6 Ways To Shake Up Your Boring Emails

Brought to you by Chris Marriott

Anyone who's used email as a marketing channel for some time has come to appreciate its virtues: high return on investment, flexibility, and speed to results. However, email marketers often fall prey to the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. After a while, email becomes, well, boring -- also known as the flipside of reliable.

We've noticed that often our clients become stuck in a single approach to email: create campaign, target list, launch, monitor results. They tend to stick to the same roster of offers and creative and tend to see consistent, if unexciting results. For that matter, we as an agency will sometimes fall back on the tried and true to meet ever-increasing time and resource pressures.

Granted, trying something new comes with risks. At the very least, new tactics require some learning, which translates into extra resources required for completion. Many marketers also hesitate to try anything new lest they disturb a well-oiled and profitable program. However, no program ever grew significantly by doing the same thing over and over again.

Moreover, new tactics may require less effort and risk than many marketers think. In addition, the highly targetable nature of email marketing allows marketers to test simple ideas with a small but viable sample of customers before rolling it out to the list as a whole.

So, let us consider a few simple tricks that can enliven an email program gone stale.

All-text email
The possibilities of HTML email positively set the creative mind reeling with images, animations, and colors. Brand guidelines often dictate a specific approach to email design that may or may not suit the medium. For these reasons, email marketers should consider sending an all-text email once in a while. Whether HTML or plain text, we have seen these emails shake up an audience, much in the way that a sudden quiet spot during a TV broadcast makes a viewer look up to see what happened. While we don't recommend sending all emails as all text, we do recommend it as a change of pace now and again.

Everything on the landing page
Perhaps the polar opposite of the all-text concept, using an email as a giant teaser often works by piquing the interest of the audience. A main graphic and call-to-action that communicates "click to see our deals" artificially raises click-through rates, of course. However, emails like these also identify consumers with strong interest in the brand. After all, they've clicked on an email without really knowing why. Keeping tabs on consumers who click through on teasers gives a brand an interesting segment to exploit later.

Silly subject lines
Email marketers have probably spilled more ink over the writing of subject lines than any other topic -- and with good reason. No other aspect of the email gives as much control to the marketer over opens as does the subject line. For the most part, subject lines that summarize the main offer in plain, direct language drive the best open response. However, we've seen silly subject lines -- bad puns, odd turns of phrase -- drive opens. One of our clients, a telecommunications provider, actually developed a champion subject line out of a pun that remains unbeaten going on six months. Marketers should not take this suggestion as an excuse to churn out subject lines that sound like Talking Heads lyrics, but they should experiment with a good, broadly funny line now and again.

Personality
Moreso than most communications, consumers perceive email as a one-to-one experience. Yet most marketing emails take on a bland, corporate tone of voice. While the efficiency and simplicity of a corporate voice makes sense for many emails, many more would benefit from a little bit of personality. Some email marketers create characters as the voice of their emails. Others send emails with the imprimatur of a senior executive. Both of these tactics give the marketer permission to speak with a little more of a human voice. While marketers can easily overdo personality (no one wants to get an email with the greeting, "Hey, dude"), they also make it easier for consumers to connect with the brand via email. Marketers, then, should test a more personal tone in copy to understand how audiences will perceive it.

Different date
No question will infuriate email strategists faster than, "On what day should I mail?" Many years ago, email service providers created charts that showed open and click rates by day of week. One report showed that emails sent on Wednesday stood a better chance of getting opens or clicks than on any other day. Guess what happened? Yep. So many marketers moved their mail date to Wednesday that Thursday emails had the best open and click rates. Or maybe Tuesday. The simple fact remains that email marketers all need to experiment now and then to see which days work best for them. To that end, marketers who have fallen into a pattern of mailing on the same day every week really owe it to themselves to try mailing one day sooner or later.

Break your favorite rule, but just once
All marketers work with rules. No knocked-out white type on black backgrounds. No emails wider than 600 pixels. Nothing below the fold. Most of these rules come from experience, either the marketer's or someone else's. And, admittedly, most of the time, these rules work. However, it never hurts to break a rule once just to see if the time has come to revise the rule.

So, to all you email marketers out there, go see what a few tweaks can do to your already-successful program. It never, ever hurts to try -- as long as you keep your cell size small enough.

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