Email Marketing in the Age of Social Media

Is email dead to the interactive marketer in this day and age of social media?

Hardly.

Earlier this afternoon we listened to a great webinar on "The Science of Email Marketing" from Dan Zarella over at HubSpot. They partnered up with MailChimp (our favorite email marketing service) to comb through over 9.5 billion data points to get a sense of where email marketing stands today.

Some surprising insights included: 

• The best days (and time) of the week to send emails - Weekends and early morning
• Ideal number of emails to send out - The more the better
• Mobile email template design - 80.8% are now read on smartphones
• Number of links - lot's of links helps reduce unsubscribes
• Social media cross over - ask people to fan/follow you instead of sharing your emails on social networks

Our Email Template Design Research

We also did an email survey around template design recently, albeit on a much (much, much, much) smaller scale. Several clients were in the process of redesigning their templates and had asked what the safest maximum width would be.

For years, email marketing services have recommended a fixed width of about 550px. But recently we've been seeing a lot of 'fat' emails, prompting us to look into the widths of some of our favorite daily emails.

In addition to width we also made note of a few other features:

• Facebook and Twitter Like/Share buttons
• Forward-to-a-Friend and Invite-a-Friend links
• General format of the email

Here's what we found:

The colored columns correspond to various social features.  Green cells correspond to links for subscribing to the email, forwarding the email to a friend and inviting friends to subscribe. Dark blue cells are Facebook pages, like and share buttons, and light blue cells are Twitter pages and share buttons.

What We Found

• The average width of the emails we surveyed was just over 700px, well outside the 550-600 pixel range most email services would recommend. The largest being Thrillist.com at a whopping 870px width.
• 17 of the emails had Forward-to-a-Friend links but only about half of those had links to a sign-up form. Meaning a friend will receive the email but there's no strong call to action to convert them to a subscriber.
• The most popular social media buttons were the Forward-to-a-Friend, Facebook and Twitter share buttons. In theory this sounds great but according to MailChimp's data these 'share' buttons are rarely used. Instead, they recommend prompting the user to follow you on Twitter or fan you on Facebook.

We'll continue to update the spreadsheet so be sure to view the most recent version for updates.