The Future of Email Marketing Along with mobile, new tools and technologies are changing email marketing—is your brand ready?

While email remains, for the time being, the most cost-efficient way to connect with customers, many marketers worry that recent developments could hamper its effectiveness. Thanks to recent changes made by various email service providers (ESPs) and the tremendous growth of mobile devices, email marketing is evolving significantly, leaving marketers with little to do but adapt to the advent of new tools and technology in a classic case of sink or swim. Throughout the past year, major changes have occurred in the email marketing realm. For one, many ESPs have changed the rules for email deliverability. Since the new engagement policies took effect, email providers including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL began regulating deliverability based on past engagement. This means that if consumers do not regularly open and click on emails sent from businesses, the ESPs may stop delivering emails from that company, and may divert those messages into the spam folder, even if the user has subscribed to the content in the past. Google, specifically, has made some big adjustments on its own as well. Email billers and marketers were sent into a frenzy when Google announced the introduction of tabs to Gmail inboxes. The objective was to make it easier for users to unclutter their mailboxes by moving certain marketing messages out of their primary inbox and filing them under a Promotions tab. "We wanted to give our users more control over their inbox," Alex Gawley, product manager with Gmail, said in an interview with Marketing Land in May 2013, when Google first introduced the tabs. After much testing, Google found that people were scanning their inboxes and jumping past certain types of email, such as promotional mailings, "because they weren't ready" to deal with them, Gawley said. Organizing email into various tabs was seen as a way to let users deal with those messages when they were ready. "The reaction [from customers] was really positive,"Gawley said. Email marketers, however, were left frustrated. Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky told Wall Street analysts in November that the company saw a steep drop from the previous quarter in the number of promotional emails opened, and Google was to blame. "Third quarter results were impacted by Q3 seasonality and double-digit declines in email open rates related to the new Gmail Promotions tab that was rolled out earlier in the quarter," he said. "While it hasn't been a huge material effect, it did have an effect on our open rates, and it is part of the story," he added. A study conducted by marketing services provider Epsilon, which looked at four million sets of emails over a period of seven months, evaluated Gmail's performance in comparison to competing providers Hotmail and Yahoo!, and found that while the three experienced similar open rate patterns throughout the study's duration, including a predicted seasonal downturn around July and August, Google's click rates dropped in June and never recovered.

In June, Gmail's click rate was 4.6 percent while Yahoo!, which had the second highest number of clicks, posted a 4.0 percent rate in the same month. By October, Gmail's click rate was only 75 percent of its June rate, while both Microsoft and Yahoo! recovered stronger; the two posted 87.5 percent and 82.5 percent October over June numbers, respectively, according to the study. Though Gmail ultimately led runner-up Yahoo! by 0.1 percent at the conclusion of the study, the email giant could not regain the 0.6 percent advantage it boasted in April, before the tabs were introduced. In addition to ESP changes, mobile technology also presents challenges. People are spending more time on their mobile devices than on their desktop computers, leaving marketers concerned that their emails aren't reaching consumers the way they used to. However, this doesn't necessarily mark the death knell of email marketing. "Just because people aren't spending as much time online on their computers doesn't mean they aren't accessing their email," Alex Lustberg, chief marketing officer at Lyris, a digital marketing solutions provider, says. "Email marketing is going mobile, but that doesn't mean it's going away. Mobile is hugely important for email, and it presents an incredible opportunity because companies can reach their subscribers anywhere and any time," he adds. This opportunity, however, comes with new responsibilities.

Marketing Goes Mobile
As user interactions with email become more dynamic and uninhibited by the limitations of a desktop environment, email content must become more dynamic as well. People move through their inboxes quickly, looking only for the information they need and want. Delivering relevant messages that resonate with them is fundamental--that includes live email content that adapts in real time to location, device, time of open, and behaviors. Among the most popular and effective live content strategies, Lustberg explains, are countdown clocks. "Countdown clocks connect to your customers through immediacy," he says. "By including a live countdown to the end of a sale or other promotion, you're creating a sense of urgency that will inspire your customers to buy at that moment rather than later, or not at all." Geographic targeting is an important tool to leverage as well, especially if the brand has multiple locations. Personalizing an email based on the recipient's location is a way to create a sense of belonging, Lustberg explains, and to build a community feel around a brand. Including a map of a nearby location, providing directions, or even creating unique "check in"-based offers are all promising approaches that "make the most of the geographic information that's readily available, without appearing invasive from a privacy standpoint," he says. Brands that offer products and content that depend on variable factors, such as weather, can also include widgets with pertinent updates, though this isn't necessarily something that every brand should employ, Lustberg warns. "There's a fine line between personalization and overkill," he says. Lustberg also cautions brands against assuming that the mobile email experience is uniform across all devices. "Insert device-specific content into emails depending on the subscriber's particular device or operating system," he recommends, "and be sure to optimize all images."

Automatically split-testing images to determine which performs best and drives the strongest response is a must-do, he says. Harvey Norman, a Lyris customer, is a retailer in the Asia Pacific region, selling large electrical goods, small appliances, computers, and furniture online and in its stores. Founded in 1982, the company now operates more than 180 stores across Australia alone, along with stores in New Zealand, Slovenia, Croatia, Ireland, Singapore, and Malaysia. Though Harvey Norman aimed to consistently deliver robust messages to its customers, the growing number of its email subscribers called for an update to its email approach that would provide better personalization and richer content. For that, the company turned to Lyris. Lyris tailored Harvey Norman's emails with live content that adapts in real time to customers' location, their time of open, and certain behaviors. If a customer signed up to receive Harvey Norman's emails, for example, the behavior would trigger an initial email, welcoming the customer and offering an exclusive voucher code that was only valid for 48 hours. Some emails also made use of targeting technology to provide Google Maps directions to a store closest to the subscriber's location. "What's unique about our tools is that the content is personalized based on when a customer opens the email, not when the email is sent," Lustberg explains. "This creates an additional, deeper layer of personalization." Since partnering with Lyris, Harvey Norman has significantly grown its email database. Following the implementation of live content into its emails, Harvey Norman email open rates jumped to three times the industry average.

The rise of responsive design
Delivering dynamic emails is only half of the solution to the challenge of tailoring email marketing to a mobile device, Ted Stites, CEO of Siteworx, an experience design and Web content management provider, asserts. "Just because content works on a mobile device doesn't mean that it's doing its job. If a customer clicks on a link in an email but is then taken to a horrible site [she] can't use, then you might as well not have sent the email," Stites says. "As mobile consumption of emails continues to grow, email marketers need to stop thinking about how to make content designed for the Web fit into a mobile equation and think instead about how to deliver different experiences at different touch points," he adds. Enter responsive design. The concept of responsive design--the practice of creating digital experiences that adapt to seamlessly deliver content suited to the user's device, operating system, screen size, or orientation--has been around for quite some time. The recent growth of mobile adoption, however, is breathing new life into the approach. Siteworx creates responsive Web sites using flexible grid systems, with fluid images and CSS3 media queries. On a responsive site, content expands and contracts as necessary to provide an

optimal experience at each display size, Stites explains. This enables site architects to design at multiple "break points" to accommodate many different devices at once. According to Siteworx's philosophy, the key to the success of any responsive site is taking a mobile-first approach to content, since it "forces designers to optimize the most frustrating viewing experiences--a small screen and a slow connection," Stites says. It also enables designers to zero in on what matters most to users, and improves speed by eliminating unnecessary content and images, which can impact the user experience as well as search engine performance. McGladrey, a U.S. provider of assurance, tax, and consulting services to the middle market in more than 75 cities, has long been delivering content to users, but the company's Web site was lacking in content accessibility, user friendliness, and aesthetic appeal. Looking for a drastic Web site overhaul, the company began working with Siteworx. "The outdated design made the content feel less relevant, and the silos made it hard for users to access resources," Stites explains. "On a mobile device, using the site was almost impossible." To combat the problems plaguing McGladrey's Web site, Siteworx shifted the focus to visual presentation and created intuitive pathways to content by implementing responsive design. Because mobile devices are smaller than desktop computers, visual elements play a key role. Big, bold images and concise headlines make content more appealing, for example. "While textheavy Web sites are an eyesore, text-heavy mobile sites are illegible," Stites says. Siteworx made McGladrey's images and headlines bigger, and eliminated unnecessary text on the homepage and other landing pages. Siteworx also used media queries—a CSS3 coding tool that allows content rendering to adapt to conditions such as screen resolution and sizes--to customize how McGladrey's content would appear on different devices. Mobile users enjoy accessing content on the go, Stites points out, and want to get to the pages they need as quickly and painlessly as possible. To that end, Siteworx worked to create intuitive pathways to content that included "more robust global navigation to get users to content in fewer clicks," according to Stites. The new design also offers better opportunities to promote related content more easily, he adds. Using Adobe Marketing Cloud to measure return on investment, McGladrey quickly noticed encouraging results. In just a month, mobile traffic increased by 7 percent, accounting for 13 percent of McGladrey's overall traffic.

Revitalizing Email Marketing
Though mobile technology presents a great deal of opportunity to email marketers, embracing its growth does not have to entail neglecting traditional email marketing strategies. It does, however, signify the need to adapt to changes more effectively. While the new engagement requirements put in place by Google present a major challenge to email marketers, small efforts can make a significant difference. Re-engagement initiatives, for example, can effectively revamp a brand's struggling email campaign.

Kristina Huffman, senior design consultant on the campaign solutions team at ExactTarget, a Salesforce.com company, recommends taking one of several re-engagement routes: the educational message, the subscription reminder, the guilt trip, the deadline, and the incentive. The main purpose of the educational message, Huffman writes in an ExactTarget blog post, "is to encourage subscribers to make the most of their subscription. Give instructions on how subscribers can get the most value from your emails. Unengagement may mean they have a lack of understanding of how your service or product works." The subscription reminder, Huffman explains, draws on the metaphor of the printed magazine or newsletter. "Even though most email newsletters are free, opt-in is still required. [The subscription reminder] communicates that your emails have a high value, and reminds subscribers that they were the ones who signed up," she says. The guilt trip technique, though uncommon in an email format, can also prove effective if used appropriately. Some brands guilt you into being engaged (or at least not unsubscribed), especially when relationships are involved. "The best example of this tactic is the 'deactivate your account' link on Facebook. It prompts an 'Are you sure?' page that populates photos of your friends with a message that they will miss you," Huffman asserts. The deadline strategy for re-engagement is a tried and true method for a reason--it works. Busy customers may procrastinate on responding to an email or taking necessary action until it's too late, and giving them a deadline could create the sense of urgency most people need to finally act, according to Huffman. "When it comes to email, timeliness is everything, and if the consequence is being unsubscribed, giving details around when, why, and how it is going to happen can help give a subscriber enough of a nudge to re-engage," she says. The incentive message, best served in combination with the deadline approach, provides a lifeline to companies whose content alone can't make a subscriber fall back in love with the brand. While many retailers give discounts on products as part of re-engagement strategies, points earned, VIP purchasing privileges, free shipping, a badge, or gift cards can all also serve as solid incentives. "Even helping others can be a carrot at the end of a stick," Huffman says. Zappos, for example, asks customers to help others by reviewing a product they just purchased.

A Fresh Take on Google Tabs
Ultimately, adapting to ongoing changes in the field of email marketing might not even require an overhaul of traditional strategies. Sometimes, it's as simple as a change in perspective. The new Google Tabs, for example, aren't all that bad if you know how to use them, says Kevin Senne, senior director of deliverability and messaging compliance at Responsys, a marketing cloud provider that helps brands manage their digital relationships.

"At first glance, it's clear why marketers are terrified of the tabs. Messages that were once front and center are in a different place now, and that doesn't seem like a good thing," Senne says. But there are benefits to being demoted from the primary inbox to the promotions tab. Once hidden among a slew of other messages in one inbox location, promotional messages are now isolated, waiting for customers until they are ready to shop. "In the past, promotional messages would roll in throughout the day and people might glance at them and move on because they're busy or not interested at that point," Senne says. "But now when people open those promotional emails, they're not just stumbling onto those emails--they're actively looking for them." With Google Tabs, people who look under the promotions tab are ready to buy, and that requires email marketers to re-evaluate their perspective, shifting their focus away from catching someone's attention in a busy inbox toward making sure customers buy from their brand, not a competitor's, according to Senne. "No doubt, email marketing is changing, but these changes aren't going to be devastating. They're going to require some readjusting and adapting, but that's just the nature of a practice so rooted in technology," Senne says. "New tools and technologies come along to make things easier for users, and email marketers have to find ways to embrace them."