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.

Click on the thumbnail images to view the emails in full.

1) Everton

Everton find themselves on top of the league with their well designed, content rich newsletter. The striking hero shot and lead story will keep fans coming back for more. Calls-to-action are impactful without being too crass and content blocks are well organised, making it easy for readers to consume the various different messages.

2) Sunderland

Close runners up – Sunderland, produce a tidy newsletter with many of the plus points of the Everton email and a few more besides. Text to image ratio is good, including free text article headers, meaning that fans will be able to read email content before downloading images (always nice to see that). It also contains a “match pack” providing fans with useful information on the upcoming fixtures, including a travel guide and how the “Black Cats” faired on previous meetings between the two teams.

3) Arsenal

The Arsenal newsletter is very simple and uncluttered. The one column structure makes for easy reading and the absence of any garish adverts makes you feel the Arsenal marketing team care more about building good relationships with it’s fans as opposed to simply monetising the email. There is however a well placed call-to-action for the clubs online video player.

4) Tottenham

The Tottenham newsletters are very long, but contains a good mix of news, game highlights, products from the club shop and eye-catching social links. Although there is a lot of information contained in this email, it is still quite easy to read through, using a simple grid layout to good effect.

5) Chelsea

Although I am not a huge fan of the Chelsea emails, there are a lot worse examples in the league, so they make 5th spot by default. Their placement of imagery makes it difficult to know where to start reading first. Their content is too reliant on “match reports” and lacks any articles fans would actually be interested in reading.

6) Fulham

The Fulham newsletter looks like a badly formatted Word document, more than a promotional email from a club playing in the richest football league in the World. With a bit more attention to detail it has the makings of an email the Fulham fans would really enjoy receiving. Their hero shots on the other hand are of a good standard.

7) Aston Villa

Aston Villa send shorter emails than any other team in the league. These emails should prove successful in achieving click-thrus on desired links, as they often only contain two calls-to-action and not much else. These emails are 100% image, but if fans download the images they are presented with a pleasant looking email.

8) Man Utd

The Man Utd emails contain too much information and I doubt fans would read even half of it. It does contain some nice features however, such as a Q&A session with a different Man Utd player each issue. The Man Utd marketing team should do a bit more testing, as half the images fail to show in Gmail and this has been the case for a number of months now.

9) Liverpool

Liverpool used to send out a newsletter with the standard links to highlights, match reports and so on, but the only time fans seem to receive emails now, is when the club want to get some money out of them. This is short sighted, more needs to be done to nurture relationships with subscribers.

10-18) Stoke et al…

Nine of the twenty teams in the league (Stoke, Blackburn, Bolton, West Brom, Wigan, Wolves, Swansea, QPR and Norwich) send out the same generic emails, generated from the back end of their almost identical websites. It obviously does not matter if Stoke’s emails are almost identical to Swansea’s, but the lack of effort is evident and this will likely be reflected in the responsiveness of their respective subscriber databases.

19) Man City

No email sign up form can be found (by me anyway) on the Man City website, so it does not look like they are utilising email any more. This is a real shame because if their emails were anything like their website, they would be great.

20) Newcastle

Although Man City do not send emails, they are saved from bottom spot because sending no emails is better than sending the sort of emails that Newcastle send. Newcastle fans must feel rather used and unvalued, when they receive emails from their club, only to find it contains no information at all about Newcastle United, but is simply trying to sell them cheap electricity. Shocking!

The season has only just started, so there is plenty of time for teams at the foot of the table to turn things around.

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.

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.

One not so good

After half an hour of scouring iStock in search of an image that doesn’t look tacky, overused or clichéd, I start to feel a little light headed and sick of looking at my computer. This email makes me feel the same way.

In contrast to the LOVEFILM email the Woolworths email makes me feel unimportant as a customer and as if I am not worth the effort. This email looks like it could have been an image taken straight from iStock that has just had “Woolworths.co.uk” stuck on top of it.

There is no clear call to action, just the generic phrase “Christmas gifts for everyone”. Who cares! Isn’t that obvious?

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:

Do nothing

It takes time and effort to alter your strategy so even if these people are inactive and costing you money it might cost you more money to change your strategy.

And what if they come back to you in the future? Perhaps now is just not the right time for them.

Bin them

An alternative approach is to take them out of your list. It costs money to send to these people and out of all of your subscribers these are the most likely to report your email as spam.

There is a chance that these inactive subscribers will start responding, so it might be appropriate to keep them on the list, and perhaps just send to them less frequently.

My rule of thumb is this – if your emails are for frequent purchases, take the subscriber out – they are clearly not engaged. If however your offering is a seasonal purchase (Holidays, insurance or even tied to annual events such as Christmas or Valentines) then it is a different scenario, so keep sending but introduce triggered messages around key dates associated with the purchase (anniversary of purchase, renewal, welcome home from holiday) rather than focussing on generic one size fits all newsletters every week of the year.

Change approach

Just changing your style will reactivate people.

Instead of sending a long newsletter, try a simple ‘sorry we missed you’ message, discount voucher or even just change the ‘from’ name.

No matter what you change only a small amount of inactive subscribers will open your message – it’s always difficult to get subscribers back once they have disengaged from your email.

But if disengaged subscribers make up 50% of your list then the numbers should stack up to make your efforts worthwhile.

Of course prevention is better than cure. Perhaps a more important question should be what do we do to stop subscribers disengaging in the first place, but that is a topic for a different blog post.

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.

If you would like to read our full findings please download the whitepaper.

You can also register to be notified of all future webinars here.