Back in 2009, we wrote a post on the email shotgun, rifle, and blow-dart, which focused on the importance of relevant and personalized email content. While this post could benefit from a few updates, much of it holds true and serves as a good example of what Southwest could be doing.

I routinely receive an email very similar to the one below that emphasizes their ‘Click ‘N Save Deals.’ This is a great idea, in concept, but when the resulting content doesn’t provide relevance to the subscriber, it does little good. What I mean is that most of the time the ‘deals’ are never in my primary service area. While I may be interested in a nice deal on a flight to Aspen, if the deal is only for Dallas to Aspen, that does me little good.

The Long-Term Risk of this Lack of Personalization: Subscribers will continue to check if their is a deal that applies to them, but after a while if they consistently see that the promotion is irrelevant, they will be trained not to check. When that perfect deal does come along, it will be too late as they will delete it before checking (or opt-out).

What Southwest.com Could Do:

1. I’m a frequent flyer and have a rewards account with them that is associated with my email address. Why not identify my primary departure airport and have personalized content about my area and corresponding deals. Also include surrounding airports that are within a 60 mile drive.

2. If there is no ‘deal’ for my airport, why not have special alerts for last minute flight availability to prime areas. This of course requires integration with other databases, but it is doable.

3. In addition to my primary airports for departure, identify frequent destinations. This could serve as a reminder of reasons to visit, partner offers (e.g. hotels) and more.

There are also significant improvement opportunities with the overall architecture of these emails, but for the purpose of this post we will stay focused on the context/relevance of the promotion. Southwest has a tremendous opportunity here to provide extremely personalized email content that will improve the customer experience and ultimately increase sales. With a few small adjustment they can have a big impact, and with a larger strategic overhaul, they could really start to better leverage the email channel.

They have launched an email series that focuses on strategic videos from the pros. Not only is this fantastic content that their subscribers will eat up, but they execute it quite well.

The screen grab below shows the top section of one of their emails.

Some great elements with this top section:

1. They have a clear button to click through and watch the video.

2. The primary topic of the video, description, and button are left-justified so it is easy to see in a preview window, and aesthetically sound.

3. They use text for all copy and not one big image! (you won’t be able to demo this in the screen grab above). This is great for users who have images blocked by default.

4. As mentioned above, they are focusing on the customer both with great usability and by providing solid content.

Areas of improvement

1. Navigation: In a future post we’ll discuss the rest of this email, but on quick glance the email navigation in this example could benefit from some changes. It doesn’t really look like a nav, plus there are alternate/additional options that would likely provide improvement.

2. Testing the Photo: I have not seen any tests run yet on the pro’s photo. I would be interest to see if a video screen grab (with play button) performed better here while still integrating with their branding.

Being a poker player myself, I look forward to seeing more emails from Full Tilt not only for the marketing evaluation, but to actually utilize the content.

Surprisingly, I see a lot of basic mistakes email marketing being made by very large casinos. With such large marketing budgets, I would expect more sophistication from their email programs.

After making my online reservation, I received the following confirmation email. (click image to enlarge)

It’s great that they are sending me a confirmation with some information in case I have questions, but where is the branding and other relevant content?

Key Items Missing:

1. Branding: All of us here at Email Aptitude are pretty big fans of having a higher text to image ratio, especially for transactional email triggers. But in this case there is zero branding. Mandalay Bay easily could have maintained a high text ratio (and all text for this main body copy) while still having a branded header and footer with additional call-outs.

2. Helpful Recommendations: Why not use this opportunity to let me know about exciting things to do at the hotel? They could have a graphic section showing events occurring during the dates of my visit; information about the the restaurants they have; games they offer; and other amenities I may be interested in. This can all be done in a very tasteful way that does not take away from the simplicity of the email.

3. Cross-Sell/Up-Sell: On my reservation confirmation email it would be a great opportunity to up-sell a different room or cross-sell some services like show tickets or a spa package. This too can be done very tactfully and presented in a way that truly benefits the customer.

With a little effort, Mandalay Bay could be doing much better with email. With some structured planning and testing, they could be crushing it. As of now though, they are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Click to learn more about our strategic email marketing services.

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In the screen grab below, we see a design with no clear focus, and what appears to be an intentional lack of focus. If you’re going to get creative, please don’t forget about usability logic and conversion architecture.

Some Issues:

• Is the yellow copy supposed to be a time counter? If so, is that supposed to be 1 day, 7 hours, 48 minutes, and 17 seconds? A counter can benefit from clear labeling.
• With the fuzzy white on black, we don’t know where the eye is supposed to go. There is a lot going on here and not much consistency.
• No clear click through: at the bottom it says ‘Click Here for Details’ but that is it. No call to action buttons or other entry points.
• Zero Hard Rock branding. Hard Rock has such a distinct brand, it should be leveraged here.

Big picture, this email needs a lot of work. I would be very interested to see how this email performed in terms of click-through and site conversion. After staring at it for a while it’s great that there is an offer of up to 60% off, which could provide some great incentive to book! Unfortunately, execution was not consistent with the brand and offer.

Click image to view larger version.

What We Like:

1. Simplicity of the Product Layout: It’s not convoluted with unnecessary design elements and each product is focused.

2. Multiple Products: Instead of just providing 3 featured products, they give 12 options. Since their layout is very clean, they can get away with more product.

3. Use of Gift Cards: Nice touch with having three images of a gift cards. On one end, it provides a great alternative if you’re not ‘in the know’ of their products, but it’s a nice simple touch to make it look like an actual gift card. (We are not sure if they actual mail a physical card or provide a gift code)

4. MSRP Price: They include the suggested retail price along with their price, which helps to drive value.

Areas of Improvement:

1. Design: While we like the simplicity, it does look a bit ‘templated.’ This can be corrected with improved design elements on the categories and main hero graphic. For the latter, the green font is somewhat difficult to read.

2. Click-Through Elements: While the simplicity works for them, there are simple elements that will increase CTR. For starters, there is no primary call to action in the hero graphic, plus for each of the products, a simple ‘get it’ ‘learn more’ ‘buy now’ button will likely help. Additionally, having improved formatting on the actual pricing would help. There are probably a dozen other elements that would improve click-through.

3. Pre-Header:  In a previous post, we briefly touched on the benefit of testing your pre-header. Here, at least they included a pre-header with ‘view the online version’ which many companies forget about. But this real-estate can be much better leveraged to reemphasize the promotion and other key elements.

This email is a good start to mixing up extremely design-heavy layouts. There are, however, many areas of improvement to make this email perform much better. As always, we hope they are testing extensively to see what works with their subscribers.

Often times, email marketers have the default pre-header inviting subscribers to view the online version. This is definitely better than nothings, but we would recommend testing additional pre-headers to see how it affects engagements.

In many cases, we see the pre-header attract a significant ratio of click activity. As always, we recommend to test and monitor to discover what works best for you.

On the topic of time of day, it can be interesting to take it a step further if you have the data available to you. If your ESP (email service provider) allows you to export and filter through email engagement data, create segments based on time range patterns. In a manual example, this would encompass opening up engagement data in Excel and filtering based on a time range for the given metric.

Side Note: The first instinct would be to filter based on time of open. While you should test this, you may find better results filtering based on time of click or conversion. You want to deploy to your subscribers when they are in a position to act. For more complex products/sales-cycles, this won’t apply as much. But for consumer retail products, it will be good to test.

In this example, you would see how many people (opened or clicked or converted) between 2-4pm, 4-6pm etc. This can get as granular as you have time for. Start slow though and test. Group the larger of the time windows you determine and test sending to them at that time with your next send. Make sure to document and monitor results so you can make informed decisions on testing allocation.

Testing can be fun, but it’s important to consider scale and resource availability. In a post from July 2009, we discussed this testing equilibrium in greater detail.

For time of day (or day of week) segmentation and testing, we ultimately want to provide a better experience to our subscribers. If we can do this, along with provide relevant content, we will increase the longevity of our subscriber relationships and provide stronger results to our email efforts.

In the first email, Verizon utilizes some great personalization and dynamic content. In the screen grab below, notice the following:

1. Image of My Phone: This is great and helps integrate the content of the message.

2. Useful Tools: To help me get started with my new phone, they offer quick links to move my contacts, set up email, create shortcuts, and more. Very useful.

3. Focused Content: Everything here is focused on helping me better leverage my new purchase and is specific to my actual device.

When we talk about providing targeted, timely, and relevant content to subscribers, this is a great example and a fantastic use of the email channel. This email from Verizon should help to create a lot of ideas of how you can create a better customer experience.

Simple Example

Revenue for Time Period or Message: $189,433

Delivered Emails: 997,015

Rev/Del: $0.19

How it Helps: The revenue per delivered email metric provides a nice constant when comparing various email efforts. Campaign 1 may have a 25% CTR and $38,000 while Campaign 2 has a 28% CTR and $52,000. The latter may appear to have performed better (and in terms of total revenue it obviously did). But in the scenario that Campaign 1 was delivered to 80,000 and Campaign 2 was delivered to 260,000, the former outperforms with a rev/del of $0.47 compared to $0.20.

For far less effort, Campaign 1 in this example produced over 2X revenue for every email delivered. This is very helpful when comparing promotions, weekly/monthly/quarterly reports, and types of email efforts, such as segmented vs. non-segmented campaigns.

Get your data together and start reviewing some email reports!