Sprint Before: all text emails with no cross-sell, or up-sell messaging

Sprint After: Started with shipping emails. Wanted to Keep personalization and some text. But, there was so much to improve (while still keeping legal and IT happy).

Content the same, but formatting much more professional and lively. Navigation in upper-right and cross-sell opportunities along right-side.
Conversion rate = 8x higher than base emails. Very relevant and timely.

• 2007 MarketingSherpa showed that email is “extremely significant” to company’s marketing programs.
• 25% of marketers surveyed have no mention of newsletter or email signup on their homepages.
• 55% of companies send a Welcome email message within 72 hours. Of those, roughly 1/3 send content beyond welcome – these automated email triggers offer a great opportunity to show examples of previous newsletters or cross-sell or up-sell offers. Strike while the iron is hot and reach out to subscribers right when they are most excited about hearing from you.
• Transactional email has become more accepted over the past 3 years. Fewer people are hugely negative or positive towards transactional email as long as there isn’t a lot of heavy, “hard sell” marketing speak in them.
• Email Deliverability: many ISPs like AOL, Earthlink, Gmail, and Yahoo are primarily Reputation-based which has become much more systematic and mathematic in all that Reputation encompasses. Reputation-based programs promote good marketing.
• Reputation Fixes:
  1) Slash your list
  2) Third Parties & CAN-SPAM (do it right)
  3) Rendering 
• MSherpa recommends that you re-engage with an unsubscriber at the point of unsubscribing. Add 2-3 quick survey questions asking why they are leaving.
• Eyetracking: need to teach new designers a data-centric way of where email recipients eyes are drawn to on the email creative. Showed a case study of a more print-driven design that performed horribly on Eye Tools heat map. The other case study showing tightened up copy and strong visual offers performed amazingly where the hottest area of the heat map was actually below the fold. Impressive.
• Viewing and Rendering: blocked images are important to take into account. Make sure that your email creative has a mix of images and copy where some copy is above the fold.

Landing Pages: this is the most powerful and impactful part of your email campaign.
Landing page copy (44% high ROI), A/B – email offers, Subject line tests, Landing page creative, A/B – email creative

If you forget anything from the above information, just remember this:
ECE = 3lq + 2or + 2bc + 2it + ef + dr
Email Campaign Effectiveness = list quality + offer relevance + body copy + intrinsic timing (send times and urgency) + envelope fields (subject and from fields) + deliverability rate

(formula is courtesy of Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MEC Labs (who just acquired MarketingSherpa))