Icons and graphics in email newsletters

Apple, milking the iPhone craze, sent out a variation on their usual email newsletter design today. It incorporated some icon-like graphics and new buttons with cta’s.

Wonder if these icons and varied buttons are worth thinking about incorporating in some email designs?

Getting noticed: good design is noisy too

Right on the heels of posting about the merits of transparent design, a project today turned that approach right on it’s head. When you’re designing a banner ad, or a “pod” on a content page, you want to get noticed. The first objective of a banner ad is to attract attention. If it fit in seamlessly with its surroundings, or looked just like the banner ad you saw (and overlooked) yesterday, why bother? It would just be filler. You can’t get your message across, much less expect a response, if you can’t pull them over to your corner in the first place.

Customer verification: where’s the beef?

I was impressed with a friend’s newly-outfitted salon, and asked him where he found all the interesting furnishings. He frequents a great consignment store in Saratoga where they have constantly changing cool furniture and accessories, and high traffic. But here was his tip: if you’re interested in an item, don’t let on to others in the store checking out all the latest stuff. Go directly to the front desk and quietly tell them you want that Thai bamboo bookcase with the wrought iron trim. Because the minute you want it, others will notice it and want it too. That’s how he got things easily without putting others on notice.

That made me think… at the most basic level, why does customer verification work? Because people want what others want. A crowded marketplace with lots of options is similar to a consignment store—so much stuff, how do you quickly find what is valuable? If someone else wants it/uses it = it has perceived value.

Email success story from Cisco

How Cisco Doubled Email Registration Conversions
by Offering Fewer Sign-up Choices
Last year, Brian Ellefritz, Sr. Manager Customer Relationship Marketing, Cisco Systems, was determined to solve the problem of what he calls the “90-day honeymoon” for one of his company’s monthly customer newsletter programs, BizWise/TechWise.

“Even if they see value in it, the newsletter in their minds eventually tails off into the category of, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll look at that later,’ ” he says. “And you see your open, clickthrough and response rates worsen over time.”

Read the Marketing Sherpa story