To celebrate the start of the new football season, we have created a league of the marketing emails sent by football clubs from the Barclays Premier League.

Read on to see if your team are going to make it into Europe, settle for mid table mediocrity or get relegated.
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The rise of the smartphone over the last few years has been phenomenal. It seems as though almost everyone has either an iPhone, Android or Blackberry.

Whilst most B2C email recipients do not read their emails on their smartphones, the numbers are growing. In fact, according to a recent survey by Knotice 1 in 5 B2C emails are being read on a mobile handset.

With this ever increasing mobile activity for emails, we thought it was time to give you some tips on creating a mobile friendly version of your marketing emails.

I personally think that its more time efficient to create an online mobile friendly version (similar to a weblink) rather than setting up two versions of each email, but the tips below are valid for both methods:

• Make sure that you are sending a text alternative to your HTML version.

• Recommended width of 320 pixels (Max 600 pixels), the list below is in order of market share:
  1. Iphone – 320 pixels
  2. Android – 480 pixels
  3. Blackberry – 360 pixels
• Stick to a single column layout and make sure the content is left aligned

• Keep images to a minimum and make sure they are small in size

• Automatic text resizing – many mobile devices automatically resize your fonts, which can impact on the design. Use the CSS rule below to disable this:
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

• Space your links out! It can be troublesome clicking the correct link on a touch screen so make it as easy as possible.

• Is your website mobile friendly? It’s all well and good optimising your email marketing for mobile devices but make sure the landing pages you are directing them to are as well.

• Test your work – make sure that you thoroughly test your web version before going live.
  There are some great tools out there for this, such as Litmus.

If you wish to discuss any of this with us, then please email the client services team or call us on 01327 355871.

Over the past few weeks retailers have starting to send out the first of their Christmas related marketing emails. Although I am sure to have a new favourite by the time I am stuffed full on mince pies and watching the “Vicar of Dibley” on Christmas day, I have decided to share a couple that have already caught my eye.

One good

I doubt this email is personalised, unless the baubles change depending on the films you have recently rented! The fact that LOVEFILM have put the effort into customising the decorations makes me feel it is worth paying attention to this email.

The message is clear and to the point. The “Visit Shop” call to action and the time limit tells the customer what they need to do and when to do it.

It could be better though. The entire email is made up of images, when it would have been easy to turn the wording into real text, making the message clear even if images were disabled.

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Have you ever looked into how many of your email list ‘never’ open your emails? From our experience it can be anything from 40% to 70% of your list that do not open any of your emails, in many cases for 6 months.
So what can you do with this massive potential goldmine? Here are the options:

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This webinar discusses the findings from our recent study into what consumers think of the marketing emails they receive. We had a great response on this topic with over 500 people registering for further information. The whitepaper can be viewed below.

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