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Email Marketing Genius: 18 Rockstar Brands That Got Their Email Voice Right
Our experts came across these previously published articles we thought you would find useful.
These are re-posts from the original sources. Author: steamfeed
Email marketing is considered so 'yesterday' by the cool young things that we hear news of its impending demise every 3 months. However, guess what's been going from strength to strength on a quarterly basis for years now? Yes, email marketing it is.
Now, one of the reasons email marketing gets the short shrift sometimes is the fact that it's not an easy gig to master. A good email campaign has to have the right balance of brand personality, readability, user friendliness, must be device / browser agnostic AND finally lead to conversions.
That's quite a tall order that not many brands master easily. Many throw in their towels entirely and steam ahead with other (simpler!) forms of digital marketing, while others plod along with more-boring-than-last-week's-news email campaigns.
If so many brands are getting email marketing wrong, who is getting it right? What yardsticks can the lesser email marketing mortals measure themselves against?
So I now present a definitive list of 18 of the best emails seen in the last couple of years. These fall into the following categories:
- Welcome emails
- Events and celebrations
- Product information
- Emails enticing shoppers back to abandoned carts
- Personalized messages from shop owners
- Usual newsletters
- Emails with animation
And the brands that have done this right include Ralph Lauren, Twitter, SlideShare and ly. Read on…
Welcome Emails
Often touted as a 'must-do' for brands of all shapes and sizes, very brands actually send out thoughtful welcome emails, if at all. The upside to this is, the ones that do put in an effort stand out in one's memory and making the customer bond that much warmer.
Slideshare gets many things spot on with this email. It personalizes the email with the name of the recipient – plus one for that. The layout is clean, uncluttered and easy on the eye – another big plus one. They educate the user about how to use Slideshare using simple graphics and illustrative examples. Home run overall.
RunKeeper takes the best qualities of SlideShare's welcome email and ups the bar a little more. It has the picture and a personalized welcome message from RunKeeper's CEO, Jason Jacobs, to give the user that extra special feeling. It goes on to explain the various ways to use RunKeeper in crystal clear copy and ends with a friendly and personal 'The RunKeeper Team' signoff.
Shopify keeps its welcome mails utilitarian, yet highly readable. It opens with information regarding your new account with them, your username, password, URL etc. They then give a detailed training program for a newbie website owner in the form of a step by step tutorial linking back to their website. They also offer direct contact details of a Shopify consultant to help the user take their first baby steps. What more could a new customer ask for?!
Anniversary / Milestone Celebration
Most brands like to make their anniversary a celebration that they can talk about (and hopefully generate sales from!). Anniversary blowout sales are not uncommon among leading retailers. But it does not always have to be about sales. Here's what Spotify and Jellymedia did on their anniversaries.
Spotify celebrated their first birthday in the US by saying a colorful and educational thank you to their American users. A hand-drawn comic that marked each milestone they achieved in the year was their via-media to convey their anniversary and indirectly brand themselves as a leader in music sharing apps (through all those impressive statistics). Talk about killing two birds with one stone!
Jelly Media is a UK based design consultancy that chose to throw a birthday party (what else!) on their 10th birthday. They actually invited their users to join them in the celebrations with this unique email invite.
Besides fulfilling its primary purpose of informing clients and inviting them to the party, the email displays Jelly Media's quirky design sensibilities and a snide sense of humor through the minimal copy.
E-commerce
This is the one industry that is most active with the newsletters and email marketing campaigns. Most of us receive at least one email per week from the retailers that we patronize, with that frequency going up to once a day in the case of some brands. So how does one keep such a high frequency communication fresh and interesting? Here's how.
Ralph Lauren keeps it bright and colorful with this t-shirt email. It showcases the product beautifully with the hero image and proceeds to use a t-shirt fabric as the background for the email itself too. The call to action buttons are neatly divided into "Men", "Women", "Baby" and so on, for complete clarity.
Crate&Barrel, a home furnishings retailer chooses to go deep into a single product category and designs an entire email around knives. The copy, the imagery and the layout all complement each other and go with the 'choppy' spirit of the email. With clear descriptions of their premium knives and a tempting 'regular price' vs. 'sale price' label, the email helps push the customer closer to the finish line.
British home goods and grocery retailer Ocado takes a fresh route to e-commerce emails. On the occasion of Chinese New Year, they sent out an elaborate email with a complete Chinese theme, made it interesting with trivia about Chinese New Year and offered a bunch of authentic Chinese recipes (the ingredients for which, of course have to be bought at Ocado) to ring in the new year.
A unique charitable venture started by eBay locally in California, Sell It Forward aimed to combine charity with e-commerce. They had an interesting model described in extremely clear steps in the email above. The copy urges the reader to be a Good Samaritan and send in their used clothing to eBay where they will sell what is 'saleable' on eBay and donate the rest to Goodwill. The email also panders to the reader's greedy side by offering them a tax deduction and half the sale proceeds. Interesting though it was, this was a concept that unfortunately died a silent death pretty quickly.
Abandoned Cart
Abandoned shopping carts are every online retailer's nightmare. While all of them suffer from shopping cart abandonment, very few do something about it. The smart ones set up triggered emails that are sent out when customers leave the store mid-purchase leaving items unpurchased in their shopping cart.
ThinkGeek speaks 'Geeklish' to their audience, with their email liberally littered with references to Mordor and Sauron and other geek trivia. The email is personalized (bonus point) and shows the exact item that the customer left mid-purchase. It also throws in a $10 discount to make the completion of the purchase even more attractive to the user.
restaurant, a restaurant deals site, approaches carts that are abandoned due to a stock out at their end, not a drop off at the customer's end with this email. They remember their customer's preferences and go back to the customer who faced a stock out situation with a new deal on the same / similar restaurant that the customer was searching for during their last visit. Like ThinkGeek, they too throw in a tempting deal with a clear CTA to close the deal quicker.
Personal Messages from the CEO
Once a user is hooked to your site, chances are they have done their homework and know a little bit about your company, its products and its people. What better high would a regular user have than to get a direct email in their inbox from the CEO of a company that they regularly buy from? A great way to build a closer connection with customers, many brands ranging from fashion to banking to software follow this approach.
Ralph Lauren makes another appearance with a beautiful New Year greeting with Ralph himself wishing users through a personalized message. No gimmicks, just plain class.
The CEO of software review site, TrustRadius reaches out to users for no special reason other than to say 'Hi'. There is a personalized email that looks like Bhagat typed it out himself on his email client, and it asks for time from the user for a one on one meeting. Even better, the email explicitly clarifies that it is not a sales pitch, but rather a relationship building step.
Business as Usual Newsletters
Not every email to a customer needs to 'Sell, sell, sell'. Many companies send out a fortnightly or monthly roundup of the latest goings-on at the company to keep the user in the loop. Or they offer simple advice to users, educate them about new products or services, in general try to stay on top of mind of all their customers.
Twitter's B2B newsletter is a clear reflection of its minimal brand aesthetic and simple user friendly design. This newsletter packs in a great deal of information – 6 different news items in one newsletter – but the generous white space in the design combined with minimal fonts and subtle colors, it does not overwhelm the reader.
Kickstarter's weekly roundup is similar to Twitter's, though with fewer subjects tackled at one go. Each project for which they seek funding from readers is described in detail to pique the reader's curiosity and encourage higher CTRs. Each section has an independent CTA button that makes tracking of data much easier later.
eROI has a distinctive fun, voice in its email communication. Another trademark aspect of their communication are the gorgeous graphics. It does not miss the mark here either. With this entire email revolving around 'Stale Marketing', they have used striking imagery to hit home the message with their copy adding to the fun quotient.
Animated Emails
With mobile taking over all marketing discussions – be it advertising, email marketing or even web design – animation is slowly losing ground to flat design and simple UX. But just because design sensibilities are turning towards cleaner looks, does not mean animation is dead. HTML5 can produce some interesting animated effects with the right coding chops.
True to its rep as an infographic's guru, ly creates a visual delight in the guise of a new year greeting email. With subtle animation used across the email, the playfulness of the entire communication comes alive. This is an example of animation that adds to the communication, and is not just another design distraction.
Uncommon Goods really delivers on the goods with this interesting email that intrigues and engages the user as much as it encourages them to make a purchase. The bold colors add an extra visual impact making the email a true animated delight.
In Closing
So this was a roundup of the best of the crop. But don't feel disheartened if your brand does not match up yet. You can always go the extra mile and create some wonderful stuff in-house or get a professional email marketing agency (my favorite for this is GetResponse for their great tool and hands-on attention to clients) to help you out with your email marketing.
Remember, it may beone of the oldest tools in a digital marketer's war chest, but it's also one of the most effective. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing delivers $67 of revenue for every $1.7 spent (2011 data).
So strap up and get going to build your own stellar email marketing campaigns. Who knows, your brand might just be in line to star in the next 'Email Marketing All Stars' list!
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-SL, Association VP