Does Design and Coding Matter To Marketers?

How often do you design and code your emails so they are sent out with the best possibility of meeting or exceeding campaign objectives? According to our most recent survey and study, most of you care about email design and coding but there is still room for improvement.

One of the main reasons why marketers are still approaching email with the code, batch, and blast approach is simple: most email software providers focus on software features instead of spending enough time educating their customers on what works and what doesn't. It is not just a webinar, case study and training, but the design, audits, coaching and feedback that shows much stronger results.

We hope that you find this edition and the eROI Q2'07 study to contain some great information to get your programs on the right track.

Get the New Design and Coding Study Results

Does Branding Impact Results?

Email design is often an overlooked element in email marketing. Many marketers feel that if you just get the email to the subscriber, it will work. Delivery is the ongoing part of the job, but when it gets there it needs to convert.

There are elements that go into email design: branding, relevance and placements of calls to action. With 69% of those surveyed stating that emails on brand are most important, it shows us that whether that email recipient behavior depends on how the email is perceived when viewed.

Think about the consequences of email that creates a negative brand experience. Could it reduce the impact of the next campaign? Could the open rates go down because expectations of the brand experience were not met in the past? We know from experience with the brands we watch that poorly executed email design reduces the likelihood of reading and acting upon future emails.

You need to monitor the results of your email campaigns to see what kind of impact an email template redesign or design tweak will make to your open and click rates.

Examples of Creative Gone Wrong

Does the Call to Action Placement Matter?

In our recent study, 59% of email marketers said that calls to action above the fold are more important than branding. From our perspective, both are equally important. Poorly designed emails simply don't convert customers as well. The action placement (link or button) above or below the fold has a greater success of getting the click when they don't need to scroll or search for it it.

We try to coach our customers to make the desired action or primary call to action to laid out so that you tell them what to do next. Many newsletters rely on text links. If you have all text links, how do your subscribers know what they need to do next? And if they have to read everything and search for the action, will you decrease your chances of great campaign results?

If you are not trying to make it easy, then you are bound to get worse results. We know from changing some of our own email campaigns that the large action button in a solid color mentally trains the recipient of what to do. Our own webinars have seen a significant lift in registrations with the change from a text link to a larger button.

So why don't you try this out for your next email and see what impact it has on your campaign results.

Good Example of the Button In Action

Using Email with Web 2.0 Apps

After 8 months and countless hours of thought, design, re-design, coding, hosting, sweat, tears, anger and love, we launched the new Konami video games American Idol Karaoke Revolution community site. It was truly a labor of love. We went to the bench with our team to write all the code from scratch instead of just taking some apps/code libraries off the shelf to build this one.

But the main point is not that it is done, but that email is going to be the main driver of the community. When we designed this, we think about how to use email in a social network. Additionally, we launched the MatchPointCorp.com site a month ago where we rely heavily on email to grow the community and spread the word.

Learn How Email Shapes Web 2.0 Communities

Does Design and Coding Matter To Marketers?

Does Branding Impact Results?

Does the Call to Action Placement Matter?

Using Email with Web 2.0 Apps

eROI Creative Review: Users Follow This Guy Around the World
iMedia Connection, May 8th, 2007

Best Email Blogs
Email Insiders, April 25th, 2007

EROI Momentum Grows
Press Release, April 10, 2007

5 Experts on 10 Rockin' Videos
iMedia Connection, March 19, 2007

In April we were excited to have record attendances for our Webinars. There are webinars ready to roll for May through June 2007 and we look forward to having you join us for at least one 30 minute session. Look for webinars covering ideas and methods you can employ for your campaign growth. Our clients and subscribers frequently comment on how valuable these webinars are.

We will be covering:
Rendering Testing and Impact with ReturnPath

EyeTracking Studies on email with EyeTools

RSS to Email for Focused Content Delivery

Register today for these upcoming events

"On our side of the relationship, we are extremely pleased with our email services. You guys have a great set up... it's so easy to make our newsletters look professional. Thanks for the feedback on our campaigns."
--Customer

"Thanks for your prompt replies. I'm sure I could've found these if I would've dug deeper but your promptness really highlights eROI's high-quality customer service."
--Customer

"eROI played a much bigger role in the redesign our newsletter than I even thought possible. We came to them in need of creative elements and functionality and walked way with a tool that has significantly more strategic value. They are truly a full service firm."
--Papa Murphy's Pizza