Email hasn’t changed much over the last couple of decades, except for the fact that more people are using it than ever before, every single day. Now, thanks to breakthrough technology, email is finally evolving into its next incarnation: Interactive Email, and we at ActivePath are excited to develop this technology to bring users the best, most efficient, interesting and engaging email experience possible, all without ever leaving their inbox.

Until now, email as we know it contained nothing more than text and images, but with our free downloadable email add-on, ActiveMail, email is transformed into an interactive experience. Not only does ActiveMail finally make possible the display of a wide variety if rich-media (including video) right inside the email, but it also endows senders of marketing emails with instant brand recognition and authenticity thanks to our Inbox Branding feature, which displays the sender’s icon beside his email in the inbox.

As it turns out, however, we are not alone in our mission to bring interactive email to the world. PowerInbox, a cool company that develops a huge range of email apps designed to let you perform actions inside the email itself – also believes that the next generation of email will be collaborative, real-time, and interactive.

It seemed logical, therefore, for ActivePath and PowerInbox to combine their passion, technological expertise and funding in order to forge forward as the leading force behind the introduction of Interactive Email to inboxes everywhere, and we’re excited to announce our merger today.
 

“Both teams shared a common vision for increasing engagement through interactive email so putting them together was a natural conclusion. There was a great chemistry and mutual desire to shake up the status quo of today’s static, low converting email,” according to Jeff Kupietzky, CEO of the new combined company, to be known as PowerInbox.

Although the merger is still fresh, the two teams at ActivePath and PowerInbox are already hard at work to develop an even better add-on that will include not only the best features of each of the individual add-ons, but  even more cool functionality for our users to enjoy.

For now, existing ActiveMail and PowerInbox users can simply continue to enjoy their existing add-ons, however the ActiveMail add-on will eventually be phased out and seamlessly replaced by an enhanced version of the PowerInbox add-on, expected for release early next year.  Existing users will not have to perform any new download to get the updated version.
 

“Our customers and end users are our highest priority and we are committed to ensuring the smoothest integration, with minimal disruption for our stakeholders” said Matt Thazhmon, co-founder of PowerInbox.

So whether you’re already using either ActiveMail or PowerInbox, or not, if you’re interested in the future of email and in joining the growing community of interactive email pioneers around the world, then please feel free to subscribe to our blog so we can stay in touch and let you know when our ground-breaking new add-on will be available for download.

The post ActivePath has merged with PowerInbox to bring you an even better interactive email experience! appeared first on ActivePath.

In his presentation, Jeff ran through some facts and figures reinforcing the power of email as the #1 preferred marketing communication channel and the astounding impact of video on email performance, leading in nicely to the crux of the matter:
Email is ripe for innovation, and enabling interactivity, namely video, is the way to start.

Things got even more interesting as Jeff demonstrated the evolution of video in email, rather reminiscent of the evolution of movies from silent films to today’s special-effect laden blockbusters made possible by spectacular advances in motion picture technology. Much like the evolution of motion pictures, “motion” in email has been reliant on technology that would allow it, and happily, the technology is now readily available if you only know where to look!

Vertical Response, for example, is among those paving the way for others to follow, by allowing their ActiveMail users to watch videos right inside their newsletters, as shown in the screenshot on the right.

Jeff also showcased some emails by other savvy senders who used ActiveMail to incorporated real video into their emails, as well as other interactive, rich-media such as scrolling galleries, registration forms, online booking, animations and more. Sounds groovy, right? Well it’s not just groovy, it works.

Results have shown engagement levels up to 6 times higher in interactive emails than in their non-interactive counterparts, and Jeff also talked about email performance expectations as a result of dynamic content.

So without further ado, click below to view the webinar. If you’re as inspired as some of the attendees were to add interactivity into their emails, get in touch. Also, check out the webinar’s Q&A highlights below.
 

Q & A Session Highlights:

Q: You’ve been showing examples via Gmail. What about other webmail apps?
A: ActiveMail supports all the major email clients including Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail & Outlook.

Q: Is the ActiveMail plugin something that users have to download/install, or does it run automatically? Do both senders and end-users have to download ActiveMail in order for it to work?
A: ActiveMail is an add-on that requires a one-time only download by the users (the email recipients only, not the senders) after which the users can enjoy all of the ActiveMail features on all future campaigns from any sender.

The senders are the ones that will be preparing the interactive content and emailing it to their users, so the more of their users have ActiveMail, the bigger the potential will be for much higher levels of email engagement for that campaign.

Q: How is ActiveMail priced?
A: ActiveMail pricing is volume-tiered based on the number of ActiveMail opens each month.  We do offer free pilot campaigns to try out the service.  For more information, contact sales@activepath.com

Q: If users can watch videos directly inside email, doesn’t that reduce click-throughs to your website?
A: That would depend on the purpose of the video in the first place. If the video’s purpose is to educate and inform, then it’s actually more convenient for the user to watch it right there inside the email rather than click out to a new browser tab which requires extra effort and time.

If the purpose of the video is to encourage an additional action after watching the video, then it’s up to you as the sender to determine whether there is merit in sending the user to the website to complete the action, or whether there is a better chance that he will complete the action if you give him the option to do it directly inside the email.

NOTE: The email content of an ActiveMail usually is a page within your website anyway (displayed via an iFrame in the email), so either way you’ve registered a website visit as soon as the ActiveMail is opened.

Q: What email clients allow the logos to be shown with the Sender name?
A: At the moment, ActiveMail’s Inbox Icons feature is supported by all the major email clients, including Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail and Outlook using IMAP.

Q: Even though ActiveMail is supported by several email programs, what exactly is the association with VerticalResponse? Is it possible to create video emails with VerticalResponse? Is the email sent by ActivePath or can we send interactive emails ourselves?
A: ActiveMail works with any ESP including VerticalResponse.  In order to display interactive content (usually hosted on a page in your website), you need to add a line of code to the HTML of the ‘static’ (non-interactive) version of your email. As long as you can freely add this line of code, you can send an ActiveMail using any ESP you like.

VerticalResponse is among our first ESP partners to realize the value of allowing their users to watch video right inside their emails. Hopefully we will be able to work together to develop a VerticalRepsonse template that will enable their customers to offer ‘true’ video inside email for their own subscribers as well.

Q: How well does this work on mobile devices?
A: ActiveMail is not supported on mobile devices at this time, however mobile device compatibility is currently in development and remains one of our top development priorities. We hope to announce mobile compatibility very soon.

Q: Does embedding the video in your email make it go to spam more often?
A: Quite the contrary, since the video (or any of the images or media, for that matter) is not embedded in the body of the email itself, but on a page that’s hosted on the sender’s server and viewed by the recipient via an iFrame within the email. So as far as the ISP is concerned, there are actually no images or videos in the email, but merely a line of code (we call it a “pointer”) that points to the page containing the actual content.

Q: Can you elaborate on the authentication process… how it works, who authenticates and how the end user will know our content is legitimate?
A: Great question. We’ve covered it particularly well in our blog post Using symbols in email subject lines: A fad that might work as long as it doesn’t spread.

Q: What is being done to encourage installs of the ActiveMail add-on?
A: ActiveMail allows users to view interactive, rich-media content inside their emails, and as the webinar points out, engagement levels are far higher in interactive emails than in non-interactive emails, so it’s worth the sender’s while to encourage as many downloads of the ActiveMail add-on as possible among his users.

There are several ways to encourage downloads, some of them ‘obvious’ and some more creative depending on the nature of your product, audience, available points of contact, etc.

Some download CTAs might include:

1) Sending an email to your entire mailing list explaining the benefits of ActiveMail and encouraging them to download it so that they can enjoy a richer email experience.

2) Add a download CTA in your newsletter’s post-registration ‘Thank You’ page. Users are still very much in ‘newsletter’ mode right after signing up, so this is another great point at which they might be amenable to improving their email experience.

3) When you send an ActiveMail campaign, you’ll also be sending a ‘static’ version of the email for the benefit of those who haven’t downloaded ActiveMail yet, so adding a download CTA in the static version is also effective.

4) Use any other strategically placed download CTAs throughout your website and other relevant online real-estate

Q: We are a VERY small non-profit org (budget of $15k/year).  Is this ActiveMail still relevant for us?
A: You can still make your emails interactive even if your budget is small. For example, even if you embed existing videos in your emails rather than creating your own, your users’ email experience will have still been enhanced by being able to view the videos right inside their emails.

Q: Does ActiveMail integrate with Salesforce?
A: Our statistics can be imported into Salesforce or other CRM programs very easily.

The post Interactive Email: Why you need it and how to incorporate it in emails [WEBINAR] appeared first on ActivePath.

First, what exactly is ‘the fold?’ The term is borrowed from the newspaper business, where news on the top half of a broadsheet newspaper is located, literally, ‘above the fold.’ It’s no surprise that the content printed there consists of the day’s top stories.

Translated for the world of websites, ‘above the fold’ is the area of a site you see before needing to scroll down to continue viewing content. Traditionally, a logo, call to action, main value proposition, and site navigation are located above the fold on a site’s homepage.

So how important is it for prime content to appear above the fold? Well pure logic would suggest that if someone is browsing through the web in search of something, and his attention span is limited, then what he sees above the fold needs to be as relevant as possible to what he seeks, or at least be engaging enough to warrant scrolling down, for him to stick around before making the decision to move on.

But not all user interface experts agree. There are vocal website designers and email marketers who believe there’s more to be gained by placing the most enticing content below the fold, tapping into reader curiosity and enjoying the ability to employ more creative design tactics. And they have a point; online audiences have long acclimated to scrolling, clicking and swiping.

It’s an ongoing debate for email marketers, too: longer emails, like web pages, force readers to scroll to view the rest of the content. Most marketers assume the same web page rules should be applied to email. For instance, look at your most recent email campaign: Your brand’s logo, your email’s call to action, a link to your website, and a link to the email’s web version are probably all available above the fold of your email.

As it turns out, it’s no longer necessary for email marketers and design experts to continue with the debate, since there are now new technologies available – like ActiveMail, which offer interactive, smart email navigation that makes clever use of above the fold email content. Email designers can now literally think outside the box and consider layout options that go beyond simply ‘up’ and ‘down’.

With tabbed navigation, scrolling galleries, menus and other forms of space-efficient content display, email recipients can access multiple layers of text, images and more, without needing to scroll at all.

Check out the demo below to see a rich-media email in action:

Consider this an email real estate revolution: an out-of-the-box use of shelf space to offer readers the widest variety of relevant content, promotions and offers.

It also enables easy discovery of unseen content. For example, in a static email, if the reader isn’t interested in the main offer, s/he’ll most likely delete your message and move on. But with the ability to intuitively browse through a few more offers, right inside the same email message, you’ve increased the chance of connecting with the reader, and gained an opportunity to deliver relevant messaging.

For more information on ditching the fold debate, and joining the new fold – interactive email – get in touch.

The post Want all your email content to appear above the fold? Try smart navigation. appeared first on ActivePath.

Shame, because an active email subscriber is among the most engaged of all online users, so it follows that ads inside emails would perform much as a result of such a targeted placement.

But despite the fact that most online brands have been slow to recognize that their marketing emails are in fact an additional advertising channel, digital advertising has continued to evolve everywhere else on the web.

Digital video advertising is now growing strongly with Forrester predicting that U.S. online video ad spend will reach $5.4 billion by 2016 (from $2.0 billion in 2011).

In fact, well-made video ads now have the potential to go viral, which means that unlike regular display ads, they have a much higher entertainment value and can earn their brands appeal on a mass scale.

“But what does video advertising have to do with email?” I hear you ask, followed by “video doesn’t work inside email anyway”. Well if you’d said that about a year ago, you’d have been more or less right, but not anymore.

Technologies are now available that enable rich-media inside email, including video-play. It’s so new that most brands and marketers don’t even know about it yet, but nevertheless, video email is here.

Now you do the math:

• People are now watching more videos online than ever before, and many of those include video ads.
• Consumers are 27 times more likely to click on video ads than standard banners
• Email is STILL the #1 preferred marketing communication channel
• Using video in your emails could increase CTR by as much as 67%

In other words, video ad CTR could potentially be higher inside emails than anywhere else on the web, since email audiences are among the most (if not THE most) engaged of all online audiences.

And of course, in addition to providing video ad-space to 3rd party sponsors inside your emails (and to maximize CTR you’d ideally sell the space to sponsors that are relevant to your audience), you could also use the space to further your own interests. Newsletters are a way to cross-promote or up-sell, so you’d do well to feature videos that promote your own products or services.

In short, if you’re ready to monetize your marketing emails while maintaining high entertainment value for your subscribers, then video advertising is a must-try strategy, and it’s easier to implement than you think.

The post Video advertising in email now possible thanks to ActiveMail appeared first on ActivePath.

“A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.” The study also found that more than 3 in 5 marketers (61%) plan on increasing their email marketing efforts in the near future.

So what do marketing experts and bloggers in the know have to say about the power of video? Brendan Cournoyer, Content Marketing Manager at Brainshark compiled this handy list of 21 Quotes on Why Video Marketing ROCKS. Here are our top three:

1. “Business decision makers LOVE online video because it gives them the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time.” –Robert Weiss, Use YouTube Video Marketing to Generate Leads, Awareness and Customer

2. “Videos can attract a different audience, one that might not want to take the time to read a white paper or an article.” – Brick Marketing, 3 Important Video Marketing Tips

3. “More than 150 million people view videos online every year, most of them ripe to hear your business’s pitch if you produce and market your video effectively.” – Vern Marker, 8 Great Tips to Help Your Video Go Viral

Still from Brendan, yet another handy list of the Top 10 Video Marketing Influencers for 2012 for a little inspiration on how to use videos more effectively to build brand awareness, attract customers and increase sales.

In part inspired by Kevin “Nalts” Nalty’s recent white paper Online Business for Video 101, without further ado here are five tips your business can use (regardless of size) to kickstart your video marketing campaign:

1. Recognize your need for video content. Stop looking at videos as a luxury or a nice little add-on and start seeing them as the essential marketing tool they are in terms of engagement, messaging, reach and so much more.

2. Create a video. Start with one. Perhaps a nice little company overview guiding visitors through your basic offering to put on your homepage. Or a helpful “how-to” video, demonstrating problems solved by your product, which you can post on YouTube. You don’t need more than a video camera, talent (can even be you), and basic editing software (or a really nice friend). Remember, “snackable” bits of video content are easier for viewers to digest, so keep it short.

3. Re-appropriate existing content. If you’re not quite ready to make your own video quite yet but still want to take advantage of its power, you can take an existing video that makes sense for your brand and make it your own (giving due credit of course). Searching YouTube is a good way to start. If you want it more personal, consider sharing video from a corporate event or party. It’s also a great way to “humanize” your company and hence, your offering.

4. Optimize for SEO. Google LOVES video, ranking it higher than text based content. That’s why you’ll see video content on most first page search results. Fortunately for you, many businesses have yet to maximize on this front. For an easy, instant SEO boost, make sure all aspects of your video are indexed by properly tagging your video title, description, duration, location and more.

5. Get your videos out to the people. Viral is a nice concept, but a rather lofty goal. No one can guarantee the creation of such a gem, but what you can do is make sure all your distribution avenues are covered. Post on Facebook, add your video to YouTube, tweet it to followers, and embed it in an email to your mailing list. Those of your subscribers who are already using ActiveMail will be able to play the video right inside their email without clicking out to a new browser. They’ll even be able to watch multiple videos in the same email if you want to include a series.

The post Video marketing starter guide: 5 tips for businesses of all sizes appeared first on ActivePath.

And it’s not just consumer audiences going nuts over video. A Social Media Examiner survey of 3,800 marketers found that a full 76% named YouTube and video marketing as their top areas of investment in 2012. That’s because, thanks to their engaging nature, videos are great for promoting everything from products, to webinars, to events and much more.

Even business executives are succumbing to the power of video. According to a Forbes Insights study, more and more executives are embracing the “Non-Text Web” and are now just as inclined to take action based on viewing a video than they would be based on reading an article.

The power of video is so bewitching, that according to Experian’s 2012 Digital Marketer Benchmark and Trend Report, simply including the word “video” in an email’s subject line saw an increase of 7%-13% in overall click-thru rates in 2011, and embedding a video in an email itself generated an average conversion rate (CVR) that was 21% higher than emails containing a static image alone.

Put all of these resounding stats together and you have a pretty clear message: Video is a must-have element in today’s marketing content mix, whether you’re targeting B2C of B2B audiences, and since email is still the #1 preferred marketing communication channel, it makes perfect sense to use the two together to create killer user-engagement.

Using video in your emails could increase CTR by as much as 67%, so if you’re not already using video in your marketing initiatives, you might want to re-think your strategy if you want to compete with those who are.

But is all ‘video in email’ truly video in email? Apparently not.

There are some forward-thinking marketers who understand the potential of using video in email who are boldly paving the way for others to follow, but it’s important to remember that most instances of “video in email” merely refer to either a link or a screenshot of the video, which when clicked, opens the video in a new window and not inside the email itself, so it’s not really “true” video in email.

There are also a few “video in email” solutions available that are based on HTML5 coding and even marketers who are experimenting with it, but HTML5 video is not supported by all email clients. It is estimated that only about 60-70% of recipients would actually be able to play video inside HTML5-based video emails, while the rest of the recipients would see fallback alternatives like a silent animated .GIF/.PNG video (if enabled) or a static image, depending on what their mail client supports.

It’s also true that some webmail clients (like Gmail and the new Outlook.com) enable videos from certain (not all) sources to play inside emails, but even then the videos are displayed at the bottom of the email, and not at the location in which they were embedded within the email body.

The only solution available at the moment that allows marketers to embed any type of videos and have them play in context within their own email marketing HTML templates is ActiveMail, a technology that enables users to view and interact with rich-media directly inside emails.

The content of an ActiveMail sits on a regular web page which is displayed to ActiveMail users in an iFrame within the email, allowing them to interact with a variety of rich-media elements (not just video) as though they were interacting with a live web page. Some of these interactions might include flicking through entire image galleries, filling out forms, viewing live new feeds, all manner of Flash animations, social sharing, seeing performing searches and much more – all within the email itself without clicking out to see any of it in a new window.

In short, ActiveMail provides a “true” in-email experience that’s supported by all the major browsers and email clients and is therefore today’s marketer’s best bet at engaging the vast majority of his captive email audience right inside their inboxes with rich-media content. And it’s just as well, because today’s modern audiences have already come to expect this sort of dynamic content in most of their other online experiences, so if you’re a marketer who’s been a bit slow to incorporate at the very least video in email, you’d better get cracking!

The post Why marketers should use “true” video in email appeared first on ActivePath.

This month, Hubspot shared a new infographic – Storytelling One Frame at a Time – a compilation by M Booth and Simply Measured that proves once again that “imagery rules across social media.” The two agencies combined behavioral data around visual content occurring on social media platforms, with research on engagement along with sharing habits on the top 10 brand pages on Facebook.

While the idea that ‘imagery is king’ on social media isn’t shocking, the numbers are still very impressive. Here’s a sample of the findings:

• On Facebook, users share videos 12 times more than links and text posts combined, while photos are liked twice as much as text posts.
• When Instagram released its Android app in April 2012, it gained 10 million users in ten days, reaching 40 million users total and on pace to beat Facebook in less time.
• Every week, over 100 million users take a social action on YouTube.

But the visual storytelling rules don’t only benefit social media platforms; plenty of these principles apply to email marketing, as well. For ActiveMail audiences, the benefits become even more easily obtainable:

1. Soar to new visual heights

With such high response rates coming from visual content, smart email marketers enhance their email campaigns with video, images, and other visual elements to boost engagement and reactions. Of course, the visual content displayed must be relevant to their recipients so that they’ll find it entertaining and even shareable. As we’ve mentioned before, ActiveMail best serves when used to its greatest ability – creatively displaying visual content in emails which is normally limited to websites, and furthermore, allowing emails to display galleries so that users can continuing browsing sender content inside the email, without closing the message.

2. Risk-free for ISP

Often, image-heavy emails risk their deliverability since many ISPs treat them as spam. With ActiveMail, the content isn’t embedded in the email itself, but on a regular web page displayed within an iframe inside the email. As far as the ISPs are concerned, an ActiveMail doesn’t directly contain any images at all, but simply a link from which the visual content sits (including videos, image galleries and other rich media).

3. Let Pinterest be your guide

As mentioned in the infographic, Pinterest is actually referring more traffic from photo and video posts than Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and Google+. It’s a powerful medium for displaying visual content, and there’s plenty to learn from the platform. ActiveMail essentially turns your email into visual eye candy, activating videos, images, social media options and more so that your message comes across as lively and engaging as an actual website, like Pinterest. By the way, Pinterest users follow brands more than users on Facebook or even Twitter, so it’s worthwhile to see how popular brands are using the platform and adapting their techniques to email.

Check out the infographic below for more visual insight on brand storytelling, and consider how your own email campaigns could be illustrated more effectively with visual, interactive elements.

The post Not just social media: 3 ways visual storytelling applies to email marketing appeared first on ActivePath.

The burgeoning trend of using Unicode symbols in email subject lines to help them get noticed in the inbox reinforces the importance to marketers of setting themselves apart from their competition in the typically crowded subscriber inbox. They totally have the right idea, but will it get their emails noticed in the inbox if everyone else is doing it too?

The problem with these Unicode symbols is that they’re available to everybody, so as soon as the trend peaks, everyone and his dog will be using these symbols in their subject lines. As if the typical inbox isn’t already crowded enough, with Unicode symbols it will soon become not only an overwhelming jumble of words but also symbols, inflicting maximum dizziness on poor, innocent, unsuspecting email subscribers.

Fortunately, there is a better way for brands to use icons in the inbox to help themselves stand out from their competition: ActiveMail’s Inbox Icons. These icons are actually the senders’ logos, which of course makes each icon unique to each sender.

In order for a sender to get his Inbox Icon, the sender’s domain must first be verified by ActivePath – the inventor of ActiveMail – using Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC), a technical specification that incorporates Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) mechanisms to authenticate email senders.

It sounds highly technical but really the process is super simple. Designed to combat spam, spoofing, phishing and all manner of bogus and otherwise sinister email senders, the idea of DMARC is to to limit or eliminate email recipients’ exposure to potentially fraudulent and harmful messages and to basically give users peace of mind in the knowledge that they are better able to discern between authentic emails and those that aren’t.

ActiveMail’s Inbox Icons offer two super-important benefits for both marketers and their email subscribers:

1. They help the sender’s email get noticed by his ActiveMail users in their inboxes thanks to his company logo appearing right beside the email’s subject line. They can also help boost open rates since subscribers are likely to be drawn first to the emails in the inbox that ‘pop’ against all the others.

2. They help ActiveMail users cut through the clutter of their inboxes by instantly identifying emails from senders they trust. Of course, a welcome side-effect of an email recipient’s trust is increased open rate, and since a consistently good open rate bodes excellently for the sender’s reputation, it can also ultimately help boost deliverability.

For now, Inbox Icons are still free, exclusively from ActivePath. All savvy email marketers need to do to get their Inbox Icon created is contact ActivePath  and once the icon has been created, the sender can encourage his captive email audience to download ActiveMail and enjoy the benefits of his Inbox Icon.

ActiveMail’s Inbox Icons are a great way for senders to help their emails stand out in today’s typical crowded inbox,
and to instill a sense of trust in their recipients.

The post Using symbols in email subject lines: A fad that might work as long as it doesn’t spread appeared first on ActivePath.

While many a doom-predictor has long lamented the inevitable decline of email – destined to go the way of the telegram – there is actually no indication that email’s use and importance is going anywhere but UP.

Email continues to dominate as the most preferred direct communications channel, and Forrester Research forecasts that although Email Marketing in the U.S. will continue to grow at a rate of 10% bringing it to $2.5 billion in 2016, the total relative spend on Email will still be kept down because of its low cost of reach for every 1,000 consumer (or CPM), securing email as one of the top channel for ROI.

But while email continues to dominate, many marketers are still stuck in the olden-days of email marketing, doing things as simply as they were done in the past, without an eye or drive for innovation. Alas, in the words of one Bob Dylan (who likely wasn’t quite referring to the destiny of the humble email when he wrote them), the times they are a changin’.

The competition between savvy marketers for the average subscriber’s attention in the inbox is fierce, and those who are serious about their email programs are willing to go the extra mile to trump their competition, so the mediocre or complacent email marketers of the world would probably be better off not sending any emails at all for all the results they will (or rather, won’t) bring them.

Savvy marketers who have seen email prove its worth by doing email well, also understand the value of a continued investment in their email program. Email budgets have been rather small in relation to their impact and ROI, so even a small boost to an email budget can go a long way towards increasing an email program’s performance.

So what should an email marketer invest in? Chances are that if you’re a professional email marketer, you’re already using an ESP, so perhaps you could review your options and switch to an ESP that better suits your requirements. Or, perhaps you could invest in more training.

But at the end of the day, neither a spanking new ESP platform or a few more webinars under your belt would significantly impact the performance of your email program unless your strategy to engage and retain your subscribers is also backed by top notch content that’s both relevant, entertaining or useful (or in the best case scenario, all three).

The email marketer’s top 3 challenges usually boil down to:

1. Deliverability. What good is the world’s most wonderful marketing email if it never even makes it into your subscriber’s inbox? There are several factors that impact deliverability, including the sender’s IP reputation, the quality of the mailing list, and the content of the emails themselves.

2. Standing out in the Inbox. What good is the world’s most wonderful email, even if it has the world’s cleverest subject line, if it gets lost in a blur of dozens of other subject lines? To the subscriber, it’s a case of not being able to tell apart one tree from another because there are already too many trees in the forest.

3. Creating content that truly engages. We’re living in an era where content has been promoted from “King” to “Mighty and all-powerful influencer of subscriber reactions”.

Content is undergoing a spectacular evolution right now thanks to an influx of devices that allow us to view seriously groovy, interactive, rich-media content on a variety of screen types. Email has unfortunately lagged behind, because existing email platforms have remained incompatible with this type of content. Until now.

By using technologies that enable rich media inside emails, marketers who care about delivering best-in-class content and experiences for their email subscribers, are able to do just that with minimal to no investment at all, if they only know where to find them.

One example is ActiveMail, a technology that enables interactive, rich-media content directly inside emails.

Here’s how it addresses the email marketer’s top 3 challenges:

1. Poor deliverability due to the suspicion of spammy content is a non-issue. ActiveMail content sits on a regular web page which is then displayed inside the email via an iFrame, so none of the visual content is actually embedded inside the email itself. As far as the ISP is concerned, the email contains one line of additional text that simply points to a web page.

2. Inbox icons create instant brand recognition. One of ActiveMail’s grooviest features is inbox branding. Simply put, it displays the sender’s icon beside the “From” and subject line in the user’s inbox, allowing the user to instantly recognize the sender and notice the email before he’s even read the subject line.

3. Enabling rich, interactive media inside emails significantly boost engagement and response rates. ActiveMail offers marketers the freedom to create whatever email content they can dream up and to display it in the most engaging way. Everything from videos, to photo galleries, to live social feeds, animations, registration forms, navigational elements and more – all of which could only ever be viewed in an internet browser – can now be viewed directly inside the email. Today’s demanding and time-poor email subscribers can interact with content and perform a plethora of actions without ever leaving their inbox.

For email marketers, the most profound investment in their email program need not necessarily be a financial one. If forward-thinking email marketers truly wish to take their email program to the next level in a new era where user engagement relies as much on the experience around the content as on the content itself, than their focus needs to shift from merely what the emails should be about, to what content types should be used in order to maximize engagement and how they should be presented to generate the desired response.

The email marketer’s biggest investment this year will be in taking the time to comprehend all the possibilities that new technologies like ActiveMail enable, and to then introduce this new rich, interactive content to an email audience that has already come to expect it in virtually every other online experience. It may initially require a combination of vision, commitment, creativity and even a bit of a pioneering spirit, but if this type of ‘investment’ means boosting open rates, click-through rates and conversions to the stratosphere, then surely it’s a frontier worth exploring, and the sooner the better.

The post The best investment you’ll make in your email marketing program this year needn’t be a financial one appeared first on ActivePath.

In a recent blog post titled Emotional Email Design and Copywriting: The Secret to Driving Engagement and Sales, Scott Hardigree of IndieMark talks about emotional email design and copywriting. Inspired by the ‘Wheel of Emotions’ created by psychologist Robert Plutchik, Scott explores how email marketers can cultivate the emotions of subscribers in order to influence their level of engagement:

By cultivating the right emotions, marketers can influence the likelihood that their subscribers will interact with the email to achieve the desired goal, such as making a purchase, sharing content, or taking steps to learn more about a new product.

The emotions pointed out on the Wheel of Emotions that are ideal for engaging email recipients are anticipation, joy and trust. Tapping into natural human curiosity, through an irresistible subject line or identifying a sender of interest for example, is important to create anticipation, which plays a large part in influencing an email’s open rate. Following through with consistently interesting and relevant content builds trust, and going to the trouble of presenting the content in an entertaining way, promotes joy. If an email can evoke all three emotions, a recipient is likely to not just read the email, but to ‘respond’ to it emotionally and interact with it in some way.

The challenge for today’s email marketers is to figure out how to create emails that generate this trifecta of emotions, and often, thinking outside the box is called for in order to stand out from the multitude of marketing emails that an average person receives in a day.

Typically, you can expect that most marketing emails these days will resemble each other pretty closely. The only thing that changes is the product or service behind the call to action. And why the tedious similarity? Because most of today’s email marketers have been weaned on the same best practice principles that have been around for years (that’s going back to the years before rich, interactive media began to dominate both super large and super small screens), so they produce the same old email content based on the same old formulae.

It’s no wonder that recipients of marketing emails spend no more than a few seconds scanning them before moving on to something else. They’ve seen it all before. Many, many times before.

It’s precisely because marketers have precious little time to draw the email recipient’s attention to the message itself, that content that evokes emotion is so important.

Today’s email audiences are exposed simultaneously to often much groovier types of online content. Email isn’t going anywhere, BUT: If email marketers –

1. Ignore the fact that their users have come to expect this new type of interactive, rich-media content in every other medium, and…
2. Make no attempt to start inspiring their email audiences inside their inboxes with content that truly engages, and…
3. Fail to embrace new technologies that enable such content inside emails,

– They risk losing even more of their subscribers’ endangered attention span, and that would be a crying shame (and surely no one wants to see email marketers in tears).

It’s time for email marketers who are still following the old formulae to boldly create what so few marketers have dared to envisage in this exciting digital age: the kind of content that subscribers want to interact with right inside their emails, right now.

The post Want to inspire your email audience? Tap into their emotions! appeared first on ActivePath.