I began my career in email marketing in 1997. Email was novel and exciting, and consumers were genuinely interested to receive most messages. Many were even disappointed to open their inboxes and find them empty. If you weren’t lucky enough to ply your email trade back then, imagine what it would have been like for every one of your messages to be anticipated, and each of your subscribers to be grateful to hear from you.
Here are 10 of the more recent evolutions of email, along with tips for how we as email marketers should respond to them. How many are you already employing? How many can you implement quickly and see a lift right away?
1. Email addresses have matured. Hotmail launched in 1996. Yahoo! Mail was born in 1997. Some AOL addresses have been in use even longer. Some of your subscribers addresses are 10 years old or older. Even gmail, the relative newcomer in the free inbox market, has been around since 2004. The longer your subscribers have had an email address, the more subscription lists their address appears on. That means more mature address are likely to receive more email. Conversely, older addresses may no longer be the preferred address and inboxes languish days, weeks, even months between openings. Either way, older email address are susceptible to lower open rates. Pay attention to your lag metrics and open rates for subscribers with these ISPs to see if a campaign asking for a fresher address makes sense. You want your messages to land in the most-favored inbox, not the one nearing retirement.
2. Image loading is often disabled. Some studies have found that as many as 50% of email messages reach inboxes with their image loading disabled. That means that these subscribers only see the text, and miss any promotional copy or offer that is part of a graphic in your email. If your messages are graphics heavy, make sure that your message appears in the copy as well. It may seem redundant to the subscribers who see both the images and the copy, but at least you’ll ensure that everyone who opens clearly reads your call to action.
3. More messages are read on mobile devices. Some smart phones will render your messages pretty well, making them as readable on a mobile device as they are on a computer. But that isn’t always the case, so make sure your messages are ready for reading even when picked up on the go. Keep an eye on your “view the web version” links: often mobile users unable to read messages on their phone will follow this link and use their phone’s browser instead. If you find many of your subscribers are viewing via mobile, maybe it’s time also to add SMS messaging.
4. Inboxes are more cluttered. The good news is that email has lost none of its relevance as a critical communications channel. The bad news is that every single company knows this, and works very hard to make sure their messages are in your subscribers’ inboxes as well. What to do? Augment your use of email with other channels of customer contact, like social media, direct mail, SMS, fax and advertising. The more relevant your brand is to your subscribers outside of the inbox, the more likely your emails will rise above the din in the inbox.
5. That darn Facebook made privacy concerns a headline again. Over the past five years, the biggest change I’ve seen in consumer behavior online is the rise in expectations of consumer control. More than ever, your subscribers want to govern what they consume and when they consume it, whether it’s TV on-demand or through a DVR, or limiting access to their inbox. I’m convinced that resistance to this movement is futile. Now is the time to cede control to your subscribers through a preferences center. Let them choose which messages to receive, and which to opt-out from. It may mean tweaking your content strategy a bit so that you don’t have an all-or-nothing approach, but it will be well worth the effort. The size of your list is no longer a meaningful metric. Allowing your subscribers to self-segment may mean fewer recipients for each messages, but should yield a greater overall ROI to your email program.
Evolutions 6-10 are coming up soon in Part 2.
