They say honesty is the greatest coverage. Honesty, in its purest type, reveals authenticity, transparency and belief. For our pals at Really Good Emails (RGE), honesty was—and all the time is— at the coronary heart of their love letter to email, UnSpam 2020.
The second-annual convention, held in Greenville, SC, introduced collectively a close-knit assortment of the most ardent #emailgeeks you’ll ever discover. And with them, quite a lot of no-bull conversations about all issues email. From design developments to trade developments to paella, what extra might email lovers ask for?
Really Good Emails strives to make unicorns out of…properly…poop.
A Bit About Our Hosts
If you’ve missed out on all that RGE has to supply, that’s okay. They’re the sorts that gained’t be offended. But now could be nearly as good a time as any to take a look at their stellar collection of emails. Built by three Matthews and a Mike, RGE showcases what the founders love: actually good email design and code. Their assortment of over 5,000 emails—submitted by customers and followers alike—runs the gamut of the buyer lifecycle to spark inspiration at any stage.
This sense of neighborhood runs by means of all the things they do—culminating in UnSpam, the ode to email pleasure.
So, with out additional ado, listed below are a few of the highlights from UnSpam 2020.
1. Think Outside the Rectangle
Being an organization targeted on email design, it solely is smart that design was a standard theme all through. Design consultants and aficionados from the likes of Tattly, GitLab, Thinkful, The Beard Club, and RGE shared their ideas and observations about what’s new and what has fallen out of favor in the world of design.
Cristina Gomez from Tattly exhibiting the greatest new email design developments.
What’s In
- Bigger, bolder sort: attention-grabbing is the title of the recreation and increasingly more manufacturers are adopting stronger typefaces to convey the message house.
- Overlapping blocks: pictures are not confined to small rectangles. Brands wish to create a extra fluid email expertise with overlapping blocks for smoother transitions.
- 3D imagery and GIFs: the world of email is lastly advancing to include extra dynamic animation potentialities. Again, bringing content material out of a confined area.
What’s Out
- Gradients: colour gradients are dropping out to stable, daring colours in fashionable designs.
- Diagonals: email entrepreneurs are actually on the lookout for the easy, simple view of their emails, shifting away from diagonal traces to guide the reader’s eye.
- Neon inexperienced: beige is so sizzling proper now.
Design is arguably of equal significance to messaging in the success of an email. You can say all the proper issues, however the general look of the email is the first hurdle to traverse to get readers engaged.
2. What’s It Like for Email Marketers
Similar to final yr, a focus at UnSpam 2020 was how life has modified for the common email marketer. And like all good marketer, the presenters got here with attention-grabbing knowledge to inform their story.
Here are the high 5 takeaways.
- Email entrepreneurs put on a number of hats with 55% of these surveyed saying they’ve abilities and tasks that stretch past email. What about the relaxation? They specialize as analysts, designers, builders, writers, and so forth.
- Click charges topped the survey with 41% of survey respondents saying it’s the most necessary metric. This is an efficient signal that entrepreneurs are wanting deeper down the funnel past open charges for achievement markers.
- Passion and dedication is vital to the email marketer. Just over 1 / 4 of respondents (26%) say they’ve been in email advertising and marketing between 5 and eight years. And over 70% of respondents count on to nonetheless be in an email function in 5 years.
- Teams are rising as email advertising and marketing grows. Almost half of respondents (47%) are on groups of two or three and 28% are on groups of 4+. The variety of respondents on groups of three+ grew 300% year-over-year.
- There is no single ESP to rule all of them as 70% of email entrepreneurs complement their ESP with different instruments. These entrepreneurs are on the lookout for complete accomplice ecosystems to fill out their stack.
Really Good Emails and Oracle current what it’s wish to be an email marketer immediately.
Looking to the future, it’s vibrant. Simple as that. Teams are rising. Marketers are obsessed with their work—they usually’re extremely expert in addition. Issues come up in organizing property and discovering the proper options to meet all the artistic concepts bouncing round of their heads. If solely there was a less complicated option to discover out which system is correct on your model!
3. All Things Email
The the rest of the UnSpam 2020 convention targeted on greatest practices that branched outdoors actually good designs.
A/B Testing
An open session about A/B testing introduced a deeper look into the completely different elements of an email which can be value testing. In explicit, The Beard Club showcased the oft-overlooked significance of the management group. They cut up testing between two experimental teams and one management group that obtained no communications.
The concept is to get the purest numbers to measure email carry. Control teams will nonetheless buy after organically discovering your online business. Rather than discovering out which topic line is performing higher, your check is actually taking a look at precisely how your email communications are driving income.
Demystifying Deliverability
Achieving higher deliverability goes past analyzing tender and exhausting bounce charges and discovering out what lands in the spam folder.
Udeme Ukutt from the Email Sender and Provider Coalition spoke about a few of the greatest methods to make sure your email finds itself in the proper folder. Firstly, you want a transparent call-to-action for opting out and in, particularly with laws like GDPR. Secondly, your lists and lifecycles want correct administration. Sending out too many emails to lists of defunct addresses will harm your deliverability. Finally, keep related with the neighborhood like the one at RGE. It’s the greatest option to keep in the learn about developments and new developments in the trade.
Engage, Engage, Engage
The objective of an email is to drive buyer engagement. A standard theme all through a lot of the convention was how one can foster increasingly more engagement with prospects.
It’s all the time a great train to see what others are doing to make the buyer journey a bit extra gratifying. A couple of of our favorites have been:
- Be genuine
- Make surveys and polls enjoyable
- Monitor buzz by wanting outdoors the inbox to see what individuals are saying
- Help subscribers really feel like a part of your staff
- Give away free stuff
The aforementioned paella. It was nearly as good as marketed.
Every enterprise is exclusive. And judging by the audio system and attendees at UnSpam 2020, there’s no scarcity of artistic concepts to make the most out of email advertising and marketing. If you’re interested by listening to extra from the consultants at RGE, take a look at their session at Activate London 2019 the place they did a dwell email assessment!
See you all at UnSpam 2021!