Emails for E-Commerce: How Effective Are They for Any Business?

Responsive or Fluid Hybrid:  Which Technique Would You Use to Reach Your Customers?

There are numerous marketing techniques coming around, but none of the marketers should forget the email strategy as it has become one of the most key elements in the world that are ruled by mobiles.  Younger generations to realize the importance of the same and hence make their way into the inboxes of people with the help of solid deliverability strategies.  This technique has adapted itself to the smartphone presence too and has emerged to be an extremely flexible channel.  This strategy is an independent one and also a supportive one too for the print and digital channels.

This is one channel that helps in interacting with all generations equally.  Its presence has become omnipotent for the consumer carries the device with him and the email can reach him.

Why is the spend of time and money on email increasing?

There are quite a number of factors that are trending in emails.

• The majority of the companies have a strategy to allocate more time on this marketing technique.
• They are significantly increasing their marketing spend too.
• It has been found that a whopping percentage of marketers are spending around one hour to five hours developing typical email campaigns.
• This trend is expected to increase where they would spend an additional time per month in email marketing.
• Many people anticipate that this strategy development will have a great impact on the overall email marketing program this year.

For all those who may have thought that email has lost its charm as an effective marketing strategy, they have been proved wrong as it is now far from being a dead channel.  Though social media has emerged to be the latest trend, marketers have not given up on email marketing for it still remains the primary communication channel.

Strategy development was found to be a key factor in making this option a success.  The email development process takes extra care and caution to ensure the better success of the strategy.  One ideal way is to start off with an email template.  You have a ready-made starting point in the form of templates which are mobile responsive too and have been tested thoroughly.  One needs to change the graphics and the text.

Personalization is yet another important aspect of email strategy as it offers contextual relevance to the campaign.  One has to go beyond first names and use more creative elements like geo-targeting and dynamic messages that change from time to time.

Developing emails is definitely a challenging task as some of them generally do not support the common CSS or HTML.  The email has to display perfectly in Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook and this skill call for a lot of practice that needs to be acquired.

Big organizations and business conglomerates will have email development teams or a few of them may choose to outsource too.  As smaller companies may not have internally dedicated resources, they will generally get into hiring independent email developers.  This could be on a contract basis too.

It has been found that most of the email marketers, designers and developers are not making use of fluid hybrid templates or responsive templates.  A responsive design in the email would make it look good definitely on screens of varying resolutions.  Fluid hybrid design helps achieve that aspect.

What is fluid hybrid design?  It helps in building an email which does not make use of CSS yet instills the responsiveness component so that the content is scaled successfully on the mobile devices.  It comes in such a way that the design will automatically adjust to the screen in which it is being viewed, be it a tablet, phone or desktop.  Technology is completely overlapping with almost all aspects of email designing.  Email technology is getting smarter and is becoming a more viable option and an indispensable marketing channel.  Email is here to stay!

Current trend:  Responsive email templates or Fluid Hybrid Design

It has been found that marketers are choosing responsive email templates over the fluid hybrid design and a certain percentage of them using both.  The latter is an up and coming trend that mitigates the dependence on media queries that is required for the former.  The trends show that the fluid hybrid design is being used by less than 10% of the marketing professionals and the majority of them go ahead with responsive templates.  An in between the percent of marketing professionals use both.

The leading trends for the year 2016 in email marketing suggest that fluid hybrid design will be the latest and happening formula for the successful campaign.  Another leading trend is found to be the interactive features followed by contextual relevance and personalization.

An insight into hybrid email design and responsive email design

It has been found that mobile email opens are more than 50% and hence has become imperative for the campaigns to be designed with these smartphone users in mind.  Those emails campaigns that are for the desktop only purpose have relegated into the bin for, subscribers now anticipate better user experiences regardless of the device they use.

Therefore,  eCommerce Web Designers are on the lookout for gaining more control on the email campaigns which are adopting two techniques…i) hybrid coding and ii) responsive email designs…that make the email look great anywhere and everywhere.  Both these techniques can be used to enhance the value of your email campaigns that are designed for the ever-increasing mobile audience.

Hybrid coding:

Also known as spongy coding, this approach uses the same principle as the traditional responsive design.  However, its implementation is done in a unique manner.  It makes use of fluid images and tables.  There are a few principles on the basis of which hybrid emails work:

1. Default fluid elements and tables
2. Maximum width CSS that will constrain the widths on the desktop

• MSO conditional comments that will constrain the widths in Outlook

What are the pros and cons of this approach?

The fluid approach is considered to be brilliant if you wish to support each and every email client.  However, it becomes complicated when one uses it in complex layouts.

Responsive design:

Responsive design in email parlance refers to the fluid images, fluid tables as well as the media queries that help in controlling the layout of emails across various device resolutions and sizes.  This responsive email design is an out an out offshoot of the responsive web design.  The principles of the web and email remain the same and they differ only in the implementation.  CSS media queries are used to bring about a change in the fixed width tables as well as images on the desktops and convert them into fluid tables and images for the small screens.

What are the pros and cons of this approach?

The biggest advantage with the responsive design is that there is amazing control in the designer’s hands regarding the content that could be displayed across devices.  There is a lot of power in media queries and when they are put to good use, they facilitate the designers to adapt and target the style and layout of content even at the granular level.

The biggest disadvantage there is no support for this traditional design.  Gmail will create problems as far as responsive emails are concerned and this can be tackled well by the hybrid coding.

Call to action:

In case you require any help in setting up your email marketing campaign, do touch base with M-Connect Media, a renowned company that houses a talent pool which can tackle the two kinds of techniques and approaches with great aplomb.