S8080 Blog

One of the email invites we designed for the 2010 e-Crime Wales Summit made the Campaign Monitor Gallery today. We developed a series of emails that were broadcast on the run up to the event, held on Thursday in the Celtic Manor Resort – each pushing our front end development team with the demanding build required to show the design at its best in a multitude of email clients.

Davida Fernandez of Campaign Monitor said…

I really like the unusual layout of this email designed by s8080, especially the way the map graphic is burning into the main content and the way the free floating secondary content is flanking the middle column. The three colour bar background is so interesting and provides a foundation for the important links on the left hand side. The nice narrow column always helps with readability, too. Super cool job on this one.

We have specialised in email newsletter and campaign design, production, broadcast, list management and analytics for quite a few years now and have 100’s of successful ‘mails under our belts.

We are currently running a stunning and groundbreaking campaign for Welsh Assembly Government’s  IBW and as soon as they have all been delivered, we show them on the blog.

Get over to the Email Standards Project for the story. Then take a look at fixoutlook.org to get the message to Microsoft.

Please!

Split testing in email marketing

Split testing is an essential tool when we are running digital marketing campaigns for clients. Banners, PPC, email marketing and landing pages are all tested ruthlessly – everything from send times to subtle changes in subject lines – a couple of percent can make quite a difference in CTR if you are mailing 10K recipients or achieving 30K Adwords impressions.

The secret is, don’t stop there. Split your winning subject line again, refining the copy and trigger words even further. Over time, these tests will have a measurable impact on your open/render rates and your CTR.

Split testing webpages

Don’t stop at your emarketing either. Your homepage could probably do with a bit of a workout.

Google have posted an interesting article giving some tips for webpage design in their The Power Of Measurement series. They did some split testing on their Picasa homepage with some surprising results.

Version A

Version B

Google give a few design tips too…

Now, you might be asking yourself, “With so many different aspects of my website to test, how do I know where to begin?” Here are four design tips to pay attention to:

• Tip #1: Pass the 8 second test. At first glance, a visitor should understand the purpose of your website within a few seconds. People are busy and have limited attention spans — you want to keep them from hitting the dreaded back button.
• Tip #2: Tell them what’s in it for them. Create clear and tangible benefits (e.g., “Save more! Make extra money! Look better with our product!”).
• Tip #3: Use compelling images. Try product images instead of generic stock photos, icons with blocks of text, and buttons instead of links. Keep in mind that a low-quality, irrelevant image can kill your site’s credibility.
• Tip #4: Close the sale. Help your visitors take the next step. Make that step clear and easy to reach; don’t make them hunt for it. Action words like “buy now” may work better than “add to cart,” for instance.

The bottom line, sites or marketing – don’t guess – test.

Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’?

It’s used in the field of computer science and ICT to refer to the fact that you’ll only get useful results from a computer program if you give it ‘correct’ data to work with in the first place: for instance, you’ll only get meaningful results from a Google search if you give it a half-decent description of what you’re actually looking for.

Google, however, can at least gain some results from your query (albeit irrelevant ones), no matter how terribly you may have written it; but other computer programs simply won’t function if they have ‘bad’ input. One such example, used by many of our clients, is the mailing list (used to send out e-mail campaigns). Mailing lists need to store a large number of e-mail addresses, names and other personalisation data. Typically, this data will be exported from CRM software to a .CSV file, and then imported into an email broadcast tool. These tools require you to import data that’s formatted just right, or else it won’t work. A CSV export may contain extra data we don’t need, or user’s names might not be in the correct format. This typically requires some amount of ‘manual handling’ to sort out.
For instance, imagine that your e-mail campaign software requires that we import data of the format:

Bradley Ford, bford@abccompany.co.uk
Joe Middleton, jmiddleton@abccompany.co.uk
Bethany Brookes, bbrookes@abccompany.co.uk

Which is fine and dandy, until you get handed a file of customers which looks more like this:

FORD, Bradley D., +441234 567894, BFORD@abccompany.co.uk
MIDDLETON, Joe P., +441345 365927, JMIDDLETON@abccompany.co.uk
BROOKES, Bethany J., +441735 294754, BBROOKES@abccompany.co.uk

And with over 1,000 subscribers to your mailing list, this is going to take a while to sort out… isn’t it?

Perhaps not! The guys behind online database tool Dabble.db have just released a new free product, called Magic/Replace (tagline: clean up data – no magic wand required!) to cater for just this situation. And it really is just like magic.

It’s a super-simple process to paste in or upload your problem CSV file (Magic/Replace also accepts .XLS and .TSV files):

Magic/Replace will then show you an example record from your data. You can then copy and paste data between the various fields (and you must copy and paste, rather than re-typing, due to the way Magic/Replace does its stuff). You can change case, add punctuation, delete data and fields… anything you need to do to get that record into your ideal format.

Finally, you click preview and you should see the sample data transform before your eyes – as if by magic – and contort itself into the format you need. Magic/Replace will e-mail you the data once it’s done converting it all, voila! You just update the one record to show how it’s done, and the rest will be changed to match. Job done.

This is a really smart, very well implemented little application (our usability gurus approve!) and should save a lot of time and effort for a lot of people. For more information, take a look at the Magic/Replace website at http://cleanupdata.com/. They have a video which shows the magic in action, along with some sample data for you to use to try it out.