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.

HP had a fairly straight forward effort with a simple time-sensitive resend/reminder. A few comments:

Offer: Up to 50% off is enticing, especially for higher priced computer gear.

Overall Design: Fairly clean with clear focus on the offer.

Architecture: In this email, they didn’t feature any products, so HP had fewer click-through opportunities. With that, I would have expected this design effort to have a more prominent entry point. The ‘Shop HP Now’ is nice, but the focus on the promotion overpowers it a bit. I didn’t see any tests on this from them, but they very well could have been testing various elements.

Navigation: They provide additional entry points, which is great.

The Resend: With the screen grab on the right, we see their ‘last chance’ resend. While the design is consistent, there are a few improvements I would have liked to see: First, ‘Hurry Ends Soon’ is a nice addition but more time-sensitive copy could help. e.g. 24 hours left, last day, etc. I would have made this a bit more prominent as well. Additionally, I would have added an additional click-through element. The Shop HP Now button at bottom is nice, but having a clear entry point near the time-sensitive copy can help.

Here, Dell.com has done a great job of providing an aesthetically pleasing email that is also very integrated and usable.

Click image to view larger version.

Some cool things going on here:

1. It appears they are testing the use of employee product comments. On first glance I thought this was an actual customer review, but it’s a nice touch adjusting the product description to be a quote from a Dell employee.

2. Dell continues to have pretty clean architecture. Here they have nice use of white-space, straight-forward ‘Buy Now’ buttons, and a well contained layout.



3. Nice use of color! Dell does a great job of integrating red here. The solid background accompanied by the buttons, product titles, and monitor backgrounds help to integrate this message very nicely.

Take note that a little can go a long way. As always, we hope everyone is testing extensively though to see what works best with your subscribers.

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.

The next page had a great  preference section that was obviously specific to this particular promotion. I was able to indicate if I wanted reminders for Laptops, Desktops, Monitors, etc. You’ll see in the screen grab below that they have large visuals for each of the options which is a nice touch. Not only is it more usable, but seeing the products makes a user more likely to want to receive updates on them — tech “eye candy” if you will.

They offer an opt-in check box to subscribe to additional offers and also allow you to subscribe to mobile reminders. On the confirmation page though, Dell had a really cool move of providing links to “Shop Now” for the categories I selected to receive updates on. Sounds like common sense, however many retailers take you to a general thank-you page and you have to navigate your way to certain products. Dell does a nice job here of making it easy for the user to get where they likely want to go and retain visitors while they are in the buying mindset.

Great opt-in process from Dell here. They stay consistent with their brand and usability of their site, offer a reason to opt-in to their list, provide user preference options so they can further segment and provide more sophisticated dynamic content, and they integrate the process with other site goals. One quick area of improvement would be on the first page where you click “Need a Reminder…” and then go to the opt-in page. I would recommend having a quick sign-up here (have a field to enter your email address) accompanied by a button reading: “Click to subscribe and select product preferences” — or something to that effect. By doing this they likely increase their opt-in conversion rate by acquiring more sign-ups from the main page and drawing additional attention to the fact that there is an email sign-up option.

The next post will focus on the reminder emails deployed during their campaign.

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

I seem to get some email promotions for a $9.99 Initiation Fee + $29.99/month, and then different weeks I’ll get an email for a $0 Initiation Fee + $29.99/month. All with the same subject line: “Membership Special”

But it was a bit too late as I recently signed a longer term commitment with LA Fitness (the nicer of the gyms in my particular area). The problem with the LA Fitness email program is they don’t have one — at least they didn’t ask for my email at all during my registration process for my 3 year membership. Perhaps they are thinking that the sale is already closed. If so, their email department needs a wake-up call. There are many relevant email communications such as class update/schedules, fitness tips, up-sell/cross-sell opportunities, refer-a-friend promotions and more!

Before rushing to judgment though, I will investigate further to see if there is in fact a members email list (or any email list for that matter). It could have just been a slip-up not asking me to sign up.

Stay tuned…

Forest

This doesn’t mean there is not a place for discounts — of course there is. Just don’t make it bland. 5% off doesn’t cut it. Make it exclusive for your email list and they will feel more rewarded.

The email below from Lucky Brand is a few weeks old, but it is a nice example of an attention-grabbing discount. It also gives you the option to print and bring in to the store, or use online. I would use a different promo-code though as 9SEPFRND is not the easiest to remember — could be much worse with a completely random string of letters and numbers, but could be improved to something like LUCKY30.

Cheers,

Forest  |  Follow Me on Twitter

I think the timing is good as well. This email arrived on Tuesday morning, which gives me some time to review and act before the rushed weekend of holiday travel. I would expect a follow-up email; either a trigger if  I don’t click-through, or an “In case you missed our Labor Day Sale…” type message.

Great (and improved) email execution from Blinds.com! One thing I’m curious about though is their overall content approach. On first glance, it appears that the vast majority of their emails are either seasonal-based promotions or special discounts either store-wide or brand-specific. What about educational content, design tips, product features and the like? Often times more sales come from a non-sales approach. If I get engaged, get some ideas, and start reviewing my windows more, I may be much more likely to purchase than if I get a nice promo but don’t know what I need or that there could be something I want. Blinds.com sells products that are perfect for more juicy content that can better leverage the email channel.

At any rate; nice work on the email below.

Cheers,

Forest

The focus of this post though is on a pre-trip email from Wynn’s Encore. A friend of mine will be visiting the new resort next week (I’m jealous I couldn’t make this trip!) A week before the arrival date he received an email from the concierge which got us talking about Wynn’s email strategy here.

Subject: During Your Upcoming Stay at Encore at Wynn Las Vegas.

Body of Email (Click to Enlarge)

Landing Page (Click to Enlarge)

Anyone who spots the first problem of why a user has to click through to see any content gets points.

Comments & Suggestions

1. Approach: I love it! For a resort like the Wynn/Encore, there should absolutely be a high level of personalized email communication that is consistent with the level of service they provide. They are on the right track here, but still several steps away from a solid strategy (some steps being beyond the scope of this post).

2. Improved Approach: What I would do here though is have the focuses of this email separated into two campaigns. On one end they are offering a personalized welcome message. This is great and absolutely needed. Make it personal and have it directly from the concierge. On the other end they are offering recommendations and using the email channel as a cross-sell opportunity. This is also fantastic and justified for its own send. Provide some timely recommendations for shows, dinner specials, new casino games etc. (Of course even better if they integrate data from previous customer behavior to make it more of a rifle/blow-dart approach). But at the very least, do let me know about other ways I can enjoy my stay — and provide direct links to make reservations etc.

3. Email Body: Now why would Encore not just have the main content in the body of the email? Here they have an image of an envelope to click through to a landing page with the actual content. Some might argue that since this is going to registered hotel guests, the click-through-rate should be off the charts. Yes – this is very true, however it will not be a 100% CTR. They could be attempting to build excitement and value once you do actually click — but I think much more can be accomplished with a well structured main email.

…This email got me very excited about all the opportunities a resort like the Wynn has with the email channel. They are on the right track with this transactional approach, but still miles away from a top-notch program. I do hope they put in the time to make improvements to their strategy and execution as I know it will pay big dividends.

- Forest Bronzan

Questions or inputs? Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.