This week I want to quickly focus on the newsletter I recently received.

Some Great Things Going On

1. Content: I love it — it’s of course relevant and useful, but also well laid out and not too overbearing. If I’m signing up for a newsletter from a mortgage company during my research phase, I want juicy content that can aid in my education and decision making. Quicken Loans does this very well here.

2. Hyperlinks: Great use of hyperlinks within the text body which appear to be inspired by Eisenberg Brothers persuasion architecture best-practices. 

3. Basics: They have navigation in the header and footer, pre-header call-outs (not in screen grab below), great text to image ratio, and several other basic best practices are being executed quite well.

4. Email Information: They have a cool Email Center at the bottom of the email that provides links to change preferences, FTAF, subscribe, and connect with them on their social media profiles. One item I would add here is a link to update my preferences.

Screen Grabs (Click Image to Enlarge)

Quick Areas of Improvement

1. Header: Below the main branding header there is quite a bit of white space around the phone number. White space is of course fine (and can be beneficial) but something appears off here. It could very well be how it renders for me (Outlook 2007)

2. Frequency: I may be on the wrong list, but for content like this (educating new home buyers — information about refinancing and the like) I’m wanting to see several each month while I’m in learning more to make a decision. This could be solved with some nice re-targeting campaigns based on my email engagement, or simply having more content for an additional newsletter.

3. CTA: As mentioned above, they have great use of hyperlinks within the email body to get subscribers on the site and engaged. What’s missing for me though in this newsletter is a focused area for connecting back to a sales rep. Yes, they have the phone number in the header, but a lot more can be done to get interested readers on the phone and closer to conversion. In my own testing, what has worked well is a dedicated area for contact info call-outs. (Often at the top right of the template). — This would of course require some template architecture adjustments, but well worth the test.

Below is a screen grab of what this might look like. Note: this is a quickly assembled wire-frame with no design and is meant only as a very general example. (click to enlarge)

There is more that can be discussed on this newsletter in areas such as dynamic content and segmentation, but I’ll wrap it up here. At some point I’d like to review the Rate Alert email from Quicken Loans. As with any company, there is always room for improvement – But overall some nice work coming out of the email department at QL. They have a good foundation with a lot of opportunity to take their email channel much further.

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or inputs? Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Too many marketers try to follow ‘day of week’ trends from big stats groups. I recommend against paying too much attention to what national surveys say for two reasons:

A. If a report says ‘Tuesday’ is the best day to send, and everyone in the country starts sending on Tuesday (I know it’s a bit exaggerated), then Tuesday would quickly diminish in quality with everyone being blasted with emails.

B. More importantly — every industry is different, every company is different, and every list has the capability of behaving differently.

So then what is the best day to send email? Let’s look at a few elements:

1. B2B or B2C? If your subscriber persona is a strict 9-5 business employee, then Friday at 4 or over the weekend probably isn’t the best idea.

2. Are Weekends Always Bad? No. In the example above, I wouldn’t recommend weekends. But what about a B2C product that targets mothers age 35-45? Might they be logging in some email checking over the weekend? I vote yes. I had one client that tested a weekday vs. weekend for a similar type of audience and saw a 85% increase in conversion with the weekend groups.

3. What about Monday? Going off of the 1st example, Monday probably isn’t too great either (aren’t you quite busy getting back to work on Monday?). This leaves us with 3-4 days for testing our B2B sends.

4. So Tues/Wed/Thurs for B2B? That looks like a decent starting point, but still does not completely answer our question of what the best day is to send email.

What to Do:

A. Know what you want to accomplish. Is your main goal a quick read for a timely notice, a click through to read more content, a click through and purchase of a product? etc…

B. Understand your recipient’s profile. Create a persona around them and among other things, determine what they are doing at different times and on different days. When will they be most likely to engage in the way that you want them to?

C. Use some common sense to eliminate some possibilities.

D. TEST. We love to throw this around, but it’s true. Do some day of week and time of day testing and you may be very surprised at what you find. If there is a huge difference, then great – you have now identified some valuable information for YOUR email program. If after significant testing you find microscopic difference between day 1, 2, or 3 then you now have some flexibility.

E. Test again.

For those marketers that don’t want to take the time to work through the elements above and must have a quick answer, I vote Wednesday at 3:00pm or Thursday at 9:30am

- Forest Bronzan

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Other posts you might find of interest:

Introduction to Email Segmentation

Email List Building Mistakes

Aside from making our subscribers happier, having preference data is extremely helpful for marketers. It allows us to provide timely, relevant, and personalized communications to our lists. If we know a subscriber wants emails only 1 time per month, we have our frequency question answered. If we know our subscriber is interested in tips for grooming dogs vs. tips for making home-made dog food; we can provide much more targeted content. You get the point.

When building your preference center, there are of course several options you can give your subscribers. Here are a few ideas:

1. Unsubscribe

2. Frequency: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly etc. (depending on what content you are providing)

3. Device: phone/computer

4. Desired Format: html vs. plain text

5. Content: make options available for the different categories of content you offer.

6. Personalization Updates: if you don’t already have the data, you can ask for Name, Birthday, Zip Code, and info that is relevant for your company. A previous post on segmentation provides some other ideas.

The options you provide need to make sense for your business, products, and subscribers. An important note: don’t offer options that you can’t follow through with. For example: if you don’t have the resources to provide a different format for mobile devices, don’t make that option available to your subscriber. Same goes for frequency and other preference options.

- Forest Bronzan