James O’Sullivan’s Blog

Valentine’s Day. That time of the year when people declare their love for someone special by writing poems, sending cards or buying iPods!
Every year apple run a Valentine’s Day email campaign offering advice to guys on what to buy their girlfriend or partner. I presume they have their list segmented so they’ve targeted males only. It would be interesting to see what they send their female list segment. OK, so the emails are a little cheesy and having an email pop-up on my screen with Love splashed all over it which could leave me open to some slagging if I’m in the office. However, Apple understand the importance of establishing an emotional connection with their brand and are simply masters at creating brand advocates.  Also if you haven’t done so by now you should take some time to create a event calendar to capture important event dates which can be broken down by category. eg sporting events - Champion’s League Final, All-Ireland Final etc
Then get your thinking cap on and plan some marketing campaigns to coincide with these events.

Over the last few years I’ve been receiving promotional emails from Ryanair.com informing me of their latest offers of their so called “Free” flights. True to the style guidelines of their website the emails are gaudy, loud and in your face with 1996 flashing images and so on. Back in November I received and email from Ryanair asking me to update my profile to receive more relevant offers. So I proceded to complete the profile page where it asked me where’s my closest airport of departure, first and last name and title.

As I expected they are now sending me offers on flights departing from Dublin Airport. Ryanair need to do some more work with their emails but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Email before profile update: - Offer not tailored to my Airport of departure

Email after Profile Update: Offer tailored to Dublin.

You can check out all the ryanair emails I’ve received on docstoc.

I received an email from Trip Wolf today which used a complelling subjectline “The French are rude and the Americans are fat”!

Every culture has a stereotype and Trip wolf are attempting to gather information  from users on what each culture is really like. I’ve noticed one user has identified Ireland as having the most beautiful women! Of course I would have to agree

Last month I wrote a post about the email marketing funnel and the steps you need to take the optimise each step of the way.  I expect that this cheeky email subjectline will achieve high open rates for Trip Wolf.

While on the topic of email I thought it was appropriate to congratulate google on their latest gMail feature - mail goggles. If you’re inclined to send drunkn emails during the weekend, google have the solution! You can now turn on a feature in gmail that will ask you to complete a mathimathical equation before you hit send!
If only I could have that feature for txt messages on my Nokia phone! Actually come to think of it maybe google have this feature on their New google phone! If not, my guess is that they’re already thinking about it. My hat goes off to google yet again, shows that the 80/20 rule really works

The email funnel is a great way to represent your EDM campaign and how you can make improvements. If your overall goal is to increase email sales then you need to optimise each step of the way to close that sale. What ever ESP (Email Service Provider) you use make sure they deliver all the neccessary key success metrics. I’ve put together an email funnel which I use to help visualise the success criteria for an EDM campaign and what needs to be changed to improve results.Bottom line, never make a change without measuring it.

Simply put email marketing is crucial for an online business. Get it wrong and it can affect almost every aspect of your business. email marketing has been around for a long time so there’s plenty of article out there to help you on your way. Apart from emailing the right customer list, personalisation, copy and email type (newsletter, transactional…) the following points should be followed.

Technical stuff.

• Close Tags
• Check that it’s W3C compliant
• Use ASCII
• Avoid CSS
• Width 500-600
• No Javascript
• No background images
• Don’t embed images, host them on a webserver
• Don’t embed forms

Typography and colour

• Use Ariel or any other sans serif font that is largely supported
• Use “Cool” colours: Blue, Purple and Green work well with both male and female users
• Don’t use a white font.
• Best practices
• Create a web version
• Test on various email clients
• Place important content on the top left
• Include add email to safe list
• Blocked images affect open rate so use images sparingly
• More links increase click rate
• Hyperlink all images
• Don’t SPAM
• Have a personality. Style, tone humour, emotion, attitude
• Have a clear call to action
• Use white space
• Forward to friend link
• RSS feed subscription link

Must have

• Unsubscribe link
• Company name and address

Test test and test

• Subject line
• Layout, colours, format – heat maps
• Offers
• Buttons, call to action
• Landing page
• Frequency