3 Advanced Email Marketing Techniques You’ve Never Heard Of
Are you stuck using the same techniques to get your readers excited about your email marketing campaigns? As a small business email marketer, you can get the same superlative results as the big brands by adopting these three (somewhat obscure) advanced email marketing techniques:
Click Heat Maps
No matter whether or not it leads to your small business’ landing page, every single link in your email newsletter is a form of a call to action. Indeed it can be said that every visible element on the page right down to every image, color, background, or word fits that definition as well. One of the preferred ways to increase the efficiency of every single part of your emails to drive those all-important conversions is to devise a series of click heat maps.
This type of mapping will allow you to determine where your readers’ eyes are going in your messages and what actions they take according to what they have seen. You may be surprised when you see your first click heat map as parts of your email which you would think are heavily viewed usually are not, and vice versa. Areas which show up on the mapping as the most intensely watched should be emphasized, and the large areas which got barely a glance should be minimized or outright eliminated.
Touch Design
Technology has finally advanced to the point where optical mouse resolution is so fine that it is essentially pixel-correct allowing for very precise and elegantly tiny functionalities… and now touchscreens enter the picture and toss everything out. The predominant graphical user interface (GUI) for all mobile devices from smartphones to tablets is the human finger, and unless it is shaved to a point in a pencil sharpener (ouch!) it turns out to be as adept at navigating mouse-oriented email messages as performing needlework with a sledgehammer.
Apple recommends that any button intended for touch use be a minimum of 44 x 44 pixels, and some GUI experts recommend at least a 50 x 50 pixel size. Buttons that are too small and too close together will cause such frustration in your touchscreen users that they might unsubscribe from your small business newsletter list simply due to your email’s design flaws!
Text To Image Ratio
A picture tells a thousand words, but it had better be a fairly small picture or you’ll be throwing your critical text to image ratio off. A number of small business email marketers are not even aware of the existence of this important ratio which has a powerful impact on many aspects of the success of your overall email campaign. If your email registers a low text to image ratio you can look forward to:
Increased flagging as spam
Poor rendering results
Lower deliverability
Diminished conversion rates
Since those are the results that no email marketer ever wants to contemplate, it is important to achieve the preferred text to image ratio of 30:70 in all your messaging. The calculation is based on file size, so to obtain the best deliverability results each email should have no less than 3.2 KB of text and that means that the total image file size be as close as possible to 7.5 KB.
The ratio should be kept as constant as you can achieve so 6 KB of text should have 14 KB of total image and so on. If you’re like many small business email marketers your ratios are way off, with perhaps over 100 KB of image trying to balance out a few KB of text. You don’t need to turn all your images to postage stamps or start writing entire encyclopedia volumes in each newsletter in order to adhere to the proper text to image ratio.
The file size of images is not only determined by the display size in pixels x pixels but also in the total amount of image information. Just crank up the Adobe Photoshop and you’ll find that when you save an image file for web & device use you can select Quality for JPGs and Colors for GIFs. Good email marketing services will let you experiment with these settings through the live preview pane to determine the lowest possible settings to provide acceptable image quality for your newsletter use.
