Email Marketing Redefined

Here at Traction, we're typically trying to stay one step ahead of our industry and market. That means trying new things (mostly online things) on a consistent basis and quickly figuring out if they fit into our toolbelt and how we might leverage them for our clients.

But we always have to remind ourselves that sometimes new & shiny doesn't mean it's where our focus should be.

For most people, possibly before getting the first cup of coffee or beginning to get ready for the day, part of our daily routinue is to check that one thing that our lives hinge upon. Our email. 

We've posted about email marketing before (here, here, and here). We've talked about some of our capabilities with easy-to-create, beautiful template-based emails. How we can allow clients to easily manage their subscriber lists. And gain deep, rich insights into how people interact with their email campaigns. But our email capabilities are continuing to grow more than one might think.

We're going to quickly cover a few new features we're offering with MagneticMail, our pro HTML email software, and how you might benefit from them.

First, let's talk about the elephant in the room. The increasing usage of email while mobile. After examining data from over 90 email clients, amounting for more than 130 million data points over a 6 month period, a recent study by Return Path found that while webmail clients (think Gmail & Yahoo) overall are on a slow decline, mobile views increased by 82.4% over the same period (March '11 – March '12). Mobile devices are currently claiming 15%+ of overall email client market share, with 85% of mobile email opens occurring on an Apple iOS device.

Here's a look at some numbers from our eNewsletter from last month compared to the previous year's numbers. You can see that things are changing, and fast.

This all means that mobile is set to surpass desktop webmail client usage for average users by July. And even more, this means that you need to be concerned with how your email campaigns look on mobile devices. It just takes a bit of extra planning in the design phase and some new code during development of templates to provide the right experience (we might even find time to do this for our own emails soon… maybe). 

We recently redesigned BC Clark's email template to match their new website. Due to their large subscriber base and the importance of email in their marketing objectives, we decided it needed to adapt itself to mobile devices. As you can see below, we shift and scale graphics and text to esure it is as easy to digest as possible.

Taking mobile even further would mean optimizing for tablet devices. Should you? Depends on your readers' habits. But if you're watching the numbers, you'll know when it becomes important. The email-watchers at Return Path also reported a 15% increase in iPad use relative to iPhone use. "What we find is that the use of iPads has exploded – with an increase of 73% in email views on iPad devices between April and September of 2011. Email views on the iPad jumped by 12% between March and April, then continued the steady climb upward."

Next up, a new type of email campaign. If you're busy blogging, tweeting, and generating content on the web, we can now use those feeds to populate email campaigns. And can even do it automagically.

RSS-to-Email is the ticket to notifying your subscribers whenever you update your site, blog, or social networking site/s. Don't want the email going out all by itself on a pre-set date/scheduling timeline? No problem. MagneticMail can sit back and create an email draft for you that you can then customize and edit at your convenience and send or schedule whenever you like.

Don't forget that you can pull in any feed/s you like. That means all those industry trend websites/feeds you'd like your subscribers to be aware of can now be sucked right into your campaigns and delivered at will - just remember to always give credit where credit is due.

Finally, stay in touch with your subscribers without lifting a finger. Autoresponders make it easy to quickly build and schedule automated welcome messages, birthday greetings, and other date-based campaigns as single emails or a sequence of emails over time.

In MagneticMail, you can now set exactly what should trigger each autoresponder based on data in your subscriber list. What types of triggers might you choose?

1) A set number of days after a subscriber joins your list.
2) The anniversary of any date in your subscriber data.
3) The exact match of any date in your subscriber data.

Email marketing is a powerful way to stay connected with your subscribers, now with minimal effort and a customized experience for whichever device they might be using.

Interested in taking your marketing efforts to email? Don't currently have a subscriber list and need help building one? Contact us for a demo of MagneticMail and an overview of pricing and features. Let's talk.