C’mon, admit it, you’ve done it too. From time to time everybody likes to peek at what other people are doing to get inspiration. As email marketers we spend almost as much time looking at our competition as coming up with new ideas on our own. We sign up for our competitors’ emails and all kinds of other email, looking at what we like and what we don’t from what we receive. Often we assume that because a large brand is doing something they must have thought it out and tested it to make sure it works, so we think we should do the same thing.

I like to talk about what marketers should be doing with email to be successful, but it´s really just as important to look at what mistakes others are making that you can avoid. After all, making new mistakes is always more fun than repeating what everyone else has done. Two recent studies have come out on this subject that are definitely worth reading.

The Email Experience Council (EEC) has released a study on image rendering and it is startling to see that over half of the marketers surveyed still haven’t taken simple actions to design for image blocking. The EEC has identified image rendering as one of the most correctable actions email marketers can take to improve their ROI. At Lyris, our feelings are so strong about the importance of knowing what your message looks like in all email clients that we made EmailAdvisor a standard feature in LyrisHQ. So, read the EEC study which provides lots of tips and mistakes most commonly committed and then use EmailAdvisor to see how many of them you can correct.

The second study that recently came out is from our friends at Return Path who researched the subscriber experience. They looked mostly at major US brands, and what they had hoped to see were lots of examples of these “leaders” utilizing industry accepted best practices. Instead, they found just the opposite:

• 60% did not send a welcome message
• 30% didn't send any email within a month of sign up
• 70% asked for a lot of data points during subscription, but 75% never used it for targeting or personalization

Best practices, like sending a welcome message and targeting should be common, but if you are looking to the big guys as leaders, you may be following the wrong ones. If you need a little help or want an expert to review your program, ask your Lyris account manager about our strategic service offerings.

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