How social has changed the way email campaigns work

The demise of the wordy newsletter

The first email casualty has been the long form, wordy newsletter. Few (if any) take the time to read such emails. Much of this is conditioned by social media and the fact that more than 50% of all emails are now opened on smartphones.

The triumph of the image

Images now dominate successful email campaigns. If you look at the average successful email campaign's real estate, you will notice that the image takes up at least 60% of the real estate, with shorter messages and links to longer-form content on websites. Images work because they can be understood in 13 milliseconds, which is literally the blink of an eye. Try to write a headline that can be understood as fast.

Information in small bites

The most successful email campaigns that are long-form use the same principles as short emails. Pictures dominate with small blocks of copy and links to longer-form content on websites. Delivering information in this format allows recipients to scan a longer email in the same way they scan the information in their social feeds. Emails designed in this way even 'feel' like a social feed, tailored to their specific interests.

Brevity works

One of the most successful commercial emails of all time had a subject line of just three characters. It was a fundraising email sent by Barak Obama's campaign. Today the goal is to keep subject lines shorter than 60 characters and include the recipients first name. 

Brevity is also true for headlines and body copy. Personalized headlines of less than 80 characters and body copy blocks of less than 350 characters deliver the highest engagement and click through rates.

Simple works best with emails

Simple emails allow your message to be conveyed faster. They also work better on mobile devices and pass through the increasingly difficult ISP filters that allow emails to be delivered to recipients.

How social has taught us to deliver content more frequently

People check their social feeds multiple times a day. They scan to see what interests them and then engage with what they find interesting or compelling. The same is true of email. Forget the model where you send a long newsletter email once a month or quarter. Break it into blocks and send the same information in 4 blocks over a month. You will get more true engagement and demonstrate that you want to stay connected. The same is true of product and service emails. Send more, shorter emails more frequently and compare which content is delivering the best results. Drive all of your email clicks to your website, track journeys, and drive up your organic search rankings. Schedule your emails for the days and times when your recipients are more open to engaging with your content.

New generation email platforms

The best new generation email platforms place image management at their core. Imagine a solution that allows you to build a collection of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of images into your own image library. Imagine finding and choosing images in seconds and adding them to an email campaign, with their descriptions in seconds. This is one of the features of XL.Today™.

XL.Today™ email campaigns capture all of the most successful email campaign's features into a campaign workflow that ensures you deliver emails that have the greatest chance of delivery, open, and engagement rates. XL.Today™ allows you to create multiple email campaigns in minutes and include posts to social media and even SMS in the same campaign workflow. 

Time to play

XL.Today™ has done all of the hard work, and now you get to be creative. Experiment with what works. Measure results in near real-time and compare campaign performances in a single graphic view. Schedule campaigns ahead of time and have them delivered when your customers are most open to respond. It's all part of a digital marketing platform that's changing the way email campaigns work.