+Creative

Our experienced creative team has a thorough understanding of all aspects of acquisition and retention-based email/newsletter design thus allowing the smooth delivery of cutting-edge creative that is aesthetic, functional and innovative.

Producing effective email creative or working with agencies to produce creative presents a new challenge for marketers brought up with managing direct mail campaigns. But many of the challenges are not new, for example the limited time to achieve an action is not new. The need for a powerful opening and an appealing, relevant offer are not new. Constraints of cost and space are not new. But there are many differences of course. The behaviours of the prospects and customers reading our email are quite different from direct mail.

For instance, many users have set up their email to have an auto-preview window to display the first few lines of the email. Email recipients are evaluating an email compared to the many others they are processing when going through their inbox.

Email is thus a much more impulsive medium than direct mail. Most campaigns receive the vast majority of responses within 72 hours. Email recipients tend to reply immediately when they open the email - if the offer is relevant to them. As we produce our creative we need to key into this to encourage the responses we want.

As with any creative endeavour, it is easy to dive in and start laying out the email. Do you have email template designs which are:

• Designed for different marketing activities?
• Which are scannable and skimmable?
• Structured around key outcomes required?
• Templates that render in the inbox?
• Which support your brand - explain your proposition?
• With pods or blocks for tailoring content, that prioritises offers?
• With full range of relevant standard features?

This is a summary of the main factors to consider:

• Aims: number and types of outcome; cost per outcome; response mechanism.
• Targeting: audience characteristics; database fields selected; personalisation.
• Offer: primary and secondary offer; number of offers per message.
• Design for inbox renderability: Email readers whether web-based like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail or running on a local computer such as Outlook or Lotus Notes all render HTML differently.
• Additional features:
  • Prompts to add to white list, view in browser
  • Update profile or communications preference through social applications
  • Forward to a friend
  • Printing, in the case of promotional offers such as vouchers

Please get in touch for further information on how we can assist in bringing the best out of your email creative.