DaxThink: Digital life

Creative rules
November 29, 2006

Keeping it simple and offering an eye-catching design are winners in email marketing, reports Susie Harwood.

Brands invest a lot of money in making sure their web sites look good and are easy to navigate, using tools such as usability testing and eye tracking, but few put equal time and energy into designing their emails.

So, what makes the perfect email? The short answer is one that looks appealing, contains compelling content and includes an interactive element to engage the brand's target audience. Sounds simple, but, in reality, designing a great marketing email or newsletter is a lot more complicated and technical.

The design, structure and layout of the message doesn't just simply affect whether customers choose to interact with it. Creative can also have a huge impact on whether an email is actually delivered and how it renders - how it looks, depending on which email system the customer is using - and it can even effect the success of future campaigns.

"I'd argue that design and layout in email is more important than in web build," says Dela Quist, chief executive officer of email specialist Alchemy Worx, whose clients include Sainsbury's Bank and Carlsberg. "The reason is, there is effectively only one client in web, which is Internet Explorer, and people don't optimise for anything else. In email, I can count over 30 clients and each of them renders HTML differently - that's why it's so important."

Brands therefore need to know which email systems are used by the clients on their database and test the email design with each and every one. There are tools available that automate this process. Email service provider Bluestreak, which counts Emap and Toptable.co.uk among its customers, has a partnership with technology company Return Path, and has integrated its technology with the Return Path tool that enables emails to be viewed across all the main email systems.

Dax Hamman, international operations director at Bluestreak, says it is possible to come up with creative that works for a range of clients. "The key thing is to code for the lowest common denominator, keep it simple and have an internal testing process in place." He also points out that brands often rely on the person who codes their site to code their email marketing, but, he argues, "they are very different disciplines".

Quist agrees. While web design has come on a long way and there are new techniques, flashy design tools and content management systems, he thinks the best approach to email coding is to keep it simple. "Best practice requires hand-coding your HTML. It's labour-intensive and requires more time, but we have found there is no real way around the problem," he explains, adding that this can make it difficult to find really good email designers as they have to be prepared to go back to basics.

Another issue is that including certain elements in email creative can prevent it being delivered to inboxes. Many ISPs have spam filters that automatically block the active scripts often used by spammers and hackers, so Quist recommends avoiding using "clever stuff like Javascript" as it significantly increases the chance of an email being blocked.

On top of that, usability research from both Foviance and User Vision reveals that customers don't like things that flash or move anyway. "Our eye-tracking research showed that people don't look at these things as they look like ads, so they don't think it is of relevance to them," points out Emma Kirk, strategic director at User Vision.

Gemma Le Marquer, head of CRM at Lastminute.com, which runs a comprehensive email-marketing programme, agrees: "We don't tend to use any Flash creative at all in our emails. We haven't found it adds any benefit and it can be quite irritating for people." She says the company aims to keep email file sizes to a minimum, so people don't have trouble downloading them. If it takes too long to load, customers are likely to delete the email without looking at it.
Different goals

Technical issues aside, what creative and layout does work well in email? Simone Barratt, managing director of e-Dialog UK, which manages email campaigns for Boots, Tesco.com and British Airways, says there is no such thing as a perfect email as every one will have a different goal. "The perfect email for BA might be very different from the perfect email for Tesco."
However, there are some things that work well in general, regardless of the objective of the email, and, equally, others that don't work. "The things that make a web site difficult to use are exactly the same for email," says Kirk.

User Vision's research revealed that, unsurprisingly, users often start in the top left of an email and scan them from top to bottom, so a clear layout, with elements such as headings, lists and tables that are easy to scan are important.

"It is essential to break the email into different content types in the same way as web sites," says Mark Gristock, head of marketing at usability specialist Foviance. "The use of images is great, but not too many. There is far too much emphasis on graphics, but there should be a good combination of text and images," he adds. This is especially important as some email clients include automatic image-blockers, so users need to be able to get the main gist of what an email is about without the images, or they will simply delete it.

The most important content in an email is what is shown above 'the fold' - what users can see when they open the email without having to scroll down - as this is what will influence their decision to read on. Lastminute.com always uses a striking image above the fold, along with a headline statement, as well as navigation to the rest of the email and a search box that takes users straight to results for their search on the site. "We have the functionality and interactivity right up front. It's kind of the newsletter in a nutshell," says Le Marquer.

Quist suggests thinking of the top left-hand corner of an email as like the contents page of a magazine, so users can quickly find or jump to the most relevant content. Gristock says this is particularly important in the case of longer emails.

However, somewhat surprisingly, the length of an email has no significant impact on click-through rates. Foviance found that if the design is good, users are happy to scan through even long emails, and are comfortable using hyperlinks to move between areas of content. It also discovered that people respond well to aspirational greetings. Personalisation is advisable where possible, but appropriate, impersonal, friendly greetings, such as Expedia's 'Dear Traveller' tested extremely well.

Similar branding
Familiarity is also important for brands that communicate with customers regularly via a weekly email newsletter. A similar design and branding to the web site, even using elements from the site such as navigational bars or search boxes, can make customers feel more comfortable. This ensures that, if they do click through to the web site, they won't be completely surprised by what they see.

Templates can also work well for regular newsletters. "There is a good reason why magazines put things in the same place week in, week out. Familiarity helps to breed higher readership as people know where to find their favourite bit," says Quist.

Lastminute uses a template for its newsletters. "We have certain things in certain places every week, so our readers understand what to look for and where things are, but it gives us flexibility to still be themed and to keep the pace and content different. You need to have the familiarity, but crossed with fresh content; otherwise it becomes dull and like wallpaper," says Le Marquer.
But, while templates and more in-depth content can work well for newsletters, they may not be as appropriate for one-off offer-based emails or news alerts, which goes back to Barratt's point about it being important to identify the goal or objective of the email. Le Marquer says Lastminute has a completely different approach to creative for more tactical campaigns, which are single-minded messages that get straight to the point and are more likely to contain just one image.

There are also some things that definitely don't work in email design. User Vision's eye-tracking testing revealed that brands should avoid presenting information as headings or banners that appear as clickable elements. Users can fixate on these. Kirk says that during user testing, they came across a navigation bar at the top of an email newsletter, which had been placed there to make it look like the web site, but it had been disabled and couldn't be clicked on. "If you are going to have something like that, you have got to make sure the elements are clickable, otherwise it just frustrates everyone," she says. Graphical content, meanwhile, should be presented as active links where possible because consumers often try to click on them to progress to the main web site.

Hand coding, eye tracking and user testing may all seem like a lot of effort for a channel that is likely to command only a very small proportion of overall spend, but the rewards for getting email creative right are huge. Foviance's research shows that 67 per cent of people have actually acted on something they've received in an email newsletter. Chances are, if you get someone to interact with an email once, they will read your email next time. Not only will this drive sales and create brand loyalty with the customer, but it could also impact future campaigns.
Hamman points out that most large ISPs use recency filters and by monitoring emails closely they can identify which emails got low response rates and automatically redirect them to junk mail folders. "Getting the creative and content right so people interact is not just important now, but also important for the success of future campaigns," he adds.

FOVIANCE'S TIPS ON EMAIL
Foviance carried out user testing on a number of emails and came up with the following tips.
"Everyone knows how important it is to get the title and sender right, and our eye-tracking results confirmed this. It's the first place people look to identify whether an email should be opened.

"However, what isn't widely appreciated is how little space you have in the preview pane to engage with the audience. With 78 per cent of people using preview panes at work to scan email content, we have to get that right.

"Combining the preview panes for the two most popular ways of accessing email at work (Hotmail and Outlook) shows how little space we have to work with (see top image).

"This doesn't mean you have to get all the information across in that space, but enough to allow people to scan the preview pane and decide whether the email is relevant.

"As it is such a low-cost, flexible medium, there seems to be a general lack of focus on making email as targeted and effective as it could be. Lessons need to be learnt from the direct marketing industry - there are many simple pointers that should be applied to email.

"For example, people respond well to aspirational greetings and personalisation is recommended.

"It's surprising to note that the length of an email is irrelevant to click-through rate. In fact, longer emails tend to perform better, although this may be down to the increased variety of content. The key is to break up content to facilitate scanning - the easier it is to determine which part of the email is relevant, the greater the chance of success (see middle image).
White space is also vital. Our eye-tracking results revealed how effective spacing is in drawing the eye to key content. The more crowded an email, the more difficult it is for the reader to prioritise information (see bottom image).

IMPACT OF DESIGN ON RENDERING
How well an email has been structured doesn't just have an impact on how many people interact with it.

Design also has a huge effect on technical issues such as deliverability and how an email renders, since html can look different depending on which email client is being viewed in, for example, Hotmail, Outlook, gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.

So, it is vital to test emails with a variety of clients. Email service provider Bluestreak uses a tool from partner Return Path to do this.

The images above illustrate how different Bluestreak client Grazia's newsletters can look when seen through different email clients. The red line shows what is above the fold - what viewers will see on their screen without having to scroll down.