Types Of Marketing Emails

The first type of email we can call the “campaign” email. This type of email could include your typical email newsletter, a holiday promotion, or announcements on new products you’ve added to your shop. You can think of any email that is sent at one time, to everyone, or a segment of your list, as a campaign email. These emails are one-off emails that you create depending on the goal of the campaign.

On the other hand, we have “trigger” emails. These are very different for one specific reason – a trigger email is sent out in response to a trigger condition set-off by something your subscribers or customers did. This trigger condition can be as simple as subscribing or for abandoning a product before check out and is set by you. Since it is a reaction to an action taken by your recipients, it is much more relevant & timely than any campaign email. These trigger campaigns are automated to send commonly used email series such as welcome emails, order placed emails, shipping details, etc.

On average, trigger emails produce 24x more revenue per send when compared to campaign emails. Wow!

Not sold on trigger emails yet?

Why Is Email Trigger Essential?

Trigger emails also beat campaign emails on efficiency. An automated trigger only needs to be set up once. Once you enable it, it will continue to generate revenue until you turn it off. Let’s use the Welcome Email Series as an example.

A Welcome Email Series is a very common and profitable automated trigger email flow. It starts whenever a new person subscribes to your email marketing. Generally, this type of email series will contain 2-5 emails spread out over a few days or weeks. You can think of it as an opportunity to automatically introduce people to your brand and entice them to make that first purchase.

Merchants see success with this email when they share valuable content such as tutorials on how to use products, user-generated content, promotions, or curated recommendations based on the subscribers’ interests.

Once you’ve set up your Welcome Email Series flow, your email service provider will send the welcome emails on your behalf every time someone subscribes. Contrast that with the typical newsletter email, which takes time to put together and is often only sent out once.

And then there’s also the open rate difference. The average open rate for a welcome email is 91.43% which is 76.6% higher when compared to standard newsletters (21.33%). This makes sense – remember, your customers taking a specific action sends a trigger email. In many cases, customers expect to receive these trigger emails from you and will check their inbox for them.

Increasing your open rate will have a big impact on your conversions because doing so will bring more people into the top of your funnel. More opens will naturally result in more clicks, and most importantly; it will lead to more conversions.

Takeaways

• Two types of marketing emails: (i) Campaign Emails (ii) Triggered Emails
• Campaign emails are ideal for making announcements and sending custom promotions
• Triggered emails are only sent automatically when the prospect has taken a pre-defined action
• Welcome emails have an average open rate of 91.43% and Email newsletter have an open rate of 21.33%
• The time invested in creating a triggered email might be greater than for marketing email, but in the longer run, triggered emails are more efficient.

Wrapping Up

Automated trigger emails are the secret weapon in a merchant’s digital marketing arsenal. They’re proven to generate more revenue per email than newsletters, product announcements, holiday promos, and any other type of campaign email. Because they’re based on your customer’s specific actions, they result in higher open rates. And you only need to set them up once to see increased conversions and revenue, which means less time building emails and more time communicating with your best customers.

Author Bio

Patrick Heer is Customer Success Manager for RareLogic Division in Coherent Path. Rare.io is a predictive email marketing solution for eCommerce with features such as Recommendation engine, Smart Timing, Customer segmentation, and Automated emails. Check them out here.

Related Articles

1. Email Automation for beginners
2. Role of Transactional email in Ecommerce
3. Tips to create a welcome email series

The channels for customer acquisition and customer retention are the two important aspects to consider when planning a marketing strategy. As per a survey done by emarketer, email is the most preferred source for both customer acquisition and retention, followed by search marketing (both), Paid Advertising (Customer Retention) and Social Media (both).

(Source)

In this world of cut-throat competition when getting customer attention has become more challenging than ever for marketers, brands are most of the time found engaging in too much information overdrive. Incrementing email sending frequency and bombarding your subscribers with too many emails shall not only worsen the existing situation, as it shall also lead to an increase in the email unsubscribes.

Solution: A study by MarketTarget reveals that 80% of shoppers would switch stores or brands when offered a compelling promotion. Email retargeting strategy adopted by email marketers help streamline your message across different mediums (as per the existing interaction level with a customer)and can help the information you share to stay on top of the customer mind.

Email Retargeting: Why it is Inevitable?

When a prospective customer abandons any interaction midway (courtesy. filling a form, cart abandonment, browsing products or even bouncing from your web pages within seconds), it doesn’t mean that all love’s lost. It is observed that only 2% of web traffic converts on their first visit to the website.

With proper retargeting strategy, brands can still touch base with the ‘lost’ customers – by displaying a correct message on different sites that the customer is browsing on, to psychologically triggering an action.

How it Works

Email retargeting functions similar to conventional site retargeting, allows you to target email subscribers instead of web visitors. You can track when any of your subscribers open your email by placing a tracking pixel or tracking cookies within the email body. This can be followed up by custom ads that shall be displayed on certain websites that they may be browsing through. This eliminates the ‘unsubscribes’ lead by excessive email send frequency.

Functions of Email Retargeting

Email is a digital passport to most of the interaction you do on the World Wide Web. From purchasing a new device to making a reservation to practically anything where any kind of service is availed, an email address is mandatory. So among all the different retargeting channels, email seems to be a necessity for ‘observing’ your customers’ online behavior.

A tracking pixel or tracking cookie placed in the email, are like a line of code that is installed in your subscriber’s devices, and it stores any miscellaneous information such as opens, time spent, user engagement heatmap, etc. This allows advertisers to figure out which internet users have previously opened specific emails, viewed them and create appropriate audience segmentation.

Potentials unlocked via Audience Segmentation

Based on the information stored via the tracking cookie, we can segment the audience in different categories. These categories define who is to be targeted and shown ads in which channel.

Search Retargeting

Search retargeting builds an audience segment based on people’s search information. Based on the browsing behavior, brands can then target relevant display ads all around the web.

Cart Abandonment Email Retargeting

A consumer abandoning a shopping cart is the most heart-breaking thing for any marketer. But with correct triggered events set in the retargeting process, the customer can be reconciled with the cart.

Dynamic retargeting can be used to display real-time ads that feature the specific abandoned products. With the right retargeting strategy, shopping cart abandonment can become a vital tool helping different leads in progressing further in the sales funnel.

Social Audience Building

Social audience builds an audience segment based on people’s social interactions. Based on the tracking link shared via social media platforms or email, for example. This way, those engaging with your social audience can be focused on. This is beneficial for brands or individuals with large social media followings.

Moreover, targeting options are available in top social media platforms such as Facebook Custom Audiences, Twitter Tailored Audiences, Google’s Customer Match and LinkedIn’s Advertisers.

A view of Facebook’s Custom Audience

How this functions

You need to upload an emailing list onto the respective platform. The social media compares your data with email addresses of the users on their social network. Those email addresses that do not match any user database are discarded to maintain end-user privacy.

According to WordStream, the match types between Google, Facebook, and Twitter are approximately:

• Google = 50.4%
• Facebook = 48.99%
• Twitter = 10.2%

Reasons why Facebook and Google have higher match rate compared to Twitter are:

1. With rising sales of Android devices, Gmail ID is very high.
2. In case of Facebook, user base and affiliations made sure that the match rate is the highest.

Re-Engagement Retargeting

Email retargeting tactics can also be used for those customers who have been dormant for a long duration. Based on the last email opened by them, the display ads can be targeted to re-engage with them. Based on the level of interaction, the customer has with the ad; you can decide to upsell, cross-sell or down-sell your product/services.

The retargeting ads also give targeted visitors a quick way to take advantage of the promotion instead of having to go back to the original email and click the link there.

Please note that this will only work with web-based email providers like Gmail and Hotmail, and you want to make sure that the email recipient is allowing images to show in the email you send.

Targeting without cookie

Almost 56% of emails are opened in mobile devices. The native browsers don’t support cookie-based tracking as regular cookies may expire or get deleted relatively quickly. This has led to a new trend of retargeting without depending on cookies; it’s called Fingerprint Retargeting.

It involves the creation of a user persona through different pieces of data such as browser types, installed software, time zones, IP addresses, and more. By creating different temporary identifier numbers based on collected data, a well-tuned CRM shall create a user persona and help in streamlining ads across multiple devices.

Setting up a foolproof Email Retargeting plan

Wait!!! Leaping headfirst with your email retargeting plan is like jumping onto wet concrete; you shall get trapped and gradually sink. Like any other marketing strategy, retargeting is not a one-size-fits-all concept. You shall need to chalk certain criteria and create your strategy around it.

1. Identify different retargeting platforms such as Adroll, Retargeting, and Klientboost.
2. Segment the audience based on the retargeting goals. It could be based on the different stages of your sales funnel or even on the pages of your website which receive most visits.
3. Create display ads according to the target audience. Are your visitors spending more time on your product section than the order section? Are you experiencing more cart abandonments? Is the number of lead conversion low? Should it be a promotional or conversion-oriented campaign?
4. Include an analytics UTM code to analyze the click rates of an ad.
5. Budget allocation: Ads functions on bidding. The more budget you set, the more visible it shall be. But you need to strike a balance. Allocate more for the niche audience segment. Spending $2.00 per click for a sales qualified lead is much better than spending $0.25 per click for all marketing qualified leads.
6. Analysis: Once your process for retargeting is set, it is time to fine-tune it. Take time to dive further into your ad’s metrics. Tweak your ads based on the clicks and spending per day. You can set a frequency cap so that your subscriber doesn’t suffer from banner blindness.
7. Experiment with different retargeting ads. Visitors who subscribed to your blog can be converted by offering a free download. For those bouncing back from your order page can be shown ads offering discounts or free proposal trial. For promotions within your email campaigns, you can further create an additional ad set for the subscribers who have opened the specific email to increase the reach.

Email Retargeting: A Real-world Implementation

Stuart searches for wristwatches on one of the search engines from his desktop and lands on your website. Seeing your range of offered wristwatches, he understands that he shall need more information. He subscribes to your newsletter. The retargeting cookie is stored on his computer.

A welcome email graces his inbox immediately. He opens it in his desktop, and immediately, a targeting cookie is installed on his system. The temporary identification number is updated informing that Stuart has opened the welcome email and he is added to audience segment who have:

1. Interest in watches
2. Subscribed and opened an email

Now he surfs different websites for personal or work-related searches. Owning the installed cookies (& the budget set by you), the ad space on affiliated websites shall display ads of wrist watches.

You add Stuart’s email address on Facebook Custom Audience. So next time Stuart logs into his Facebook account, he sees your ad and decides to interact with it. He is redirected to your product selection page. At this moment, the cookie is updated. His audience segmentation has one more condition:

1. Interested in watches
2. Opened an email
3. Interacted with a social ad

He browses through the products, and he adds a watch in the cart and poof!!! He disappears by abandoning the cart. The cookie is updated, and he receives a cart abandonment email, and meanwhile, the display ads changes to show his cart products and special discount offer for him.

He clicks either the email or the display ad and completes the transaction. A burn pixel (explained later) at the post-transaction page ensures that he is no longer shown the same ads again. His cookie information changes and the display ads change to display products that go well with Stuart’s new watch.

Best Practices for Email Retargeting Performance Optimization

1. Polish your Segments: No two persons shall remain engaged for the same duration. Observe the behavioral pattern to understand the needs of the customer. For instance, for someone who is a marketing qualified lead for long, you can focus on displaying ads for discount promotion; for someone who has often been purchasing, you can focus on serving ads of relevant products.
2. Prevent Banner Blindness: Did you know? On looking straight, your eyes see the tip of your nose every time, but the brain tends to ‘ignore’ it. Similarly, if your customers are shown ads frequently, then there are chances that they shall, unknowingly, start overlooking the ads. Set a frequency cap regarding when, where and how many times the ads shall be displayed.
3. Experiment with different CTA: The main motive behind an ad is for the customer to engage with it. So your ad must have a crisp and precise CTA copy.
4. Weed out non-performing ads : Be selective about the ads, based on their performance, and allocate the resources to your best performers.
5. Include a Burn Pixel: Nothing is more annoying than watching an ad for getting a discount on your first purchase even after you have achieved it. On adding a snippet of code (called Burn pixel) on your post-transaction page, users who make a purchase shall no longer see a specific ad. This way, they can be catered better display ads. Better safe than sorry.
6. Targeting based on Demography, Geography, & Context: Customizing your targeting based on different parameters helps you dish out better ads specific to a demographic element.

Takeaways:

1. Email is the most preferred marketing channel for both Customer retention and acquisition.
2. Email retargeting is viable option compared to increasing email frequency.
3. Email retargeting works on the concept of a tracking pixel placed in the email which stores miscellaneous information.
4. For an efficient email retargeting process, it is important for set up proper Audience segmentation.
5. Facebook has the largest percentage of user match up.
6. With 52% email opened in mobile devices, email marketers also need to focus on non-cookie based or Fingerprint targeting process.
7. Set up a frequency cap to avoid banner blindness.
8. Include a burn pixel to avoid redisplaying same ads to converted subscribers.

Final Thoughts

Marketers consider retargeting a perfect tool for touching base with your targeted audience outside the domain of emails. AdRoll prides in stating that there is $10 earned for every $1 spent. Have you used email retargeting earlier? Share your views in the comment section.

In this age of technology, people’s actions are a goldmine of information. Be it searching for something, watching a display ad from the search term, visiting a website, or the interaction they have on a website, everything generates a plethora of information. How a marketer manages to put the data defines the success of their email marketing campaign. 

You may be wondering where to look for the data, how to separate data from the noise, how to understand it, and use it in your email marketing campaign. 

In this article, we shall explain what data-driven email marketing is, how it helps you grow, common mistakes while dealing with data-driven email marketing, and how to use data innovatively to improve your email campaigns.

What is data-driven email marketing?

Marketers started adopting emails as a marketing communication channel in the late ’90s. Due to this, emails became a channel for people to receive unsolicited marketing messages, and this lead to the implementation of various norms and country-specific laws. The purpose of these laws was to regulate marketing emails and turning email marketing into a permission-based marketing channel. So, people only subscribed to those brands that drew their curiosity, and marketers started using personalization as a tactic to retain subscribers. A good user experience via emails kept the subscribers loyal, and the contrary caused them to unsubscribe.

Hence, data-driven email marketing is all about using the data you already have and the data you can collect, through consumer interactions and engagements, to predict future behaviors. This benefits the subscriber as they get a customized experience in the emails, all thanks to personalization and segmentation.

Benefits of data-driven email marketing

The customers and marketers both enjoy the fruits borne from using data-driven email marketing. The subscribers get useful and relevant information that interests them and the marketer, i.e., you, gain a loyal customer that constantly engages with your emails and is qualified for conversion. We send out a weekly email newsletter that provides useful information about the different events of the email marketing industry & is tailored to the data collected (You can be a part of our list by filling the form below). The following are some of the benefits we have observed:

• The clarity in Communication: Marketing depends on creating relevant buyer personas based on the collected data. The more information you have at hand, the easier it becomes to segment your subscribers. This way, the subscriber will only receive emails about their interest (and some promotional emails related to their interests).
• Better personalization: From a better understanding of your audience, you can send the right message to the right audience at the most opportune time. Additionally, the right amount of personalization can strike the right chords and aid in better conversions.
• Lesser SPAM complaints: The level of refinement in your buyer’s persona helps you identify the correct audience, and when you approach them with something of their interests, the chance of being SPAM  reduces. Moreover, the existing subscribers are going to be engaged as long as the email content interests them, and this can lead to a reduced churn rate.
• Multiple Channel Engagement: The engagement via the collected data is not just limited to emails. By providing a customized experience, based on the collected data, across all channels, you ensure consistent messaging that is aligned to subscribers’ interest and reaches them at the correct time.

Where marketers go wrong with data-driven marketing

1. Not anticipating the data size: Right from the location, time spent on the page to the cursor movement of an individual visitor, all form of data is available with the help of the right tools. Most marketers tend to be overwhelmed by the size of the data collected and stick to the commonly used metrics and demographics. You need to break the data in smaller, manageable chunks and segregating the data that is valuable for your campaigns.
2. Oversee everywhere; Focus nowhere: It is a common mistake when it comes to implementing data-driven email marketing. Data collection is not solely about creating various data points and tracking them. It is also about collecting the data and using it to leverage better email content as well as context. You need to distribute work and responsibilities such a way that you are focussed on collecting the relevant data and utilizing the data contextually.
3. Inconsistent Data collection and analysis: Marketers sometimes tend to utilize the data collection activity until the demand exists for it in the next email campaign. Once the campaign is sent, data collection is put on a slow burner until needed again. It needs to be a continuous process that should be used to re-target customers, welcome new customers, and improve the experience for existing customers.
4. Losing sight of the end goal: Collecting the highest amount of data is not the goal of a data-driven marketing campaign. Depending on what your end goal is, you need to align your data collection efforts. If the goal is ROI, the data collected should reflect the LTV of customers. If the goal is customer engagement, the data collected should reflect the links clicks, the request for quotation, form submission, etc.
5. Only you are using the data: Marketing is a joint effort, and slack (not the app) from anyone can affect the performance. You need to educate your team about the actionable metrics, as well as how it is to be measured. Your team needs to understand the importance of the different metrics and associate them with business goals.
6. Considering that it is too-late: Many of you may be wondering that is it feasible to implement data-driven email marketing into your strategies now. Marketers tend to avoid implementation owing to the fear of beginning from scratch. That is not the case as you have already been collecting data and need to understand how to leverage it better.

Making your emails data-driven

Implementing data into your email marketing campaigns doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch. You would surely need to make minor modifications, but nothing that will break the layout. Here are some of the ways that you can make your emails more data-driven.

A welcome email (or series) that collects demographic data

It is a universal agreement that welcome emails are to welcome a new subscriber to your mailing list, and it is an opportunity to gather information other than their name. You can offer an incentive such as a discount coupon or a downloadable resource and ask for demographic information such as location, interests, avg budget for their purchase, etc.

Broaden your vision to a multi-channel approach

As we stated earlier, data-driven email marketing can help other marketing channels, so it would greatly help you if you track customer interactions from those channels also. Some of the most common places to collect data from the metrics are:

• Emails: Opens, Clicks, Conversions

• Website: Number of visits, pages viewed

• Landing page: Form filled, Downloads, Signups

• Blog: Time spent, CTA clicked, Comments

• Social Media: Engagements, Likes, Shares

• Video: View times, Timestamp of avg viewer duration, Ads clicked

• Display Ads: Clicks, Bounce

Create a central database

An email marketing campaign involves using multiple tools for different purposes. You should be using a CRM for storing customer information, an ESP to send the emails, a heatmap tool to monitor visits to the page, and a tool to monitor the analytics. Depending on how much you spend monthly, all the tools might be integrated into a single platform, or you use individual tools. Either way, it is essential that all the tools ‘talk’ to each other seamlessly, and the data is collected at a central point, i.e. CRM. This not only helps you track the progress from your email campaigns but also other touchpoints such as social media.

Map out how to utilize the data

When someone subscribes, you utilize the sign-up information to personalize the welcome email. To create further engagement, you offer them a freebie. Provided they download it, you send them a review email after a few days. Later on, you send them a link to a webinar that you are conducting that aligns with the subscribers’ interest. After a few days, you send them a link to the consolidated transcript of the webinar. 

In the above email series, as you can see, the subscriber is provided customized experience based on their actions. You need to map out the way you shall utilize the data before you jump onto creating email campaigns.

Periodically offer subscribers to update preferences

Times change, and the needs of the subscribers may change. There is no way to sense that if you do not provide them a chance to change their preference. This helps the subscribers in only receiving the emails that they are interested in; while benefits you by improving email deliverability with reduced unsubscription rates. Learn about the importance of email deliverability and how to make your emails land.

In the example below by Content Marketing Institute, the email prominently displays a link for unsubscribing as well as changing the preferences.

Use only the effective data in your email by A/B test

You may predict what step the subscriber may take, but you cannot say for sure. That’s where the results of your A/B test will help you. By testing two variants of the same element in your email, you can pinpoint what works better for your audience. Progressively testing out multiple elements will grant you a practical template layout. 

Utilize the demographic data to send one-off emails

Demographic data such as age, location, date of joining are premium data that is not only easy to collect but also great to personalize the email content around. Making your subscribers feel special on their birthday by sending a birthday greeting or reminding them about renewing the subscription to a product they purchase (as seen in the example below by Rockin’ Wellness) can make them feel special. This grows down the line and contributes heavily to the loyalty they have towards your brand.

Wrapping Up

As you may be aware by now, data-driven email marketing is not a new thing but only a better adoption of data in your emails. The effectiveness of your marketing success depends on the quality of the data collected and your implementation of it. You are not alone in this endeavor, our QeInbox team of experts is qualified in performing email template audit, and managing your campaign on your behalf to help you email better. Drop an email at [email protected] to ask for assistance.

Let’s face it, building an email list can be a long and excruciating process. It takes technical know-how, some writing acumen, and a whole lot of determination. That’s why there are thousands of blogs and videos giving you “the best” tips and tricks to build a list faster than anyone else. It’s a lot of work, but for most companies the payoff is still worth all the effort. Even with dozens of marketing channels available, emails are still king in the digital realm. The Email has the highest conversion rate, it outperforms social media for lead generation by 40% and typically provides a $38 return on investment for every $1 spent. And most importantly, email is likely the core communication channel for your entire organization. 

So just consider how you would feel if all the data and information, that you collected using lead generation methods, were all wiped out in a manner of seconds? And you couldn’t get it back. For Mailchimp users, this experience is an on-going one.

Know Your Risks

Mailchimp is one of the top email automation platforms on the planet. In 2017 they claimed to have over 20 million customers and have begun acquiring companies in the hopes of expanding their offerings. This continued success is fantastic for Mailchimp devouts but also makes everyone a more attractive target for cybercriminals. Think of all the personal and sensitive information you have collected on existing and potential customers. Names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords (which people often used in other places), and maybe even billing or credit card info. This is a goldmine of data for people who know how to grab it and use it to their advantage. 

Security experts see an explosive growth of cyber attackson small businesses, with 70% being targeted during 2018. Incidents of ransomware are also on a dramatic rise with a 500% increase over this time last year. Although these stats apply to websites, cybercriminals are moving into other software applications, like email automation, and Mailchimp is not immune. Mailchimp recently had to crack down on criminals hacking into accounts and sending malware-laced emails.

There is another, more innocent way your Mailchimp world can come crashing down the human error. And the most common scenario is accidentally deleting something (like your email list), which unfortunately you may not be able to recover. This is precisely what happened to Chanie Hyde at BugHerd. She accidentally deleted 40,000 emails when she was cleaning up her lists. But you can also lose data when you make changes to other areas of Mailchimp. And unless you have a manual backup of this data, it’s gone for good after a deletion.

One of the misconceptions about cloud platforms is that they “save everything,” which isn’t entirely true. The majority of Software-as-a-Service companies follow something called the “Shared Responsibility Model” when it comes to data protection. This means Mailchimp protects the infrastructure that powers its software. However, you are responsible for backing up and securing your own account-level data.

We know it sounds dire; hackers are after you, the cloud isn’t the safety net you thought it was, and all your data can be wiped in a heartbeat. There is hope, though. Thankfully some simple strategies can ensure your Mailchimp account is secure and can be restored with just a few keystrokes.

How to Protect Yourself

Keep Your Account on Lockdown: We all do it; create simple, easy to remember passwords. And we mentioned earlier about how people reuse the same ones over and over again. Sure, this shortcut helps you in your day-to-day, but it’s also a big help for hackers as well. With weak passwords, your account is vulnerable in a few ways. People can gain access by social engineering, brute force, or a dictionary blast. As a refresher, here are the best practices for creating a solid password:

1. Make a password at least 12 characters long
2. Use a random mix of uppercase & lowercase letters, and include numbers or symbols 
3. DO NOT use any names of family members, friends or pets 
4. DO NOT use birth dates, phone numbers, postal codes or any other numbers associated with you 
5. DO NOT let web browsers “remember” you passwords 
6. Make a password impossible to remember

We understand this causes more work, especially when having to create unique passwords for all users. To help with this, we recommend using a password manager like 1Password or LastPass. 

Be Strict About Who Has Access:  A password is as personal as your house keys. Give it up and you compromise your safety. Never ever share a password or use a common login. Each user should be given their own account. Again, it’s common sense, but something many of us are still guilty of doing. 

Be Careful About Integration Access: Using third-party apps can make your life WAY easier, helping with everything from analytics, to billing, design, and more. However, it’s worth auditing and reviewing what level of access you are trading for these benefits. Every time you add an integration, you are increasing the risk that your data ‘could’ be manipulated or edited in a manner out of your control. We are not saying these third-party apps have nefarious intentions, but we have seen occasions where some third-party software made changes on their end, and it wreaked havoc on the main account’s data and settings. It’s worth understanding the ways the apps you currently use (or would like to use) can access your data. 

Use Two-Factor Authentication: It would be great to guarantee your account’s security, with all the above safeguards in place, but that’s not realistic. The possibility exists that someone can steal your password and compromise your account. With two-step authentication, which involves generating a unique code on your mobile device, you can ensure that only verified people are accessing your Mailchimp account.

Backup Your Data: All the above tactics will help mitigate the chances of nefarious parties hijacking your email list. Yet, it still won’t prevent humans from making mistakes and causing a data disaster. Many account owners choose to backup manually by saving dozens of CSV files. This method has its limitations, though, as you won’t be able to save all key data. And importing all the raw data back into Mailchimp can be time-consuming.

The easiest solution is a third-party application, like Rewind, which automates the entire process. You can save time as well as eliminate the stress of trying to get everything back the way it was and is free for accounts with under 4000 subscribers.

Conclusion

Your Mailchimp list may be one of the most important digital assets you have.  Having security and backup strategies in place is the best insurance policy. A quick recap:

• Use unique and strong passwords
• Only give access to the right people
• Always review and audit third-party integrations
• Use two-factor authentication 
• Have a backup strategy in place 

It may take extra work to keep your account protected. But it’s worth the headaches caused by a cyber attack and weeks or months it may take to recover.

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Dasha Shakov is a Product Marketing Manager at Rewind. You can connect with her on Linkedin.

Email started off as an interdepartmental communication channel that only supported the Unicode text. In the late 90s, email became a mainstream marketing channel and adopted HTML formatting. This opened up new opportunities for email marketers to beautify their promotional and marketing emails to draw their customers’ attention. Further addition of CSS animation by 2014 and the demand for responsive emails made email marketers put more emphasis on the visual attractiveness of their emails.

In this article, we shall look into the email design best practices and understand which email design impacts user engagement.

Things to focus on when considering email design

Most marketers tend to mistake email design to be using the correct images and colors in the email whereas email design involves everything from having the correct From Name, subject line & pre-header text placement, color schemes to even what you convey in the footer. The following list is the things to consider when designing emails:

Brand Personality

Your emails are an extension of your brand and the design needs to reflect it using your brand personality. Your emails need to have a conversation with your subscribers instead of just informing them. So, from the tone to the brand colors to how you sign off, your brand personality needs to be evident. A good brand personality also keeps your emails from being considered SPAM.

Pre-header & Subject Line

Email clients such as Gmail, iOS, and Outlook will display a small snippet of text from your email as a pre-header text. Most marketers tend to miss out on the opportunity in adding a personal flavor in the pre-header text. You can either use the pre-header text to complete something that was left out in the subject line or use it as an individual email element.

Litmus uses its pre-header to explain further what was hinted in their subject lines.

MailChart, on the other hand, uses personalization tags to make it more one to one interaction.

Email Layout

The email layout determines the placement of the elements in your email design. The email layout relies heavily on the visual hierarchy and you can have separate layouts for the same email depending on the screen width of the user’s device. Keep an 80:20 text to image balance in your email design for good user experience as well as avoid SPAM traps.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a baseline for any email design. While misinterpreted of only applicable to someone with a disability, accessibility in an email greatly boosts the user experience as well as makes it easy for someone to easily scan through the email while collecting valuable information. Read how to create an accessible email in our blog post.

Visual Aspect

Images are the pictorial version of your email copy and can communicate more while occupying less space. Any discrepancy in the visual aspect of email design such as stretching or blurred images can easily be detected by your readers and should be avoided with constant tested on multiple devices. Provide background colors and appropriate alt-text to all your images, use high definition but compressed retina-images to avoid image tearing or blurring.

Copy formatting

Not only is what you convey in your email copy important but how you convey it. A properly formatted email copy is a vital part of the email design. Copy formatting is not just restricted to short sentences, paragraphs but includes typography such as line spacing, line breaks, bullets.

Email Footer design

An email footer is where people sign-off but it is not only for that purpose. An email footer should include the physical address of the organization, contact details, reason why subscribers are receiving your emails, as well as the social profiles for them to engage with your brand on respective platforms.

Email Design Best Practices

Be Responsive

Even though it is 2019 and most people check their emails on handheld devices, marketers still do not understand the importance of creating responsive emails. Responsive emails adjust the email content based on the screen width of the devices. This can be the thin line between good user experience and an unsubscribe due to ruined user experience.

Use High Resolution but Compressed Images

As we stated earlier, using blurred or stretched images can drop the visual appeal of your emails. On the other hand, the more defined your image is, the larger will the file size be and longer it will take for an email client to download it. Opt for a lossless compression method to get optimum visuals without sacrificing on the file size. Additionally, use a background color and appropriate alt-text so that your subscriber can be engaged while the image loads.
While including images in your emails consider the following parameters:

• Image size: The file size should be as small as possible without sacrificing quality.
• Consider image width and height: When you specify the exact image size while coding your emails, you will maintain the structure of the email even when the images don’t load.

Have a color palette

Every color instigates a specific emotion within you. Red can convey urgency, blue can convey serenity, and green can calm you. But you cannot use colors as per your liking. Have a color palette where you can specify the brand colors as well as the shades that you are already using on other platforms and use them in your emails as well for consistency.

GIFs are still a thing

Animated GIFs are still a boon for marketers to fit in multiple images without affecting the screen length. You can replicate the feel of a video without exceeding the file size or coding headache of including an actual video. Ideally, your GIF shouldn’t exceed 1MB file size for the optimum experience.

Play with Fonts

Most email clients support system standard fonts such as Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana. Any 3rd party fonts can be used in your emails, provided that email-safe fallback font is specified for it. For those fonts that are too fancy for any fallback fonts, it is better to use them in images.

Place elements based on the eye-scan path

In every left to right reading country, the eye-scan begins from the top-left corner of your email and progressively narrows to the center. Hence, following an inverted pyramid placement, you make optimum use of the space by placing your brand logo along with any other relevant information such as sales announcements and call-to-actions in the middle..

In the example above by Really Good Emails, the top portion has the brand logo followed by a personalized image promoting their Unspam conference. The element placements emulate an inverted pyramid.

Design with Minimal distractions

The simpler your emails are, the easier it would be for someone to scan across and collect important information. Always follow a visual hierarchy while placing email elements in the email design. Avoid placing any distractions such as flashy GIFs or contrasting colors unless it is for the call-to-action button.

Always A/B test

You may not always have a finger on your subscriber’s pulse when it comes to email design preferences. It is a good practice to A/B test different elements in your email design for the effectiveness instead of assuming. Also, test your email design before sending to your subscribers.

Wrapping Up

The above-mentioned best practices are not commandments but more of a guideline for you to adapt to your existing email design and create your own style. Email design best practices constantly change and at the end of the day, what would matter is you find what works for your brand on the basis of testing, learning and implement the learnings. If you need help with innovative email designs, check out our template library or send an email to [email protected] for custom email design requirements.

While eCommerce email marketing is a category of email marketing that is specific to the eCommerce industry, but what sets it apart from the others is the additional set of emails. Most interactions people have during online shopping need to happen in real-time. So most of the emails sent in an eCommerce email marketing campaign also need to be instantaneous. Such emails that are automatically sent in real-time based on the user end triggers or online behaviors are called triggered emails, and in this article, we are exploring one such triggered email, i.e. Transactional emails.

What Is A Transactional Email?

As we stated earlier, transactional email is a type of automated email that is sent to acknowledge user activity or inform the customer, details about their recent transactions. They are triggered by events, interactions, or a change in the profile or preferences instead of being manually sent like a marketing campaign. Compared to marketing emails that are simultaneously sent to multiple subscribers, transactional emails are sent to a specified recipient one at a time and contain information that is personalized for the intended.

Importance of Transactional Emails

In the physical world, when you make a purchase, the transaction receipt or the product received is an acknowledgment. In the digital domain, you have a hard time tracking the progress of your transaction if you don’t receive a transactional email sent after different stages of the transactions. While a transactional email may seem insignificant compared to other emails, transactional emails are an integral part of your eCommerce email marketing. Let us understand how transactional eCommerce emails benefit your brand.

1. Build a Trusting Relationship: Ever made a transaction and didn’t receive an intimation of a successful purchase? Didn’t it make you paranoid? In a survey by Mailjet, with 2000 consumers in UK and France, 77% of UK respondents always check for a confirmation email. An instantaneous transactional email acknowledges the customer about the order placed, when it shall be shipped, or when they shall receive it. This reinforces a sense of trust in your brand and helps you build a strong relationship in the longer run.
2. Bound to be opened: Since transactional emails are a result of a user-end action or behavior, these emails have the consent of the customer and have higher open rates. Additionally, ISPs rarely redirect transactional emails to SPAM. Every successful email delivery contributes to maintaining the sender reputation and in turn the email deliverability.
3. Progressive email updates: Be it for orders confirmation, payment success, password changes, changes to personal information updates, or shipping notification, a transactional email keeps the receipt updated on the progress. This helps them track their products and undergo a good user experience that helps you retain them in the long run.
4. It can be a little promotional: Transactional email copy doesn’t need to be completely transactional in nature and can have 20% promotional content amidst the standard email copy. While this may not be as effective as an actual promotional marketing email, but it can act as the foot on the door to raise interest.
5. Personalization without human intervention: Behavioral Transactional emails, as we stated earlier, are automatically sent whenever a customer successfully triggers any of the pre-determined actions set in the email workflows. The email sent has personalized content that is specific to the customer only. The only human intervention is during the creation of automation workflow as well as individual email templates.

Transactional Email Examples

The following are some of the most commonly used transactional emails.

Welcome Email

The first email once someone subscribes, the welcome email, is first of the triggered email. The content of the welcome email depends on the reason behind the subscription. Your customers can receive welcome emails on their first order, account registration, or when they sign up to your mailing list. A welcome email is a great opportunity to explain the value addition your brand brings. What sets your brand apart from competitors? How often you send emails? You can also include a sign-up bonus to increase conversion chances.
In the transactional welcome email example below by Bellroy, they started with welcoming the customer, followed by an introduction to the brand. They added links to their Instagram page as well as snippets to some of their promotional emails, followed by a showcase of their different products. The overall email copy has the warmth of someone personally welcoming you to their family.

Order Confirmation Email

The core transactional email in itself, the order confirmation email, acknowledges the customer about the purchase success. The order confirmation email not only informs about the order placement but also about delivery dates, price breakdown, order number, and whom to contact for any issues raised. As we stated earlier, promotional activities such as upselling and cross-selling can be done in this email to an extent.
In the example below by Firebox, the email content informs all the information mentioned above, along with links to their other products in the footer.

Shipping Detail Email

The shipping detail of the order placed can be featured in the order confirmation email or sent individually. Some brands tend to feature it in the same email, and some tend to separate both. Shipping detail email is generally sent when the shipping company is different from the brands selling the product. Either way, it is important to add a link for the customer to track their order, along with information on the point of contact for any issues arising.
In the example below by Etsy, the shipping details, the sender details, and the product images are featured for easy understanding of the customer.

Product Receipt

Even though the order has been delivered to the intended customer, it is a good practice to send an order delivered or product receipt email. This email can be used as a ‘thank you for placing order’ greeting and can help your email sound human.

Review / Feedback Email

Your communication with your customer doesn’t end with the purchase. In order to continue engagement, sending a review or feedback email is a good tool. This not only creates an opportunity for user engagement but also for brand advocacy. Send such emails after waiting for 10-15 days after the order was delivered for a more honest review. Avoid any promotional content in this email as it can be distracting.

In the example below by Target, the email copy is humble enough while asking for a review. Also, they have shown how the review will benefit other shoppers. This adds a social responsibility to the reader, and this would enhance the chances of reviewing.

Re-order reminder Email

Another post-purchase re-engagement opportunity is the re-order or replenishment emails. Applicable for subscription-based products, the replenishment emails are a great way to remind the customers about the upcoming deadlines. This way they can take action and continue being associated with your brand.
In the email example below by Rockin’ Wellness, they have displayed the product along with the price and the link for re-ordering for the ease of the subscriber.

Password Recovery or Profile update email

Any changes the customer makes to their online profile is also considered transactional and needs to be given equal urgency as other transactional emails. Such emails need to help the recipient to complete the actions mentioned above as easily and quickly as possible. So, the design needs to be minimalistic and to the point.
In the example below by Vervewine, there is no additional fluff as the email copy is straightforward and minimal.

Transactional Email Best Practices

1. Include necessary personalization tags: Addressing your customers by their first name is no longer personalization. Include other relevant personalization tags such as order no, order date, the image of the purchased products, billing summary to make further the email seem personal. Learn further about email personalizations.
2. Have a recognizable sender name and address: Be open for feedbacks by avoiding no-reply email address. Additionally, the sender’s name needs to be either the brand name or name of a correspondent that the customer knows. Also, include your contact information such as online chat link, phone number and local address for the customer to reach you.
3. Only light promotions allowed: As we stated earlier, transactional emails can be promotional but don’t get carried away. Occasional offers are acceptable but should be only 20% of your total email copy.
4. Give your emails a personality: Your transactional emails should reflect your brand. Hence your transactional email must have the brand logo, colors as well as fonts to add visual relevance and email tone for the personality.
5. Highlight the most vital information: No one has the time or patience to go through the entire email to find the information they need. Always use formatting to highlight the most important transactional data that can be stand out even if the customer scans through the email.