I get to experience all the effort and time that we marketers spend on building awesome content and creative assets for emails, crafting perfect subject lines and investing hours on building reports that reflect our efforts on Open Rates, Clicks Through Rates and hopefully having an impact in Conversions.
As a user, what surprises me is that I receive dozens of emails with lots of small errors that only inspire me to delete them. I delete those unwanted emails from my mobile phone so I will never see the result of those long hours of work. Maybe your audience is doing the same with the emails that you craft.
If your emails are not being opened... where is all that hard work going?
Let's see what are the most common mistakes from marketers when building emails. Ideally you would be able to see what your readers see and do the extra bit of work that will make the difference between having your emails opened or deleted.
These are some of my good, bad and ugly examples that I have gathered. Hopefully they could help you spot the mistakes that you are making. Small changes on the details below will make huge differences. Believe me!
Let's get started...
1. The Good. This is a perfect example of how emails for mobile should be crafted. This email has a very clear Call to Action for their subject line ("Become a Journalist", they also mention an "Exclusive..." Offer? Maybe?") The preview is greatly crafted. It describes a benefit of their offer, something that is important for a person considering to become a journalist ("You can become a freelance journalist in as little as 12 weeks. No pre-requisites...).
2. The bad. Startups.co.uk normally crafts beautiful content for entrepreneurs. On email #2 we can see that sender and subject line are really good, short, clear and specific but as you can observe the preview element was not properly looked after. (How horrible it looks for the reader to see this message: "This email was sent as HTML...").
3. The ugly. The preview on email 3 is ugly: code, code, ugly slashes? Inviting? No! Even when the subject line is inviting, it is a shame that this preview encourages me to delete this one.
4. The bad and ugly. I get an email from someone called 'anil' - all small letters?. The subject line sounds spammy and the preview? Not inviting?
So, can you tell how many of these emails were opened?
Let's talk about the small details that you should pay attention to when building your email if you want to increase your Open Rates on mobile.
1. Check your preview content. It could make the difference on having your emails opened. Avoid the bad and the ugly!
2. Test your emails on different devices. Make sure you like how your emails look on the most popular devices. You can use www.emailonacid.com to test them.
3. Think as a receiver: What would encourage your readers to open that email that took you so long to build and get approved.
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