Essence of Email Weekly

Hey there!

It's the end of the quarter, which means our Essence of Email Quarterly report will be out very soon!

In addition to the key news and events from Q1 2021, this edition of the report will be dedicated to key performance indicators in email marketing and how to improve them.

Covid-19 moved many businesses online, and there are many brands that are new to eCommerce and email marketing. We wanted to help them understand which numbers to track and how to improve them. But the report will come in handy to anyone looking for new ways to spruce up their strategy and content and ensure better results!

Stay tuned. We'll be sending out the latest edition of the Quarterly on April 9.

Happy reading!



EMAIL MARKETING


Easter emails can help your business thrive


Source: Unsplash
Easter is almost here! Time for chocolate, family celebrations… and big spending.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates that 80% of Americans plan to celebrate Easter this year. Total spending is estimated at $18.1 billion with 9% of people planning to spend at least part of Easter Sunday shopping online, while another 8% are planning to shop in stores. Per-person spending is estimated at $151.

With Easter being one of the most popular holidays in the US, now's a great time for brands to connect with their audiences through unique campaigns and creative content.

There are plenty of tips and tricks for creating a holiday-inspired campaign that will capture your subscribers' attention. Using seasonal wordplay, colorful visuals, and Easter imagery to engage your subscribers are a great way to go. But how can you differentiate your brand and stand out from the competition? Try these strategies:

• Adopt a new color palette (as long as it's on-brand!)
• Create enticing seasonal offers
• Incorporate quizzes or other interactive elements into your emails

As always, you'll need to be careful around your list segmentation: this gives you the chance to hit the right people at the right time with content that's tailored to their interests.

For more information and ideas on how to shake your emails up this Easter, visit our blog post. Happy reading!



DIGITAL MARKETING


Klaviyo introduces SMS and data innovations


Source: Giphy
Attention, eCommerce brands!

Our partners from Klaviyo, one of the leading email marketing platforms, have just introduced some awesome SMS and data innovations. These developments are designed to help online retailers dive deep into their customer data and strengthen the relationships with their SMS audiences through two-way communication.

Personal Benchmarks is a tool that will help marketers gather data-driven insights on their efforts. This will be done by collecting data, comparing them to up to 100 similar businesses (based on industry, business model, revenue, growth rate), and then pinpointing the main areas of focus in order to improve their results and develop additional opportunities for growth. This way, brands won't have to benchmark current results against their own past performances, and will gain a better overview of the bigger picture and the situation on the market.

In addition to this, Klaviyo has introduced SMS innovations! Some of the new features offer two-way conversation and the ability to subscribe at checkout. This will make communication more personal, and the process of gathering consent easier and cheaper. Klaviyo SMS offers mobile-optimized signup forms, pre-built automations, month-to-month profile-based billing, and complementary toll-free numbers. Nice to see Klaviyo's SMS program keep up with the trends!

"We believe that the best way to build a lasting business is to own your relationships with your audience. And we believe the best way to own relationships with your audience is to connect on your owned channels. Owned channels are actually the world's largest networks. More than half of everyone in the world uses email and text messaging — that's more than any of the other social networks, and it's not even close. We believe email is the first, largest, and most open social network and graph. And we see text messaging as the second," said Jake Cohen, Klaviyo's Head of Customer Marketing.



EMAIL MARKETING


Campaign Monitor partners with Unsplash


Source: Giphy
Campaign Monitor's research indicates that choosing the right image for an email can be difficult for email marketers — with 40% sourcing images from stock websites and 70% having to upload the photos manually.

To try and simplify the process, Campaign Monitor, an email marketing software, has partnered with Unsplash. Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography, and has over 207,000 contributing photographers and a growing library of over 2 million photos.

Through this integration, Campaign Monitor gives its users access to Unsplash's new Free Image Gallery. The photos are available directly within the email builder for more creative email campaigns, and users will be able to drag and drop and customize emails. It is believed that this will save marketers both time and money associated with image sourcing and high-cost production. Within the first two weeks of the integration, over 11,000 images were already used.

"Finding the right image is a major burden for many of our customers, but it doesn't have to be. Now with our integration with Unsplash, an incredibly curated source of visuals, they can use the Free Image Gallery to find a beautiful and relevant image without ever leaving the email builder. Free Image Gallery users are already saving time, adding an average of two images per campaign. We know that images are very important to our customers and their brands, and now they don't have to spend any extra time or expense just to find the right one," said Desta Price, Chief Product Officer at CM Group.



EMAIL DESIGN INSPO


Zig-Zag email layouts


Source: Canva
Last week, we talked about how ''inverted pyramid'' email layouts can help you boost engagement and click rates. This week, we're looking at the zig-zag layout, and how it can help you to set the orientation of your content.

This popular layout can make it easier for your audience to read blocks of content in a natural way. That's because it creates angles by using color and imagery to guide the reader from the left to the right. Simple, yet intuitive, it allows readers to ''slide'' down the page.

And while some claim that this type of layout is best used for newsletters, it can work wonderfully with promotional emails too. Check out this example by Sephora. Through clever use of color and product imagery, the marketers have created a vibrant, detailed email that's still easy to navigate.