As a designer, there are a few skills I’m required to have. Coming up with new and exciting ideas, bringing those ideas to life and generally making things look pretty. However, never in my career have I had to showcase psychic powers and predict the future to be able to do my job, that is, until I started working with @mediaquery.

What is @mediaquery?

@mediaquery is a relatively new feature of CSS which can be used to dictate how a website or email renders on particular sized screen such as a mobile device or desktop computer. I won’t bog you down with the details, but basically the way @mediaquery works is that the code is hidden in the email and only comes to life when it detects that your screen is below a certain size. As soon as it detects that you’re using a device with a smaller screen, it switches on the hidden code which manipulates and overrides elements of the email, changing its look and structure to suit the smaller screen.

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No matter how beautifully crafted your email programme and how engaged your core customers, you’re always going to get unsubscribers. It’s a sad but inevitable fact of email marketing and you have to be strong and let them go. The most important thing is that whilst you’re waving goodbye to old friends at the back door, you’re shepparding new ones in at the front. Invigorating your email file is absolutely crucial to maintaining healthy KPI’s but how do you get them in? Bought lists are so hit and miss and, in the unforgiving world of spam traps and blacklists, potentially harmful to your sender reputation.

With this in mind, I’ve prepared a list of the top 5 ways to grow your email file organically, with the type of opener-clickers that will have you forgetting those unsubscribers in no time.

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This year is the 25^th anniversary of a very significant event for me, an event that has led directly to me being here today.

In 1986, as a young direct marketer working for home shopping giant GUS, I was lucky enough to attend the Montreux Symposium, on the Lake Geneva shoreline (as Deep Purple put it).  At the time, the week-long Symposium was the biggest event in Europe for the direct marketing industry, and attracted some major speakers.  But for me, the single most significant session, one that profoundly affected my approach to direct marketing, was a ground-breaking live demonstration and seminar by Professor Siegfried Vogele, founder of the Institute of Direct Marketing in Munich that is now owned by Deutsche Post.

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When Adrian asked me to attend Silverpop’s EMEA Customer Conference in London I jumped at the chance.  The agenda looked promising but the real draw was the prospect of partaking in a little quality time with a pint of London Pride. Surely I’d find a little time wouldn’t I?

Anyway, the conference took place at The Brewery in the Barbican and I have to say it was a great location with bags of character. Oh and there was a pub just down the road which surely sold London Pride?!

The first session was literally “awesome” as Silverpop’s American CEO, Bill Nussey, outlined his vision for the future of email marketing.  I was expecting to be bowled over by this “vision” but I wasn’t.  In very basic terms he advised against blast emails and recommended that email marketers adopted a more targeted and segmented approach.  Not exactly groundbreaking but to be fair to Bill he did manage to bring his presentation to life with the use of Silverpop’s Email Platform which helped showcase how easy it was to adopt his “visionary” approach.

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It’s fair to say I’m not the brightest star in the sky.  So when I found myself getting involved in a conversation about the intricacies of email deliverability recently, I adopted my usual strategy when involved in situations like this: I nodded a lot, agreed with everything and escaped for a toilet break as often as I could.

But despite the awkwardness of this conversation, I started thinking to myself: I can’t be the only person involved in email marketing who finds the issue of email deliverability as confusing as a woman’s fascination with cushions and soft furnishings. And that’s what motivated me to write this blog article.

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Our client Swinton has over a million customers for which they have an email address and we had been working with them for a few months on some of their product focused emails.  We knew that there was much more they could be doing with email marketing and wanted to push the boundaries for them.  Our triggered email activity was first discussed in January when we received a nice timely email from Pizza Express offering BOGOF on all pizzas to celebrate the fact that the snow was finally melting and people were now able to get out to eat again. This triggered our own thoughts – “Wouldn’t it be great if our Swinton emails could be a bit more timely and relevant and well…. interesting really!”

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Over the course of the last two years I have been involved in several conversations regarding what we should do with dormant or unresponsive email subscribers.  These conversations have always been rather enjoyable due to the complex nature of the issue.

One side of the argument has always been that once an email address has been dormant or unresponsive for 6 to 12 months then it is quite right to remove the address from the email file but I tend to sit on the opposite side of the fence.

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If I had a pound for every time a client asked “Are we emailing our customers too much?” I would be a very rich man.  However, if I had a pound for every time a client asked if we were sending too much direct mail or are we broadcasting our TV or radio adverts too much then my bank balance would be no different.

Did the marketing team behind the infuriatingly more-ish Go Compare campaign debate whether their adverts were being shown too much during peak times?  I very much doubt it.  On New Years’ Eve 2008 did Pepsi worry that they were going a little over the top when they launched their new logo with a week-long ‘promotional extravaganza’ in Times Square.  Of course they didn’t.  So why do email marketers continually question their strategy when it comes to frequency and volume?

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The truth is out there

At Red C, as well as juggling our busy schedules, we have a number of Creative team projects and initiatives that bubble along throughout the year. These include filming and editing video case studies to researching search engine optimisation. This time around, our team got the tricky task of generating new business opportunities with our current clients.

Finding new business avenues for clients sounds easy, but there are lots of things you need to consider. Identifying potential oportunities requires a deep understanding of a brand and the directions in which it could and would want to expand. And that’s just for starters. On top of that, it has to be financially viable, fit in with wider brand and marketing strategies and be measurable in terms of return on investment.

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We love our lunchtime training sessions here at Red C. Every few weeks, a feast of sandwiches, cakes and pastries is laid out in the boardroom and we’re invited to gorge ourselves, whilst picking up new skills and knowledge from guest speakers or colleagues.

It was at one such day earlier this month that our Managing Director, Adrian Rowe, shared a presentation that he’d previously been invited to give at a conference in Amsterdam. It was an online masterclass, detailing some of the key learnings Red C have picked up during our time creating and implementing web strategy for our clients.

Part of this presentation included 7 ‘killer’ email tips Red C have found to be very effective. I thought it would be a good idea to share them with you here.

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