Murder He Wrote: The Invisible Email Marketing Message

Posted by Scott Cohen On May 24, 2011 in story time I 0 Comments

I read a book long ago about a murder that takes place in a neighborhood on a day when people were out in their yards, lots of people coming and going, yet no one saw a thing.  They didn’t notice any strange cars or people in the neighborhood.  Nothing out of the ordinary stood out.  It seemed almost impossible that not a single person saw the killer.

As the story evolved, we learned that the killer had actually been seen by almost everyone that day. A few had even talked to the killer.  The culprit wasn’t a neighbor or friend—it was the mailman.  You see, because the mailman was in the neighborhood almost every day, people forgot they ever saw him.  He became part of the landscape, part of the everyday noise we mostly forget and thus became invisible.

Your email marketing message can have the same problem when it comes to the recipient’s inbox and how they actually view your creative.

It seems with some Daily Deal email, the recipient can become blind to those email over time.  There it is every day like clockwork, same time, and same template layout.  It can become invisible after a while.  Even if they open it, if the layout is consistently the same, the content can provide less of an impact. In essence it becomes invisible.

The same can happen to weekly or monthly email marketing newsletters.

So what can you do? Consider testing these points to your inactive/non-converting recipients:

• Relevance: Are you delivering what they asked for?
• Day and Time you send your email
• Subject lines
• Add/edit and test pre-header text and include link to desired Call-to-Action
• Test new creative templates – keeping your branding at the top for easy recognition
• Review past sends for upticks in conversions and determine the reasons for why they performed so well
• Test multiple preference center layouts and let the user choose their frequency
• Review your segmentation rules and make sure you aren’t over-segmenting for offers that might have more general appeal than you think
• Consider more offers and calls-to-action (CTAs) per email
• Consider less offers and CTAs per email
• Change color, size and placement of CTAs
• Survey your recipients and ask them what changes they’d like and be prepared to implement changes
• Change location of Social Share icons and links

Testing any one of these points could give your email marketing a boost.  Make sure to track the changes and tests so you know which worked.  Keep testing as your list grows because your audience preferences will change over time depending on growth demographics.

Think outside the box and don’t become invisible to your subscribers.

Cheers, Chris