“The number one obstacle we face with our emails is not a lack of brilliant copywriting, the right graphics or an understanding of personalization. The real enemy of underperforming emails is confusion,” Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS Institute, said in his live optimization session at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015.
During this session Flint McGlaughlin makes live edits to several emails submitted by the audience, offering feedback on everything from preheaders and titles to body copy and calls-to-action.
The first page submitted is from Kelly of RoadRunnerSports.com and is discussed by Flint and an audience of Kelly’s marketing peers. The live optimization of this page shows a discussion of principles from personal marketing experiences.
Of the many changes that were recommended by the audience, one that was particularly important was an edit to the calls-to-action and their color and contrast to the rest of the page, specifically the background image.
Flint makes the point that the CTAs do not look like CTAs and, “every time you ask your customers to make meaning for themselves, you lose customers … That is far too much unsupervised thinking.”
When designing emails or landing pages it is important to make the message as clear as possible; do not leave it up to the prospect to find clarity.
“Remember — you never have full attention. This is a key for designing your email. The most you can hope for is half of their attention,” Flint said.
Although things like layout and graphics are addressed throughout the session, the main focus of Flint’s feedback centers around the importance of driving clarity to the customer.
“Say something to me clearly, that I understand and that matters to me — give me meaning. If you don’t give me meaning then you haven’t given me a message and if you don’t give me a message then I’m not going to respond,” Flint said.
Flint points out that the moment we force our customers to make meaning of the offer themselves, we lose them. People are looking at our pages but they are not seeing the offer. During this session Flint works with the audience to add clarity to the offer of these pages.
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