Email Strategy

Graymail vs Smart Email

Dealers are historically known for marketing to everyone in their database—the idea being that the more consumers you market to, the more likely you are to get conversions. This has never been true, and dealers need to be smarter about their marketing efforts.

So, what is Graymail? As HubSpot explained:

“Graymail is email that contacts have opted in to receive, but never open or click. Spam filters can identify and filter out emails that your recipients aren’t opening or clicking. This increases the likelihood that future emails will end up in the junk folder or spam filter. By continuing to send email to contacts who don’t open or click, you’re lowering your sender score overall.”

Similarly, if you have a Gmail address, you may have noticed that every so often a message pops up asking if you want to unsubscribe from something because you haven’t opened or clicked on anything from that sender in a long time.

One solution for avoiding these deliverability traps is to create a sunset policy specific to your business to determine who should be removed from communications and when—i.e., after a certain number of nonresponses. While this is a great idea in principle and necessary in today’s landscape, it can also be cumbersome to undertake on your own, especially with limited staff.

What you need is a tool that can predict a consumer’s propensity to engage and prevent you from overcommunicating and creating even more graymail.

This is done by utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine how frequently to send communications to each consumer. Excluding certain consumers does not mean permanently excluding them or removing any valid consumer records from your database. Those customers and prospects are simply being “rested.”

Data across industries has shown this to be the best answer to reduce spam complaints and increase Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) by upwards of 90%, thwarting deliverability issues and keeping currently unengaged consumers from becoming unreachable in the future.

“Creating a good customer journey between different mediums is crucial to ensure you are reaching your prospects and customers wherever they are.”

Images, Animated Gifs, and Video

Visual components are very important in email marketing. However, there are certain best practices to keep in mind.

When it comes to images, be careful not to send image-only emails. If your consumer has images turned off, they will miss your message completely and the email may find itself in the trash without ever being seen. When you are thinking about adding images into your emails, think of it as supportive creative to the message. The text should still say everything that’s important, and when the consumer sees the email, they can choose to download images at that time. Don’t load up all your text within the image, or at least be sure to repeat the text from the image in the text-only portion of the email.

Animated images are a useful resource when used smartly, but don’t overload your emails with animated images, because too much going on can be distracting and cause added load time. One thing to also keep in mind is that animated images will not display in all email clients, like Outlook where only the first frame of the animated image will appear, so make sure that your design and content does not rely on this component.

When working with and considering if an animated image is best for your email, you want to make sure that it can also stand alone as a static image with the first frame. Another thing is file size. As mentioned, you have 8 secs before losing the attention of your consumer; you don’t want to waste any of that precious time waiting for an image to load.

“You have eight seconds before losing the attention of your consumer; don’t waste any precious time.”

Videos can be a powerful tool, but like everything, they shouldn’t be used just for the sake of adding video. Ask yourself if its inclusion adds value. One of the most exciting things about email is that it’s constantly evolving, and we now have ways to embed video into emails easily, but there are many things to consider before doing so.

Video will not play for all email clients (i.e., Outlook) so you should review your database and see if the majority of your prospects and customers use one of the email clients that supports video. There are lots of ways to work around the clients that do not support video, such as making them animated images instead, or placing a static image with a play button that drives the consumer to a landing page.

Another reason to use one of these recommended routes over embedded video is that video in email can be very large. You also never want to have a video automatically play due to a lot of people using their cellular data when viewing emails. Let them choose when and how they want to use their data.

Conclusion

Email remains one of the strongest tools in your marketing arsenal if used effectively, especially when you integrate automated targeted lifecycle sends and use email enhancements, such as video and animated images, with care.

Make sure you adhere to these best practices to see the highest potential ROI on your email marketing.