Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

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.

Endless chains of emails are sent between those giving feedback and the person making the changes. This person needs to make sure they do not miss any changes, while trying to decipher ambiguous change requests.

To address this problem, Emailcenter have introduced a tool to streamline the feedback process and improve communication. The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key features:

• Provide feedback by drawing on top of the email – remove ambiguity with visual annotations, so everyone is clear what the feedback means.
• Each comment is easily identifiable to the region and commenter, helpfully stored in one location, to make it easy to review all comments.
• Comments are archived for auditing purposes.

To understand how the Collaboration tool can make your email team more efficient, call the Support team on 01327 355871.

The newest member of the Emailcenter team (Simon) talks about the main issues to consider when trying to get your marketing emails to render correctly in Outlook 2007.

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?