Email marketing essentials: Insights from Dotdigital’s in-house experts

Standing out in crowded inboxes is harder than ever, but email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s toolkit. With peak season around the corner, it’s the perfect time to revisit the essentials. That’s exactly what we did in our Manchester office, where our in-house experts shared their top tips for creating standout campaigns that actually land and convert.

Our in-house email design expert and Creative Studio Manager, Jenny Newton, shared advice on killer email design and Lisa Dixon, Deliverability Consulting Lead, shared everything you need to know about email delivery and inbox placement.

Here’s a breakdown of their top tips and advice, including strategies you can implement now to make your peak season more successful.

Email design to stand out and drive clicks

Making an impact above the fold

The concept of “above the fold” comes from the days of newspaper publishing, where the most important content needed to be visible without unfolding the paper. In email marketing, this principle still applies: your key message, visuals, and call-to-action (CTA) should be immediately visible to grab attention.

Human attention spans are dwindling. Thanks to short form content and always-on media feeds, our minds can’t help but wander (well done if you’re still reading.) Get your most important message in your header, make it succinct, and have the CTA right there, too.

This example from TotallyMoney tells you everything you need to know in a matter of seconds. You instantly know it’s about credit cards, then you learn the important information around credit limits, then a clear CTA that speaks to the reader. 10/10, no notes.

Another thing we love about this campaign is the use of background colors, which leads us on to…

Designing with images in mind

Many readers view emails with images off, whether due to slow connections or being on a train whizzing through a tunnel, or corporate email settings. You want your email to still look good with the images turned off. Images turned off doesn’t need to mean a plain black and white email.

Here’s that same email from before, now with images off. The email still has color and the visual hierarchy is clear. Using background colors and CTA buttons is a foolproof way to include some brand style and visual interest even to those with images off.

Of course, another reason your email needs to be made up of more than aesthetic images is for accessibility. Screen readers only pick up text. So adding alt text to your images is important to still get your message across.

Equally, include live text in your campaign design, rather than embedding all text in images that some subscribers won’t be able to see. Another benefit of live text is that it also scales properly across devices where text included in images can struggle.

Deliverability 101

Let’s first clarify the all important difference between email delivery, and email deliverability.

Email delivery = whether the email got to the intended server e.g. Gmail
Email deliverability = the placement of the email within the inbox e.g. spam or regular

A good delivery rate is typically 97% or higher. Anything lower warrants investigation into your sending practices or contact data, if yours is lower, don’t panic – there are things you can do to improve it.

When it comes to deliverability, you can’t track it due to the way the email clients report it. You can get a good idea of this though through your sender reputation. Sender reputation is a Dotdigital feature that provides an evaluation of your trustworthiness as a sender. It’s based on the quality of customer data you use and the engagement your campaigns generate.

It’s important not to take a good sender reputation for granted too, it can fluctuate even if your email strategy remains unchanged. Maintaining SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records ensures your domain remains trustworthy to inbox providers.

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Lists which servers can send emails from your domain
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Verifies emails weren’t altered in transit
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): Tells receivers how to handle emails that fail SPF/DKIM

Preparing for high-volume seasons

Often during peak sales seasons such as Black Friday and Cyber week, many marketers send to people that haven’t engaged in a while. Whether this is due to higher targets or pressure from higher ups, it happens a lot. If you’re thinking about expanding who you send to, it’s important to weigh up the potential revenue gain from sending to these unengaged subscribers versus the potential long term reputation damage and to mitigate these risks.

If you do need to target unengaged customers, start with the lower risk segments – this is those who you wouldn’t consider engaged (depending on your product lifecycle) but it hasn’t been so long since that they heard from you that they will have forgotten who you are, or abandoned the email address. The other thing you can do to help is to start this re-engagement strategy sooner rather than later.

Don’t wait until Black Friday itself. Mailbox providers are stricter at this time of year and recipient fatigue sets in sooner due to the increased volume of emails sent – the Dotdigital platform sent out 365 million campaigns last Black Friday alone.

The final tip is to mix up your send times and don’t send at top of the hour. Sending at 9:12 am versus 9 am means it’s likely to be triggered when servers are less busy and also will land just after all those sent on the hour, giving it a higher placement in a chronological inbox. If you missed Google’s recent changes to the Promotions Tab, including chronological ordering, our Messaging Operations Director, Tam Bond, has written a great blog covering everything you need to know here.

That’s a wrap

We also made new connections, Dotdigital’s Senior Trainer, David Pyle, ran free 1-on-1 training sessions, and we all ate some great croissants. We’d love to see you at our next in-person or virtual event, keep an eye on our events page to find one near you.