The GraphicMail Email Marketing Quiz

Do you ever wonder whether you are creating a positive, professional impression when you email your subscribers? Or do you think that they might actually be shrieking in horror whenever they see your mail pop-up in their inbox?

It's time to find out...

Take our new Email Marketing Quiz to see how you grade as an email marketer.

Win with T-Art’s Status Update T-Shirt Innovation

The GraphicMail marketing team has recently made the acquaintance of T-art, a group of 7 young and enterprising University of Cape Town students who’s innovative new product (a write-on wash-off “status update t-shirt”) made such an impression on us that we decided to help nurture their success by offering our full support as an ESP. They will now be making use of our mobile and email services to raise awareness about their product and create a buzz around their special promotions and competitions.

The t-shirts, which appear similar in design to update and/or tweet boxes on social networks, have a white text box area (made from a special material) where you can write or draw your thoughts on for all the world to see, and then simply wipe off with a wet cloth once you’ve thought of your next status update.

T-art aims to ignite a creative expression that transcends culture and conventional social platforms:

“This is an innovative and engaging form of interaction where quirky words, inspiring quotes, and sports scores can be written onto your t-shirt and immediately wiped off again. Now there is nothing stopping you from wearing your favorite t-shirt EVERY day! Imagine a free space to promote your business or to unite your colleagues with the exchange of 'walking' ideas. Imagine a 'walking' white board that you can travel with where ever you are...the opportunities are limitless. We have created a product and a platform that allows you to express yourself and be your own ‘brand’. It’s the first write-on wash-off t-shirt in the world!”

GraphicMail is providing T-art with both a free mobile campaign and a free email marketing account as a platform for their communications and product promotions.

Kicking off on Friday the 2nd of September, GraphicMail is running a mobile marketing campaign with them for the duration of the Rugby World Cup, to help promote the T-art Springbok Supporter competition:

Entrants need send a picture of themselves wearing a T-art Springbok supporter shirt with an inspirational ‘status’ message written on it to the T-art Facebook fan page.

The best picture will win the grand prize of a bar tab to the value of R1000 at Forester’s Arms, in Newlands Cape Town!  The competition kicks off tomorrow and will close on 30th September 2011.

To keep up to date with the competition and developments at T-art, subscribe to the mobile and email campaigns by contacting them via the T-art website via their Facebook page or by including all your details when you sign on for the half price national T-art deal on Groupon.

You can also find them selling the ‘status update’ t-shirt every Saturday at the Bay Harbour market in Hout Bay.

So order yours today and show your support for the Boks and our proudly South African entrepreneurial spirit!

“As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.” – Donald Trump

Optimising Email for Mobile

Why direct marketers should optimise their HTML emails for mobile; and how

Email marketers are constantly evolving and adapting to a changing digital landscape and finding new ways to demonstrate that their primary communications medium is not just a one-trick pony. A strong online presence and strategy has proven to be the keys to communication and marketing success in this digital age, and with the recent growth in mobile capability and market-share, marketers are scrambling to get into the mobile game.

Mobile is here

Mobile is the technology with the highest penetration rate globally, and with smart phones, mobile email marketing is going to become increasingly important. With that said, the term “mobile email campaign” is a misnomer. The first and foremost concept email marketers need to embrace is that there is really no such thing as a mobile email campaign in the strictest sense.  Email was the first successful method of Internet communication and it's still the one most people depend on. Emails are sent to an email address and it is the recipient alone who decides whether to read that email on their mobile phone or on their desktop.

Consumers’ preferences can and will change based on what they are doing and what technologies they have at their disposal at any given moment. So people are reading emails on mobile devices, right now, even if the marketer doesn't know about it or plan for it.

“It is estimated that 98 percent of email marketers have no idea whether their emails are being read on mobile devices and, as a result, are missing the unique opportunity to communicate with their customers with emails that are both content- and design-appropriate for today’s on-the-go consumers.” - Deirdre Baird, CEO of Pivotal Veracity, Email Deliver Optimisation Solutions.

Add to that the continuous growth of mobile as a preferred method of multichannel communication and you soon realise that email marketers must embrace not only the unique rendering and functionality aspects of the mobile phone and tablets, but must also get smarter in terms of understanding the platform preferences and habits of their customers in order to remain relevant. Relevancy is the king, but relevancy doesn't end with the type of content you deliver; it also extends to how that content is delivered, and mainly if your timing is right. This cannot be stressed enough when it comes to mobile email.

Ultimately, whether marketers track it or not, they can safely assume that a significant portion of their emails are being read on mobile phones.

Therefore, optimising emails for cross-platform performance is the largest, but most necessary challenge for email marketers. One in ten consumers are utilising their primary personal email accounts on handheld devices, according to Forrester Research, and that percentage is constantly increasing.

Each marketer's mobile audience is going to vary in size (the number of subscribers viewing it on mobile devices) - and so is complexity (the different types of mobile devices that are in use). The amount of customers reading email on mobile devices varies dramatically, sometimes even between audience segments. So will you optimise for mobile when 3 percent of your opens are generated by mobile devices, or wait until your mobile views hit 30 percent? This is really up to your company and you should actively determine where your thresholds are for balancing user-experience with email campaign ROI. But as a rule of thumb, blind-faith optimisation can do no harm.

Design sensitivities for Mobile

Regardless, operating as a direct marketer, you obviously want to be able to get the best results from your marketing efforts, but at the same time it’s not a free-for-all and you can’t necessarily do whatever and however you wish in order to gain customers and make sales. Marrying email and mobile strategies together can be a complicated process. However one simple step is to test to make sure the email renders on all mobile devices. If your customer base is predominately a BlackBerry-carrying one, as we do have here in South Africa (particularly in the “Generation Y” market - according to the Generation Next 2011 Brand Survey awards by HDI Youth Marketers) it becomes even more important.

Designing for the mobile web is nothing particularly new. Although it seems that mobile style-sheets haven't proven to be quite as popular in email, despite the advantages they provide to device-based viewing. Also keep in mind that some devices are more adept at handling HTML email. Apple and Android devices generally display HTML emails intact, making the optimisation requirements minimal. The use of these HTML-friendly devices for the consumption of mobile email and web is statistically higher, simply due to their near-seamless simplicity. In general however, viewing HTML email on a mobile device can be fiddly and even on the iPhone it's possible to have text automatically rescaled to a size that's nearly unreadable or in a way that can botch your design. And so, optimising your emails for the mobile environment can be essential, though laborious.

Each and every mobile device has its own unique standard settings to take into account. BlackBerry devices, for example, don't display images by default, whereas iPhones and Android devices currently do. A mobile screen is small - at first glance no one’s going to see much of your email newsletter, especially if it’s designed to fit a PC screen instead. Some initial suggestions to accommodate the sparser screen include having single column design layouts, tighter subject lines, bigger font size, greater image vs. text balance considerations, bigger buttons for links and an overall narrower message width. Wide emails often require horizontal scrolling, especially when there's a large image involved. So keep it top-down, not left-right. The correct use of images is one of the biggest considerations when designing an email for the mobile screen. Furthermore, consider download of data/ charges to the user and make sure images are light to ensure speedy and comfortable viewing.

Typically, a mobile screen is about 350px by 380px, but of course this varies and will continue to vary. iPhones are an email marketer’s ideal as they usually fit the emails to the screen size automatically. However this is not true for all devices and it means that, if your email is designed for a larger screen, your subscriber will have to do some tedious scrolling to get to the other side of the email.

Keep the HTML design of your email simple - the simpler it is, the more likely it is to render well in mobile browsers. Additionally, we all know the importance of a powerful subject line and nothing’s changed when it comes to mobile. Your subject line is your first attempt at hooking your reader and if it succeeds, they’ll open your email. Other than that, the majority of textbook email marketing tips and best practices still apply to mobile email design. Remember that good design is always backed by responsible coding and effective layout. If you are designing for the user and device in mind, you will be in good shape. Prepare for blocked images by inserting ALT text into your emails and remember to design your layout so that your call to action is clearly visible. Also bear in mind that mobile screens are modest, and that clicking on links may be difficult. And as always, conduct a test send to check that all coding and links are rendering correctly before you send the email to your subscribers.

In summary, smart phones like the Apple iPhone, Android and others are on the ascent, these have large, easy-to-navigate screens (in mobile terms) however the trusty older mobile generation with Internet access is still the predominant phone; so always design your emails to enable easy up-down navigation, with text that wraps to the width of the mobile screen.

Include a text version with an HTML and a click-to-call link

Many smart phone users don't like to download the rest of email messages when prompted. For that reason, marketers should keep their messages very short and include a link to connect recipients directly to the company if recipients want more information right away. Additionally, many older mobile devices can't show HTML versions of an email, so it's a good idea to include a text version of your message as well. The default setting on the phone will recognize which version to show its user. And when it comes to links, be smart about placement. Layout here is very important. If you want someone to click on a link, don’t bury it with other links. Set it apart and make it accessible, which is especially important on touch screens. Once you are more progressed with rolling out mobile-optimised email campaigns, think about surveying your subscribers and find out if they would prefer to be provided with a mobile version option at sign up.

Mobile use and prevalence

In the case of mobile email and mobile marketing, marketers need to catch up to consumer behaviour given the wildfire adoption curve of smartphones. The 2010 Mobile Year in Review report indicated that checking personal email is the most popular mobile internet activity with mobile users. The use of mobile email is clearly linked to the availability of email-ready mobile devices, particularly smartphones.

An alternative to all-out optimisation for every newsletter send is to let customers request mobile versions via a mobile subscription option on your website, in addition to getting counts on mobile open rates and click-throughs from your Email Marketing Service Provider.

The eMarketer Daily has reported recently that 31% of mobile users check their emails on their mobile phone more than four times daily; 32% check 1-3 times a day. These days the odds are strong that your marketing email is being read on a mobile instead of a desktop. In fact, from October 2010 until December 2010 13.36% of email opens were opened on a mobile. The new mobile web is going to be infinitely larger than the current web, with more sites, more interactions, more transactions and basically more volume than the current web.

The 2011 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona hosted more than 60,000 international visitors, with companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo!, Nokia, Vodafone and Acer in attendance. According to Rafael Biancardi, the MD of GraphicMail Spain, 95% of the exhibitions were focused on smartphones and tablets. Key findings from the Congress include that Bluetooth is dead and so is typical bulk SMS marketing. Instead, it’s time for marketers to focus on sending SMS texts that include links to online or mobile sites, apps and utilities, and make their email newsletters mobile-friendly as a general principle.

Three important take-aways for email marketers:

1. Since images download, and the mobile browser renders to the ratios built for a PC-based client, the use of large masthead banners or logos at the top may contort the content or push the actual headline and call to action way below the fold. As all good marketers know, user experience matters, so keep visuals noticeable but contained.

2. Develop emails for cross-platform performance. That is, the world consumers operate in. Emails need to be minimally designed to function and render properly across various platforms.

3. Email marketers also need to track and understand the unique preferences and habits of consumers as it relates to time, place and platform bias. By so doing, marketers dramatically improve their ability to target and engage followers with relevant information and worthy promotions in an increasingly cluttered world.

How to set up a Facebook newsletter subscription form with iFrame

There’s no point in having the perfect email newsletter without having anyone to send it to. First, you need to establish a list of contacts, and this begins with building a subscription form that lets interested people sign up to your email communications.

These days clients and prospects are very likely to be searching for you on social networks. Therefore, your company’s Facebook Page is an ideal perch for your email sign-up form, since it is highly visible and accessible.

In times past, if you wanted to add widgets to your Facebook Fan Page, you needed to use the Static Facebook FBML application (Facebook Markup Language). However, Facebook recently announced that they would be discontinuing their support of FBML in favor of iFrame. This is actually good news from a marketing point of view as FBML was restrictive about what was allowed within Facebook.

GraphicMail investigated how setting up a custom tab on Facebook using iFrame can be done - which can be difficult if you’re new to email and social media marketing.

Here then is our complete, foolproof step-by-step guide to building Facebook subscription forms via iFrame:

Action Summary:

• Create subscription form on your GraphicMail account.
• Grab the form’s HTML code.
• Add it to your Facebook page via the iFrame tab.
  

PHASE 1: Create a subscription form on your GraphicMail account

Log in to your GraphicMail account and you will see a list of subscription form options on the left navigation:

Subscription Form
•    Subscription form wizard
•    Setup Form
•    Put it on your website
•    Autoresponders

The easiest and quickest option is, of course, to use the subscription from wizard.

Step 1 - Set up the design of your subscription form

Once you’re in the wizard, you are given a few basic building blocks to work with:

• Logo: Select the image you want to use as the logo for your subscription form and upload it to the top of the form.

• Background Color: Pick a color for the subscription form background.

• Text: Choose the style, size and the color for the text on your subscription form.

• Subscription Form (text link) buttons: Choose the style, size and the color for the text links on your subscription form.

Once you are done with these, you can preview your subscription form and keep tweaking the above steps until you have the most desirable product.

(Note: If you are looking for more flexibility in the design that the form can be further customised via the “Subscription Form Setup” option.)

Step 2 - Choose your main subscription list(s)

At the next screen you are about to define how and which lists your subscribers will be signing up to through this form. These options are:

- New subscribers will be saved to a single mailing list

- New subscribers will have the option to subscribe to multiple mailing list.
- Select the existing mailing lists to display on your subscription form

Naturally, pick whichever option works best for you.

(Note: New mobile numbers will be saved to your mobile list)

Step 3 - Choose the fields to display on your subscription form

Here you decide what information you want from news subscribers by ticking the relevant fields and sections to be displayed in your subscription form.

You are able to choose from:
- Entry Name
- Email Address
- Mobile Number
- First name
- Last name
- Occupation
- Industry

(Note: In the advanced mode Address Book, you can customise your address book format further (e.g. change field labels, create fields with your own dropdown menus, checkboxes and so on.)

And with that, your subscription form is finished.

PHASE 2: Placing the subscription form on your Facebook page

When you place a subscription form onto your website, you have 3 different options available; however for our purposes, please select the last option in the list, namely: “Embed the entire form onto your website”.

Step 1 – Capturing and embedding the HTML code for your form

On the next page we can generate either javascript or non-javascript code for your subscription form (please select the Non-javascript version).

Copy the HTML in the text area (temporarily into notepad) which you will later be pasting to your Facebook page, enabling visitors to subscribe to your newsletters.

Step 2 - Installing IFrame and navigating the HTML code interface

Go to your Facebook page. In the top search bar, search for “Static IFrame Tab”, choose the page you want to add the application to and then hit the install button.

Once the installation is done, click on the “Static IFrame tab” on the left navigation.

There will now be a screen with the following options available to you:
- “Edit Tab Content”
- “Edit Tab Name”
- “Set Default Landing Tab”
… and more.

For now, click on “Edit Tab Content”.

There are a lot of options available here that may be altogether confusing, however we can very simply and directly proceed to add our form since we’ve already acquired the HTML version when we created it on the GraphicMail backend.

To insert your HTML code:

• Select the option to work in HTML mode.

• Copy your subscription form code from notepad.

• In the large text area, paste your subscription form HTML so that it sits in between the following statements in the code: 

           <body>

           </body>

 • Scroll down and click “Save”. Your subscription form is now loaded onto your Facebook page and ready to implement. Now, just a few housekeeping tasks are needed before the operation is finished.

Step 3 - Setting up  your subscription form

At the moment your subscription form has been assigned with a default name. It’s important that you change this to something more prominent that will make it clear to your fans and followers that this tab contains your newsletter subscription form. For example; something obvious and instantly noticeable, such as “Monthly Newsletter Sign-Up”.

And so, to change the name of your subscription form:

•    Go to your wall, click on “Edit Page” on the right menu, then click on “Apps” on the left menu.
•    Scroll down to “Static IFrame Tab” and click on “Edit settings”.
•    A pop-up window will appear which allows you to enter a custom tab name.
•    Once you’re done typing, click on “save” and then “okay”.
•    Next click on “Manage Permissions” tab on the left menu.
•    Go down to the “default landing tab” option and select the tab you have just created (it should be listed as the name you have just given it, making it very visible.)

That’s it!  Congratulations! Your custom subscription form will now display on your Facebook page.

From the “Manage Permissions” screen, click on “View Page” to take you back to your page.

And voila! You will notice that the name of your subscription form landing page is now displaying as an item in the left menu. Fans and friends on Facebook are now just a few keystrokes away from signing up to your mailing list.

If you are uncertain about whether your form is displaying and working correctly, feel free to have a third party look at your page and sign up for via his or her own personal Facebook account as a test.

Final Note: Usually one would need to host a subscription form on a separate server in order to get the image to be available for display to all viewers (such as when you load images onto a HTML newsletter), but since you’ve created the subscription form on your GraphicMail account, the image is hosted by default on our server and pulls through directly to your Facebook page.

Top 6 content tips for Mobile

When creating mobile content, keep in mind what it represents.

For many users, their phone is the headquarters of their lifestyle. It’s a connection to friends, family and co-workers. Users personalize the background, download apps that fit their needs and look up information on the go. It’s by their side 24/7 and their connection to the world. With mobile marketing campaigns, you don’t have the luxury of leading up to anything and writing for mobile means distilling down web copy even further than before based on the following six criteria:

1 - Be Goal-Oriented

The best mobile content cuts copy to a minimum and only spews out the necessities - necessities being what your target should see during those fateful two seconds that determine a click. Create content focused around your goals and avoid going on tangents.

2 - Use Strong Headlines

Mobile copy should be very much to the point, while sacrificing as little power as possible. Get an idea across quickly. Headlines will have to fit on one line, avoid wrapping text, and have to be quick and clear so that users get the point right away, but with enough encouragement for them to continue reading and to also share the content with others.

3 - Screen Sizes Vary

When writing copy for the web, space on the page allows for visual cues that can draw the readers’ eye towards the marketer’s objectives. Writers have to place extra consideration on being extremely direct, clear and succinct, because presentation options will likely be limited or even inconsistent across devices and platforms. Think within the confines of a small screen.

4 - Prioritize Your Content

It’s important to put the most important content up front. Think about how readers will browse the content. Most of the time, people are only going to read headlines.

5 - Test Your Content

Find out what works best by testing two versions of your copy. A/B testing tools allow marketers to pit two versions of the same content against each other. The software splits users into multiple groups, showing different versions of the content to each one, and then automatically selects and implements the content that results in the most conversions, whether that is click-through rate, time on site, and so on.

6 - Refine your SMSs

With a limit of 160 characters, SMS is a challenging communications vessel. Calls to action should be kept simple and concise and you have to think very clearly about how to phrase your message; focusing mainly on whether it can be easily understood, remembered and acted upon. Make your point in as few words as possible without missing out on any important information. Events, new launches, urgent actions and relevant successes are all great message topics for an SMS message.

Readers on the go want bite-sized information that will serve them in that very moment. Acknowledging and embracing that fact is key to successful copy-writing for mobile.

For more useful advice on Mobile Marketing; such as crucial design sensitivities and how to go about creating mobile promotions - read our newly published white paper here.