This week: A Little Art Goes a Long WayLast week I went to the Portland Art Museum to see the retrospective of Mark Rothko. Funny the things we see and relate to depending on where we are in our lives.... More

This week: A Little Art Goes a Long Way

Last week I went to the Portland Art Museum to see the retrospective of Mark Rothko. Funny the things we see and relate to depending on where we are in our lives. I have seen a few Rothko shows at other museums over the years, so it's interesting what resonated with me when viewing a Rothko last week.

I currently work on the Coca-Cola creative email marketing program and last year we redesigned the My Coke Rewards (MCR) email template to a mobile-friendly version, meaning 1 design template that displays beautifully on the browser and scales down perfectly to a mobile device. We do this by designing the template with more generous margins, larger fonts, all HTML text and minimal text. Every article is held within its own container, clearly delineated from the next. Check out the Rothko sample next to the MCR newsletter.


Both have single columns, clearly delineated containers and nice wide margins so things don't get messy and run together. Inspiration and ideas come from everywhere and anywhere but it doesn't hurt to go to the masters to glean some ideas from time to time.

What has inspired you over the last week? Less

Weekly creative email design series focusing on email marketing design best practices. This week is eBay Sellers focused. More

Welcome to the 3rd edition of our weekly Fun Friday Email Design Creative Spotlight. If you haven't read the first 2, be sure to check them out here creative email design eBay and here creative email design 'My Coke Rewards'. As always our goal is to get YOU involved with the email creative services team and get the conversation going about what designs inspire you, call you to action, or prompt you to click that dreadful "unsubscribe" button.  Please, share your thoughts.

Alright, enough with the fluffy stuff, let's shine the spotlight on this week's email design, something we developed for eBay as a part of their 'Seller Achievements' program. The idea behind these segmented email messages was to congratulate all of the active sellers on eBay once they've reached a designated milestone.

We know that thanking users through email is a great way to engage with them, so layouts reflected an über-positive, trophy-like look and feel. As Jack Satta, Sr. Designer at Yesmail said, "We wanted to shout YOU'RE THE BEST to their most active users. Like a big, warm ray of sunshine."

The milestones varied and were bucketed into 5 different categories:

• Receiving a 5-star rating
• Longevity of membership  
• Receiving positive feedback
• Having a certain success rate (sales record)
• Reaching a certain number of listings made

We wanted to focus on 4 Key Areas of Email Design for this project:

1. Bright, friendly
In order to stand out, we chose eBay's bright color palette for this series. The messaging was also large and congratulatory to evoke friendliness and accomplishment.

2. Certificate-like feel
People often print these notices, so it was important for us to design them in a way that works beautifully on the printed surface, and even more so, on a computer screen.

3. Variations for subtle changes in achievements
To avoid the "I've-seen-this-email" response (and the dreaded delete), we changed up some of the subtle details and messaging.

4. Stackable and swappable tip sections
Since the seller tips varied in relevance based on the recipient and type of category he/she belongs to, they were treated like modules in order to make the content more flexible and easily added in or swapped out.

So now we want to hear what you think about this design, what do you like or what would you recommend? How do you use saying 'Thank You' in your email campaigns?

Want more email design? Be sure to check out our Email Design Look Book 2012 for more creative email inspiration.

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This Week: Email Copywriting with AnnieOne of the best parts of working on a Creative Team at Yesmail Interactive is getting to look outside our industry for motivation and inspiration. When we are not looking back on our previous creative... More

This Week: Email Copywriting with Annie

One of the best parts of working on a Creative Team at Yesmail Interactive is getting to look outside our industry for motivation and inspiration. When we are not looking back on our previous creative email design work with clients, sharing our favorite photos, ads, artists and memes can help us look at our work with a fresh perspective, or unlock a creative solution for our clients. Check back each week as we share some of our favorite links, "likes", and ways we get inspired.

I'm a huge fan of marrying the high brow with the low brow. Maybe because copywriting - especially the short form style required of email marketers - requires that kind of creative back bending: to communicate intelligence and wit in 50 characters or less for the modern audience with a 6-second attention span.

Combining screen shots of pop cultural TV gems (Zach Morris, Don Draper, Snookie) with a poignant literary passage (Ernest Hemingway, Anne Lamott, Virginia Wolf), Slaughterhouse90210 takes the cake when it comes to walking that line.

Take a look next time you've got a creative block, or just need a bit of brainy comedy.


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Welcome to the 2nd edition of our weekly Fun Friday's Email Design Creative Spotlight. As we mentioned in last week's creative email design post, we want to get YOU involved with us in the email creative services team. As we look... More

Welcome to the 2nd edition of our weekly Fun Friday's Email Design Creative Spotlight. As we mentioned in last week's creative email design post, we want to get YOU involved with us in the email creative services team. As we look for inspiration in previous email designs, we would love to give you a chance to be inspired and inspire us with your comments.

This week we focus on a mobile-friendly email we created for the 'My Coke Rewards' program. When looking at the open data we noticed Coke's open-on-mobile numbers were skyrocketing. There became a need to create a template that looked stellar on both pocket-sized and traditional displays while combining a personalized mega merge tailored to the individual. A points balance merge and a customized comic were introduced to keep users coming back for more and a sharp increase in mobile code entry was observed after the redesign. Best of all as Shaunmarie Gutbezahl, Sr. Designer at Yesmail said, "Big, bold, flat, and simple. And the code is light as a feather!"


There were 7 key areas of email design we focused on:

1. Enhanced personalization
We wanted to lead off with a personal greeting and design a large, highly visible area to display the member's point balance. After all, this is a loyalty program and points and rewards is what it's all about.

2. Simple and fun looking with short burst communication style
The new design reads more like a magazine--large editorial-style photos, eyebrow text for easy skimming, short headlines and brief body copy. Following this style also made it possible to create a mobile-friendly newsletter that scales down nicely.

3. Rewards in a grid (4, 8, 12, 16)
Our research proved that readers love browsing rewards and they will scroll through a larger quantity of rewards than we ever expected. We created a rewards grid that can expand and contract as necessary and offer rewards based on editorial content, points balance or anything in between.

4. Sticky content and author introduction
We introduced a monthly comic starring the Baxter family who are avid MCR members. We hope to archive these for our members viewing pleasure on one of the MCR social sites. Alongside the comic is a friendly message from the MCR Team. We included a handwritten sign-off to add a human element to the newsletter.

5. Mobile: Narrow body design and large type format
We restructured the width of the newsletter to minimize the amount of scaling required when viewed on a mobile device. We enlarged the text, CTAs and gutter spaces to ensure readability on mobile devices while still looking great in the traditional browser space.

6. Social : 'Likes', Reviews & Dispatches
We created a content space dedicated to social news and promotions from MCR's social various social media channels.

7. List based sections
We added html lists intermixed with the photo-enhanced editorial stories to mix up the template and add more information without cluttering the newsletter or requiring too much more scrolling.

So now we want to you to hear what you think about this design, what do you like or what would you recommend? Will you be signing up for Coke Rewards any time soon?

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"I usually am the biggest email geek in the room, but probably not here," joked speaker Sonia Simone of Copy Blogger blog. Indeed the biggest email geeks gathered last week for the annual Marketing Sherpa Email Summit, held at the... More

"I usually am the biggest email geek in the room, but probably not here," joked speaker Sonia Simone of Copy Blogger blog. Indeed the biggest email geeks gathered last week for the annual Marketing Sherpa Email Summit, held at the Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, NV. If I was the betting type, I would have put my money on the fact that every attendee walked out of that conference overwhelmed with enthusiasm and knowledge on how to optimize their own email marketing program. With all the incredible advice offered by the many speakers during the event as well as talking to fellow peers in the industry, I learned a ton. Here's some quick advice I picked up during the event:

1. It's all about the customer. Professor Flint McGlaughlin, CEO & Managing Director, MECLABS opened up the event with a keynote addressed that focused on providing relevant content to your customers. Looking at sample emails and how to optimize them, we learned that conversion rates are significantly increased when thinking about that one to one relationship between you and your customers.
   
   
2. Automated emails that are extremely personal is the ultimate combination. Jermaine Griggs, Founder, Hear & Play Music (@realhearandplay) created a unique series of emails that are automatically triggered based on actions by his customers. While the flow was unique to his business model, the wide-eyes in the crowd clearly proved that spending the time devising a lifecycle flow for your customers is worth the effort.
   
   
3. Become an architect. Select the content, identify the click path and the route to conversion, explained Brian Solis (@briansolis), author of The End of Business as Usual. He suggested marketers start with the desired outcome in mind and work backwards to achieve optimal results. Including social and mobile strategies with email marketing campaigns may be a hard-sell internally, but showcasing how seamless that customer experience is hard to dispute.
   
   
4. Transparency in marketing will yield respect from your customers. It may have been an early start on Day 2 of the event, but Marcus "The Pool Guy" Sheridan, founder of The Sales Lion (@thesaleslion) provided more energy than a bottomless cup of coffee. Telling your customers that you are aware of the questions potential customers may ask and what your competitors offer (through email campaigns or blog posts) adds incredible value and more often than not, ends in a sale.
   
   
5. Don't sell the product in your emails, sell the click. In-between the cute slides of lolcats and babies, bloggers Brian Clark and Sonia Simone of Copyblogger Media (@copyblogger) asked marketers to transform the way many strategize their email campaigns. If you can convert the interest into trust for new prospects on your email list (without being as sales-driven), the rest will likely follow.

Overall, the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit was two days jam-packed with useful and actionable tactics to close that gap between the marketer and customer. I left with pages and pages of notes, new friends, and a lot of re-energized strategies to bring back to my clients... but then again I'm usually the biggest email geek in the room too.  Less

There are Super Bowl ads, and then there are Super Bowl campaigns.  Brands that understand the need to have fully integrated digital campaigns will receive the most benefits, garner the greatest customer interaction, and achieve the most long-term success.  We... More

There are Super Bowl ads, and then there are Super Bowl campaigns.  Brands that understand the need to have fully integrated digital campaigns will receive the most benefits, garner the greatest customer interaction, and achieve the most long-term success.  We used Yesmail Market Intelligence to identify which brands were using the top four digital channels (email, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) to promote their big game ad.  Acura's 'Transactions' campaign, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, was an instant match for our search criteria. Yesmail Market Intelligence profiled this campaign's digital lifecycle to help illustrate the importance of using all 4 channels together.

The Pre-Game:
Acura's 'Transactions' Multi-Channel Deployment Breakdown:
Acura kicked off the 'Transactions' campaign on January 30th (six days before the Super Bowl) by uploading the commercial to YouTube and promoting it through Facebook and Twitter.  The campaign timeline below showcases Acura's usage of the top four digital channels to promote the 'Transactions' campaign.
On February 1st Acura used email, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to cross promote the campaign.  These campaigns have been highlighted below:

Email: Jerry Seinfeld is #2 on the list.
Facebook:
Twitter:
YouTube:
Post-Game:
Acura continued promoting this campaign from Feb 6-12 encouraging users to view this campaign and provide feedback.

Multi-Channel Campaign Total: 48
Yesmail Market Intelligence was easily able to tally that Acura deployed 48 campaigns across the 4 digital channels promoting their Super Bowl spot 'Transactions'.

Total Social Engagements: 18,719,371
Yesmail Market Intelligence recorded 18,719,371 direct user interactions through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube with 'Transactions'.  Given that social media promotion is virtually costless, being able to reach 18,719,371 for FREE is making a BIG statement on the need for expensive marketing mediums (TV, Radio, and Display).

The Wrap-up:
When done right, conventional creative television ads are a great way to reach a large number of eyes but in order to optimize them, they can no longer be standalone assets.  In order to achieve the greatest long-tail effect from marketing efforts, marketers need to develop fully integrated campaigns that optimize digital channels to support and promote costly television ads.  The success that the Acura 'Transactions' campaign achieved speaks for itself.  As we profiled, allowing a 'sneak preview' of their television ad had a strong impact on interactions within their community.  Marketers utilizing this technique may consider asking viewers to enter their email address to view exclusive content ahead of schedule.  Acura could have possibly captured 500k-1M new email addresses, potential leads, if they structured the initial 'Transactions' web preview in this manner instead.

For information on how Yesmail Market Intelligence could be a vital part of your marketing strategy, please attend my upcoming webinar, "Keep your customers close and your competitors even closer". Or request a demo of Yesmail Market Intelligence today and discover how creating multi-channel strategies, similar to Acura, can help you stay ahead of the competition at sales@yesmail.com or 1-877-YESMAIL.
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Due to our recent email design awards, we decided to release our Email Design Look Book 2012. We love Email Design Look Books - they're great sources of creative ideas and a great way to focus and look at what we... More

Due to our recent email design awards, we decided to release our Email Design Look Book 2012. We love Email Design Look Books - they're great sources of creative ideas and a great way to focus and look at what we have done in the past. Going forward we want to make sharing what we are doing creatively on a regular basis a priority in 2012 in order to get YOU involved. With that being said, we decided to start a weekly post showcasing our email designs called 'Fun Friday's Email Design's Creative Spotlight.' Our goal is to get you involved in and in touch with the creative process, highlight why certain email campaigns worked, and add a little fun and creativity to your Friday afternoons.

So with that being said, let's kick it off with an email we created for eBay's Green Team. The idea behind this was to create an editorial-style newsletter with supplementary, non-product related "eco-content" to help further engage their audience. Our Sr. Designer Jack Satta emphasized, "Single-column, stacked sections with strong delineation are great for newsletters and a must-have for mobile."


Key Areas of Email Design We Focused On:

• Clearly readable emails with images off
• Very mobile-friendly
• Maintain brand/sub-brand look and feel throughout
• Stacked sections for easy scrolling and separation
• Hierarchy (postcard + subsections, or lead article+ other articles, treatment of Headlines, CTAs)
• Carried over site design

What are your thoughts on this design, what did you like or what would you recommend?
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Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our recent webinar "Digital Channel Analysis: How top retailers used email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube during the 2011 Holiday Season." I know... quite a mouthful but it basically answers the... More

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our recent webinar "Digital Channel Analysis: How top retailers used email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube during the 2011 Holiday Season." I know... quite a mouthful but it basically answers the question "What did the best Digital Marketers do this Season?" We know they did a LOT of things right and that was directly proven by all the ecommerce records that were broken (we share those too...).

Anyway, if you didn't get a chance to attend, here's a quick rundown and links to watch or download the presentation. Would love to hear what you think!

Our analysis was unique in that we were able to track and analyze marketing activity across multiple digital channels. Here's a quick look into the agenda -

• 2011 Holiday Season Industry Recap
• Analysis Approach (Yesmail's own Market Intelligence Tool)
• Findings & Insights of Overall Holiday Email and Social Marketing Trends
• Marketing Themes of Key Holiday Spending Periods
  • Holiday Kickoff  Nov 1 - Nov 17
  • Black Friday/Cyber Monday Nov 18 - Dec 2
  • Last Minute & Free Shipping Day Dec 3 - Dec 20
  • 2011 Holiday Wrap-up  Nov 1 - Jan 6
• Predictions for 2012 Holiday Season

A few exciting tidbits (just a few of many, many, and many) we included:

1. Average marketing deployments per channel (email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube per day) over the holiday season. Notice the high spikes on key spending periods and low valleys on the weekends.
   
   
2. Average number of emails, tweets and Facebook postings each retailer sent/posted
   • Retailers on average sent out 2.7 Facebook posts for every 1 email
   • Retailers on average sent out 6.5 Tweets for every 1 email
   • Facebook fan bases over Holiday period grew at an average of 7%
3. Most popular promotions by channel. And in case you had ANY doubt at all, check out the following word cloud that represents a word count in subject lines (across our 100 top retailers) and visually shows the big ones. "Free" and "Shipping" were by FAR the most popular words in email subject lines during the season. Not so much in social channels...
   
   
4. On the social side of things (facebook, twitter, youtube), we share:
   1. Who the big players are per channel == (Target is exceptional...)
   2. Who is growing the fastest == (wide ranges here as channels still new and growing)
   3. Who is deploying the most == (Walmart was way busy as was Amazon)
   4. AND who is getting the most engagement == (seems Disney has a formula here)

There is more... so if you have some time, be sure to check it out here and let me know how 2011's holiday trends will fit into your 2012 strategy!

Take care! Less

Keeping tabs on your competition has always been a necessity for any company to protect their customer base. We see it every day with "Joe's gas station" shaving 2 cents off Shell's gas price down the road. In many organizations,... More

Keeping tabs on your competition has always been a necessity for any company to protect their customer base. We see it every day with "Joe's gas station" shaving 2 cents off Shell's gas price down the road. In many organizations, analyzing a competitor's online marketing strategy has fallen into the hands of everyone from the email marketing associate to the senior marketing director.

A few years ago, this was a very manageable task signing up for newsletters and email marketing programs. However, since the onslaught of social media, this effort has become a very daunting time-consuming process. Not only must marketers stay on top of competitor's email marketing campaigns, but marketers now must be aware of their competition's Facebook fan pages, Youtube videos, Twitter campaigns, etc...you get the idea.

Having all these different avenues to communicate with the ever evolving customer gives your rival more of an opportunity to get their message in front of your customers...whether that be a catchy viral YouTube clip or a last minute Valentine's gift promotion email. The need for a multi-channel competitive intelligence tool has never been more of a necessity. Up to this point, there has been no easy way to track all of these dominant digital channels within one centralized view...until now.

Using Yesmail Interactive's latest Market Intelligence solution enables the marketer to easily analyze their competitor's marketing strategy. It allows marketers to compare a brand's campaign deployments while reviewing engagement and digital channel ranks. The quicker they can understand emerging trends, themes and multi-channel strategies, the faster they can apply these insights to their own future campaign strategies.
 

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We're delighted that Chad White and the Retail Email Blog mentioned one of our Creative Services Team's designs for HP Shopping in the 'Design Hall of Fame: 2011 Inductees.'Our clients at HP Shopping really pushed us to create a layout... More

We're delighted that Chad White and the Retail Email Blog mentioned one of our Creative Services Team's designs for HP Shopping in the 'Design Hall of Fame: 2011 Inductees.'


Our clients at HP Shopping really pushed us to create a layout that stood out. Their new Folio Notebook is an amazing product, and we wanted to show that with a "breakout" email layout.  Here's what Chad White had to say about it:

"I'm a big fan of email design best practices, but I'm also a big fan of occasionally ditching those best practices to stand out in the inbox. HP does exactly that in this email, where they jettison their preheader text, header, and navigation bar and increased their email width to 800 pixels from 570. Those changes helped put more focus on the hero image of their new ultra-thin laptop."

It's an exciting time to be a part of the Yesmail Interactive team, and, as we announced this week, it has been especially exciting for the Creative Services Team as we're a part of 4 awards in the last 3 months! 

• 2011 Email Hall of Fame: Retail Email Blog HP, 12/8 - Exclusive: HP's First Ultrabook is Here
• 2012 Marketing Sherpa Email Awards Best Triggered Email or Auto-Responder Series: Silver - Feld Entertainment - Welcome Series
• 2012 eTail Email Marketing: Best in Class Finalist - Webroot Newsletter
• 2011 OMMA Award: Best Email CRM Campaign - HP Customer Revival Campaign

While we would love to take all the credit, we have to thank our clients for continuing to strive above and beyond the ordinary and inspiring us to create innovative email templates.

Last but not least, if you happen to be attending the Marketing Sherpa event in Vegas next week you're in luck, I'll be there both days providing FREE email design audits in our dedicated clinic room. Be sure to register to here today as space if filling up quickly.

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