| Email Marketing Rebels: When Breaking Email Best Practices is Good - Part Two |
| Sunday, August 15 2010 23:00 | |||
 As marketers, we’d love to have a collection of rules and standards that we could call on to ensure that we’re 100% successful, 100% of the time. While email marketing best practices do provide us some guidelines, we should by no means take these as the absolute, unquestionable rules that get us the results we crave.
In the first of this two-part blog post, we discussed how email marketers may get bigger and better results by taking some license with best practices around subject lines and email format. In part two we’ll take a look at how breaking the rules regarding preview pane design, links, and calls to action might just be tickets to success. Take a look at the accepted best practices around the email preview pane:
Costco’s goal is to sell a lot of a wide variety of products. And if you’ve ever visited their store looking for one item, you likely remember leaving with a cart full of products you didn’t even know you needed. This same philosophy holds true with their email marketing campaigns. Because Costco has created a brand image that is about bulk and variety, the email messages they send to prospects and repeat customers deliver that image. While email preview pane best practices may not have been applied in this example, Costco’s brand consistency from store to email marketing messages generates results and revenue that make them one of the biggest and most successful big box retailers in the U.S. As email marketers, we know the golden rules of creating calls to action. They should be:
But in this newsletter example from social media guru, Chris Brogan, you can see that there is no call to action - clear, concise, urgent or otherwise - very few links, and a lot of text (another big no-no for email marketers). Yet this newsletter has an astronomical open rate and an impressively high level of subscriber engagement, as measured by the number of replies and questions from readers.
As email and online marketers, we have both the freedoms and the challenges associated with our trade. While we crave best practices to help guide us through the challenges of ever changing prospect needs and wants, rapidly evolving media, and shifting management expectations, we also are chartered with pushing the limits and innovating to get better and better at what we do – and stay ahead of our audiences’ expectations. Best practices are useful points to guide your marketing efforts, but more importantly can be used as launch pads from which to take calculated risks in order to build better marketing campaigns. The only way to determine if email marketing best practices or being an email marketing rebel is best for your company is to develop and maintain a measurable and consistent test strategy to determine what preview panes, calls to action, links, or other elements will deliver your best results. ### About the AuthorShannon Titus is the senior marketing programs manager at Lyris. She is responsible for creating compelling email marketing communications and programs to share with Lyris customers and prospects. Related Resources:
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