Why is Email Marketing Newsletter Content and Image Balance Important?

By Heather Truitt

There is nothing like opening an email on your computer or phone and seeing the following screen:

The average person received 90 emails per day in 2016. As digital marketers, we want to ensure that our messaging stands out in the crowded email-marketing space. Unfortunately, email marketing messages such as the above, that rely on only images and no words, are far more likely to miss their mark. Unless the email has a subject that has captured my attention, this email would immediately get deleted. In fact, I might even take the extra minute to unsubscribe.

Using an image is a great way to grab attention in your email marketing, but adding text content that supports the image is a best practice. That way, if your image doesn’t display correctly in your recipients’ inboxes – showing only a message to “right click here to download image” – they still will have an idea what your message is about.

You are selling yourself and your company short by not including any text-based messaging along with an image in your email marketing content. By taking a shortcut and using only images, more of your email recipients will unsubscribe from your email marketing database.

By balancing the image-to-text ratio in your email marketing messages, however, you will create content that engages more readers. For example, take a look at this Netflix email marketing message:

Netflix has included a large, attention-grabbing image at the top of the email, and below, they have added text content that supports the image. The image immediately presents the promotion, and the text content provides more insight. Even if you don’t “load the images” for this email, you will still understand the message. At the bottom of the message, Netflix add two action buttons (if you need help constructing an effective call-to-action, check out our recent blog post).

Below are a few email marketing best practice tips:

• Test, test, test, test, and do another test before you schedule or send your email blast. I can’t tell you how many emails I receive and just ask myself… Why? Twice last week, I received emails that were either mis-formatted, missing images, or contained broken links. Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but these were very simple things that could have been avoided if a round of testing was incorporated into the email marketing process as a quality control measure.
• Make sure you optimize your images. People don’t have the patience to wait for large images to load in an email. A particular daily email publication that I follow often features vintage artwork and vintage graphic design images of historical significance, but it sometimes takes 2 minutes for the entire email to load. Make sure you are saving your images so the file size is less than 50kb. That will ensure that they load more quickly for your recipients.
• Test on multiple platforms. This is something that we do in-house at Furia Rubel, where some of us work on Macs and some of us are on PCs. Sometimes there is a world of difference between what you see on the screen and what your coworker sees. You can also subscribe to a platform like Litmus, where you can test and view different platforms and versions all in a simple interface. 

The appropriate balance of images and text ensures that your recipients are more engaged in your marketing messaging and are more likely to click-through your call-to-action links.

Email Marketing Matures with Litmus and Microsoft Partnership

By Heather Truitt

For 10 years of my career, I’ve supported clients with email marketing. No matter the message, there is always one factor that is critical to all email marketers: will the email present well in Outlook?

Recently, while working with a coworker to finalize an urgent client email alert, we experienced an issue with Outlook. The eAlert looked exactly as I had designed it in my Outlook, but it did not display the logo properly on my coworker’s screen.  As soon as I saw a screenshot of her display, I knew what needed to be fixed.

If you’re an experienced email marketer, one screenshot usually will provide you with enough information to solve the issue. Outlook display issues can range from not displaying a background color or an unexpected border around an image with a link to fonts displaying improperly and images showing up with incorrect justifications. In fact, virtually thousands of things can go wrong when designing for email marketing.

I recently participated in an “Industry-Changing News” live stream by Litmus. Litmus is an email marketing service that provides access to view your email on various platforms including Mac, PC, Mail, all Outlook platforms and more. This service is invaluable to email marketers and developers because you can log in and view the email in all the platforms. I easily could have spotted the Outlook issue I described above if I had been able to test it in Litmus or other email testing and delivery tools.

Here is a list of some other email testing websites that evaluate email messages for design and content, including spam scores:

• Aurea, which acquired Lyris (http://www.aurea.com/products/email-marketing)
• Email on Acid (https://www.emailonacid.com/)
• Email Reach (http://www.emailreach.com/)
• Email Spam Test (http://www.emailspamtest.com/)
• Postmark (http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/)
• PutsMail (https://putsmail.com/)

In addition to hearing more about the Litmus platform, about 15 minutes through the live stream, a special speaker from Microsoft was introduced. Caitlin Hart announced that Litmus is partnering with Microsoft to #MakeEmailBetter, the details of which can be viewed online at https://litmus.com/microsoft-partnership.  The announcement comes after 15 years of having to create specific work-arounds just to make sure an email displays properly in Outlook.

With a team of Microsoft engineers working with Litmus, I believe we will see some great things for email marketing in the future, things we were not capable of doing via email before.

Survey Says…Business Executives Love Email Newsletters

By Laura Powers

At Furia Rubel, we spend a fair amount of time creating monthly and bimonthly email newsletters for our clients. We were intrigued by a recent survey performed by digital news outlet, Quartz, confirming that newsletters can be one of the most effective tools to maintain client relationships or keep colleagues informed. If done right, your newsletters could develop an engaging subscriber foundation, and potentially cultivate suitable leads and customers.

Email newsletters as a primary news source

Quartz’s survey states that 60 percent of business executives interviewed say email newsletters are one of the first three news sources they read in the morning. For keeping up on the latest industry news, 56 percent of executives said an email newsletter is their primary source of information. 75 percent of executives surveyed said they spend at least 30 minutes a day consuming the news. Why not spend a few of those minutes looking at business newsletters?

Sharing newsletter content among peers

The survey documented the changing ways, people ranging from managing directors to c-level executives, consume and share content – despite the widespread use of mobile devices. Content sharing of relevant news items that allow the original distributor access to and ease of sharing is important. So important – that 91 percent of business executives surveyed say they would share work-related news with others.

Understanding your audience is the key to relevant content

One of the biggest problems with email newsletters is that they are often disorganized and nonspecific because they are featuring news from every aspect of your business. PR stories or blog posts could be going next to random upcoming events – what a mess! Find a strategic solution for content placement by brainstorming ways to balance the content of your newsletter to be 90 percent informative and at least 10 percent promotional.

People are on a tight schedule; meaning everything they see has to be concise with such limited time on their hands. While they may want to hear from you, there is only so much information they’ll want to read before tuning out. Unless you actually have interesting news about your product, service, or company, leave out as much as you can of the self-promotional aspects and instead:

• Offer something different from those of your competitors
• Provide high quality content relevant to your audience
• Include positive events in which the company participates 
• Reflect on recent happenings in your industry

Where to promote a company newsletter 

Not sure where to advertise your email newsletter? Below are a few placement hacks we recommend:

• During client communication 
• Announce the arrival of the next newsletter on your website
• At trade / industry events
• Introduce the newsletter to new business contacts
• Position a link to the most recent newsletter in your email signature

Please feel free to share your thoughts on email newsletters with us in the comments section below. Does your company use them? What do you feel is valuable to include in company newsletters?

Diary of a Bull$hit Explainer

By Gina F. Rubel

#148441660 / gettyimages.com

How often do you have to explain something to a client, family member, colleague or friend that you know is bullshit? Please forgive the language, but there really is no other term for it. It is what it is, as they say!

Today, I actually thought to add “bullshit explainer” to my bio. It disgusts me that there are so many marketing scams and schemes out there, run by people and companies who are just trolling for victims. In fact, Snopes.com has dedicated a whole section of its website to Marketing 101 urban legends.

As a result, I’ve decided to keep a diary this week of bullshit that we come across regularly, that otherwise would victimize the unsuspecting.

Those “fake” Yellow Page listings: Every few months, we receive a letter in the mail that says it’s time to renew our Yellow Page listings. If you get one of these, be suspicious.

The big dogs in Yellow Page advertising, both print and online, have thousands of well-trained sales representatives who call on their clients annually for renewal. Sales reps often are compensated based on new or increased sales and renewals, so they don’t simply rely on snail mail. If you get one of those letters, question it. Don’t just put it in your bookkeeper’s “to pay” file. That is exactly what bullshit companies are hoping you’ll do.

Google’s latest unsolicited analytics, “Your personalized Analytics report”: This week, we received an unsolicited email from “Google” which provided us with analytics for our blog, ThePRLawyer.com. The analytics were so nebulous that we couldn’t help but deduct that they are being distributed simply to increase ad word sales.

There is no time frame for the analytics. They use terms like “bounce rate” in bold as a scare tactic. In fact, when you read the fine print, “bounce rate” means “how many people leave your site without visiting any other pages on your site.” For a blog, that’s not necessarily bad. If you are driving traffic to a particular story that interests the reader and they read it and move on, you have accomplished your goal.

Here, bounce rate is not synonymous with the “bounce rate” of electronic newsletters. Couldn’t they come up with a better descriptive phrase? They came up with the name “Google,” didn’t they?

#143522526 / gettyimages.com

Bogus online listing about to expire: Almost weekly, our clients get emails stating that their “listing is about to expire.” When you investigate further, there was never any listing to begin with.

The most recent notice received by one of our clients was from a low-quality website where our client had not been listed in the first place. Scamming companies such as these hope that people, such as our clients, will click on those listings which will, in turn, boost the flow of internet traffic to their website. If the visitor then creates an actual listing for her company on that website, the scammer has benefitted in two ways.

Feel free to add your bullshit marketing stories here, too. I’m sure there’s more where these came from.