Making Your Customers More Productive
Founder and principal of Slaughter Development recently passed along a few words of advice to email marketing copy editors. Write your content so that it can be consumed and understood quickly and easily.
“Making Your Customers More Productive”, a recent guest post written by Robby Slaughter for Delivra’s blog, focused in on why particular email marketing strategies could be more problematic than helpful. To help describe his thoughts, Slaughter’s post highlighted a recent experience of his own:
Just last week, I received an email marketing message about an upcoming seminar. All of the key information was helpfully displayed right in the body of the message, including the date, location, time and cost of the program. But when I went to copy and paste this text to add to my calendar, I discovered it was actually an image of the content! I had to manually reproduce the details by retyping them into my electronic day planner.
According to Slaughter, marketing messages are an expense not just to the marketer, but to the recipient as well. So, instead of incurring costs for design, composition, delivery, and support—as well as time and attention—it would be more beneficial to adopt a clearer, more personalized perspective on the process.
We can reduce the cost to subscribers by making email marketing messages easier to read and process. But we can also reduce the cost by giving them something for the courtesy of their time: special discounts, exclusive access, or personalized content. Doing so acknowledges the value of their efforts, which in turn, increases subscriber productivity.
To learn more about captivating target audiences through clear, productive communication, contact Slaughter Development today.
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Tags: copywriting, ease of use, editing, email, email marketing
July 18th, 2011 at 9:40 am
Well, as an individual who has designed multiple website an e-mail message design requires more time usually because it requires adequete testing. The reason for the image in place of text is because it is much easier for someone to create the ad inside of PhotoShop and then just create the simple image tag inside the HTML for the message. This method is used a fair amount because of all the rendering problems an e-mail message may encounter when being delivered to different e-mail applications.
It could also be from an inexperienced person designing the e-mail message. If the person designing the message does not understand how to properly design an e-mail message to be displayed properly in different e-mail applications then this method is a quick fix to prevent bad rendering of messages due to the multitude of application used to display e-mail messages.
This method could also be because the company wants to try and protect their content by forcing the person to manually type the ad. There are lots of companies that send messages this way daily, and a good example of a large company that does this kind of image use for e-mailing is TigerDirect.com. Their daily ads are image ads and have no text inside of the message except for a few areas at the bottom of the message. Although no matter what option you choose to design your message, careful testing and planning of the final message should be included for any e-mail marketing campaign.
There of course are various testing programs available to properly test and design your message’s. The proper coding of an e-mail message is very clean and clear, use old standard HTML, CSS rules and include your CSS rules directly into the tags, and while using a table format.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:11 am
Good points, Ty!
In the case of TigerDirect, the action that the email wants you to take is to click through. An image is reasonable in this case.
However, for event information, I need to immediately transfer the details to my personal calendar. This is something which I should be able to move via copy-and-paste.
A little forethought goes a long way!