Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend
The 12 Pillars of Reader-Friendly Email Marketing
This was a good refresher on design for email messages and I receive my share of ugly, poorly written email messages. Ironically, many of the worst I get are from Affinity Express competitors in one specific segment. The simple fact that I'm receiving the marketing messages of these companies is bad enough but then they embellish with multiple fonts, centered text (!) and barely understandable copy.
In contrast, I get regular emails from Overstock.com and like them. The frequency feels right to me, the subject lines display fully and, although there are several images, they are properly optimized and the overall design is clean and organized. The same is true for Barnes & Noble because the subject lines pique my interest, tie in with holidays for gift ideas and promote the coupons I want.
At Affinity Express, we try to keep our email messages consistent, including the date each month they are sent, the type of content and the layout. There is a comfort level that is established because we consistently deliver what is expected.
5 Ways to Improve Your Contact Form Conversion Rate
We've debated about this in Marketing and with the Website Team at Affinity Express. From a personal standpoint, I completely agree that you need to reduce the number of required fields. I don't want to give you a ton of info until you prove that I'm going to get value in exchange. In fact, I just begrudgingly filled out an online form to compare home security companies and got five phone calls inside of three minutes. All of them repeated back the details of where I live along with a few other facts and it was creepy.
From the professional perspective, I understand the value of getting more detail so you can qualify and customized your response. What we try to do in Marketing is compromise. If you make the attempt and fill in a couple of fields, we'll write to you and ask for additional details with concrete reasons why we need them so you can make an informed decision and continue to engage. It takes the conversation from a brief form to two people and builds trust gradually, as the article suggestions in lesson #2.
