This is the third post in getting maximum ROI from your email newsletter and email marketing efforts. The first post, Key Elements for Maximum Email Newsletter ROI - Email Newsletter, Email Marketing Podcast Part 1 focused on knowing what device a newsletter will first be seen on and part 2 dealt with color and content completeness.
This time we address "Your insights and advice about designing newsletters are based on studying more than 1400 Email newsletters, and then just 200 of those in depth.
What kind of patterns emerged?"
What emerged was that the most successful -- and success was defined by the newsletter authors -- newsletters followed some very common patterns. We actually found six basic "styles", if you will, that the most successful newsletters followed as far as layout, messaging, graphic element placement and so on. We call these styles "masks" because it didn't matter what content was behind these masks, so long as your newsletter was wearing one of these masks it was going to work.More significantly, different masks worked better based on audience, topic, distribution frequency. The one exception was the mask for mobile and handheld devices. Pretty much if you knew your audience would be oepning the newsletter on a handheld device there was only one mask to work with.
One group did something that I thought was very clever; they did some kind of programming that allowed the email to know what type of device it was being opened on. Don't ask me how it was done because I'm not a programmer, but this was genius. The newsletter used the same basic mask if it was opened on an handheld, laptop, desktop, etc. This was done so that people who opened it on a handheld could then find the same information in roughly the same position on their desktop. But what the newsletter designers did was show more of each item's story when the newsletter was being opened on a non-handheld device.
This was genius because people got hooked -- as I mentioned before -- using their handheld then got reeled in when the opportunity was there. Very nice.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- How to Design an E-Mail Newsletter to Maximize Your ROI: Part 1
- How to Design an E-Mail Newsletter to Maximize Your ROI: Part 2
- Email Newsletters, Anyone?
- Make sure your email newsletter is working
- SEND Glands Blog arc
- Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08
- New Communications Forum 2008, 22-25 April 08 at The Vineyard Creek Inn & Spa, Sonoma County CA
- San Francisco Emetrics Marketing Optimzation Summit, 4-7 May 08
- SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08
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» Key Elements for Maximum Email Newsletter ROI - Email Newsletter, Email Marketing Podcast Part 3b from BizMediaScience
Key Elements for Maximum Email Newsletter ROI Part 3b Expectations [Read More]
Tracked on: April 6, 2008 8:27 PM | Permalink to Trackback