Shexzy Email

www.pure360.com @Pure360

Shexzy EmailHas email marketing got it’s sexiness back?


Andy ThorpeSenior Managed Services Consultant @Pure360

@Captaininbox

Eyes deep in email since 2006


2010


Four years ago Email Radio did a show about the

future of email - yes there was an email podcast

before Litmus’s.

On the show there were no two better people

qualified to speak on the subject: Mr Influence Bill

McCloskey and the legend of Mark Brownlow.


Cheap

Robust

Consistent

Easy


The future of email will be defined by more by Mobile than anything else along with ways of email separating itself from being lost in social.

The discussion moved to be about why email was not getting the respect it deserved in the digital marketing industry and in brands as far as budget and priority was concerned.

The general census was that Email had been a victim of it’s own success: cheap, robust, consistent, ‘easy’ and of course there is spam and list purchase.

Image blocking and Outlook using Word to render had allegedly “ripped the guts out of email design” according to Bill.


Medium Brand

Search Google

Facebook Facebook

Twitter Twitter

Email Er ... Outlook?


Email was not sexy like the brands, who were also mediums,even though email still delivered the best ROI, content was put everywhere, if you saw it in realtimeon twitter, you won’t open the email about it.

Email was competing and losing to the brands of search and social

You could look back to design, but of course Outlook had “ripped the guts out of email design” by using Word.There was no exclusivity to being on “the List” so the medium delivering the most was getting everything last. As Seth Godin put it, email needed a Purple Cow!

I wanted to find something sexy about email and promote it…


Shexzy Email!

Jordie van Rijn / @jvanrijn

Famous Dutch Email Marketer


The three

Elements of the

Evolution of

Shexzy Email


At the time there wasn’t much to go on but

today there is so much more … So how did

email recover from that...

I see three main elements which have made

email marketing what it is today and what

makes it shexzy…


A lot has happened since 2010…

x 4000+


A lot has happened since, way to much to

cover but some notable ones include HTML

& CSS being able to a lot more, 8+ iPhones,

getting bigger & bendier, Outlook finding

new ways to rip the guts out of Email HTML,

Gmail tabs, new types of spam trap, the

Spamhaus ddos attack slowing down the

internet, Samsung using clips from 2001 to

show that Apple didn’t invent the tablet

design.


3. Sender Reputation


IPs were the main filters but IPv4 was running out and ESPs were using shared pools so ISPs needed more to track a sender.

Then v4 IPs were given to fridges, then the credit crunch kicked in and low permission blasts from larger brands who could no longer afford TV & print took to solus and affiliates to get their brand out there, rose to a point where the ISP s were struggling with the volumes.

Instead of getting more boxes ISPs turned on reputation and everything changed.

It was harder to get delivered, you had to care about all recipient reactions and deliverability was born into a new era.


“Email Intelligence”

Reputation Scores

List Health / Cleaning

Engagement

https://www.senderscore.org/

https://www.senderscore.org/

https://www.briteverify.com/

https://www.briteverify.com/

http://www.freshaddress.com/

http://www.freshaddress.com/

http://www.edatasource.com/

http://www.edatasource.com/

https://litmus.com/

https://litmus.com/

https://www.emailonacid.com/

https://www.emailonacid.com/


Email Intelligence was born, we have

software to tell you what everyone was

doing, how ISPs saw you, clean your list,

preview your emails in every inbox before

you send it.


2. “BIG Data”


A catch phrase that didn’t bring anything new as far as functionality - single customer view & data mining etc. have been around for a long time, but it was always seen a so very expensive.

This made it Shexzy and less scary and brought smaller tools to our attention to solve one data problem for far less cost. Much of it was inspired by the need to track social alone.

Email tracking software collects so much data but you only got opens and click etc. the need to track behaviour and engagement was needed and now you can have it all.


Automations / Behavioural


A catch phrase that didn’t bring anything new as far as functionality - single customer view & data mining etc. have been around for a long time, but it was always seen a so very expensive.

This made it Shexzy and less scary and brought smaller tools to our attention to solve one data problem for far less cost. Much of it was inspired by the need to track social alone.

Email tracking software collects so much data but you only got opens and click etc. the need to track behaviour and engagement was needed and now you can have it all.


Open Reach


Open reach is a great strategy to apply even to your bread and butter newsletter list.

Aim to get every person on your list to open at least one email a year, track the behaviour and as people drift down the time line, target them differently to wake them up.

Once they pass the year mark, then you get into reengagement.

You will also eventually need to make a decision about dropping them all together.

It helps to track additional touch points, link email subscribers to their social profiles, to browsing your site, all is achievable now.


1. Mobile


Bar far the biggest influence to email’s

shexzy factor is smart phones.

Initially the iPhone’s email app rendering

everything brought design back and devs no

longer had to dial themselves back to the

nineties to build an email


Behaviour


One of the biggest changes to email is

opening times, we used to just have to time

it so people were in front of their computers,

now everyone gets to see every email

almost as soon as we send it.

But on a mobile, they very rarely click

straight away because they don’t want to

waste their killing time waiting for a page to

load. more on Mobile Inbox Triage…

http://getintheinbox.com/2014/01/03/mobile-inbox-triage/


Media Queries


Mainly on the iPhone though but we can now make emails automatically alter their content structure on the fly based on screen size.

It’s popular to take the desktop version where media queries are not supported then add styles to make them change on a mobile where they are.

And ironically many of the code we use to organise content responsively is very very old.

Media queries are not vital to making an email auto-arrange itself on a smaller screen but it gives you most control.

You can build an email to roll down into a single column without the need for media queries and then add them to neaten it up where they are rendered.


Progressive Disclosure

:Hover


One of the coolest things we’ve discovered is the how the hover style works on a mobile.

Part of the reason why Flash was ignored by apple was because much of its UI was about hovering and a touch screen does not have a hover.

However, when you do tap an element with a hover, it will stay hovered, so you can make the email interactive and show & hide content without them leaving their inbox.

Initially this was rolled out as progressive disclosure because it was presented as a contents list but a recent effort from B&Q did a whole lot more.

More and more techniques are emerging to capitalise on the dynamic option in a mobile inbox by twisting the purpose and the effect on commonly used web techniques and how they actually work on a phone.


Animation

Gifs

Video

JPEG-push

Cinemagraphs (Echograph app)


HTML5 brought the video tag! iPhones would render the video tag, in fact I even managed to get Hotmail to play a video.The fact that you could get video working in an inbox was very popular but eventually very complex due to the video file types preferred by each browser. But animation stayed popular and software evolved which could push videos through a jpeg image.Lots more people went for the animated gif and to save image weight on high quality images the “cinemagraph” was born, which only animates a small section of the image.This House of cards emails was very popular and an iPad app called Echograph was a very cheeky tool to convert videos into gifs but only animate a small section, like a wine pouring or a candle flickering etc.


What’s in Store

• More phones

• Wearables - plain text for watches

• More email clients / function over render

• Less Spam

• More data

• Shexzier Emails


We have all of these very cool things at our disposal now and there is more to come.

Phone will continue to appear as software pushes the hardware,

As phones get bigger, too big to hold, wearable emerge for easy access; the apple watch’s inbox is rumoured to show only the plain text, so now that old thing is back!

As Gmail adds more features, more email clients are appearing, to help people better organise their busy inbox, a good example is Mailbox from the guys at Dropbox with a built in snooze feature to allow you to quickly get to inbox zero now and see the stuff you want to read later, appear back in your inbox later. Incidentally, this does not render media queries, so you only get the desktop version, not unlike the Gmail app, but the organisation features still seem to attract users, like the Gmail app. Definitely something worth keeping an eye on.

There are more and more spam traps, especially zombie traps as emails expire, so using your data and keeping your list fresh will be more and more important,

so you’ll need more data to stay relevant and more data you shall have as ESPs develop and integrate with best of breed tools.

So right now you get to make your emails relevant in content, timing and rapport and you get to make them fit on any screen and tweak them for the features of different inboxes, that’s shexzy and there’s more to come.


IT’S A GREAT TIME

TO BE IN EMAIL


Andy Thorpe @CaptainInbox

Pure360.com @Pure360

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/andythorpe/

https://twitter.com/CaptainInbox

http://www.pure360.com/

https://twitter.com/Pure360

http://getintheinbox.com/

http://getintheinbox.com/




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