In the first article of our two-part series on designing real-time email, I gave a few examples of real-time content, demonstrated why designers (and their companies) should want to use it, and presented tips to help choose the right real-time experiences. In case you missed it, you can read Part 1 here.

Now it’s time for Part 2. In this article, I’ll give you specific email design best practices and tips to help design memorable, engaging, and effective real-time email experiences. 

What should you consider when designing real-time email content?

I always tell designers that they should start the process in much the same way they would with a traditional static email. But this is just the starting point. From there, you should think about the entire user experience, which will include every touchpoint as a recipient opens your email, digests the real-time content, and then engages by clicking through to a landing page or interacting with your real-time elements. 

I also recommend that you get creative in the way you think about using advanced email experiences, and how you can use them to present personalized content in ways your audience might not expect (but will love when you get it right!)

For example, Discover used our LiveRender capability to personalize emails by embedding an animated graphic that showed recipients their exact mileage balance and how much they would gain with a special matching promotion.

In this case, the design became a win-win: Consumers loved the experience, and Discover increased click-through rates by 46%.

One quick note: The Discover email is just one example of well-designed real-time content. To see many more—in all phases of the customer lifecycle—download our LookBook today.

Other creative approaches

Real-time email content can accommodate branding styles and approaches that aren’t typically seen in traditional emails. This means that designing these kinds of emails may give you the chance to have fun and be a little more creative.  I’ve found that real-time emails usually go hand-in-hand with the most innovative (dare I say cool), design work.

Liveclicker’s RealTime Email platform can even accommodate your branding “must haves,” such as custom fonts, CSS formatting, branded images and animations, and other branding necessities that typically aren’t applied to dynamic content. 

Use video!

Also, if your company has video assets, flaunt them in email. Research from Campaign Monitor shows that including video in email can boost click-through rates up to 65%, and at the same time, it helps minimize the struggle to find or include new content.

With RealTime Email, video can play directly in the inbox, delighting your audience by giving them something they might not have expected to receive. So give video a try! Welcome emails are a great place to start, especially since you’ll impress your customers with your very first message.

Design responsively

It also helps to keep responsive design in mind. Remember that your audience will open your emails on a wide range of screens. So take a look at your email and its landing pages on mobile, tablet, and desktop. Generally speaking, it helps to know what specific device the majority of the audience will be using.

Even beyond that, it’s good to know additional details such as operating system, email client, or if they’re using Web-mail such as Gmail to receive emails. 

Go Retina!

It’s also important to think about how your creative will look on higher-resolution screens. For the best results, I recommend using Retina images, a higher resolution that is twice as many pixels per inch (ppi) than the normal web 72 ppi. Even if the rest of the email doesn’t use such high resolution, you will still get the best results using Retina-quality images for your real-time content.

You probably know how to set up Retina images, but if not, here’s a quick tip. Make your image resolution 144 ppi instead of the normal 72 ppi. If you’re entering this information in Liveclicker’s RealTime Email platform, enter height and width dimensions that are half the height and width of the retina image(s). 

Simplify content and present it in new ways

Don’t you hate it when the marketing team wants to force too much content into your elegant design? You can use advanced email experiences in creative ways to deliver this content in a more efficient space and help you stay in control of your design. These include LiveSlides, LiveVideo, LiveImage, and more.

Thoughts on testing

You should also think about quantifying your real-time email results by testing them against a static email. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t and help you develop innovative new ideas to improve future emails with real-time email content.

You can even test your campaign within our RealTime Email platform. Our Adaptive Testing capability lets you automatically roll out a winning test as determined by statistical significance. This makes sure the winning creative is launched effectively, without having to wait extra time to manually deploy this version as a future campaign.

Don’t forget the versioning

Finally, remember that some experiences require creative assets for different states—for example, for LiveHover you’ll need to think about the cover state, hover state, animation fallback and create images for all.

I hope these tips are helpful as you continue to design innovative emails that connect and engage consumers in new ways. If I can answer any questions, please feel free to contact me. And don’t forget: for even more real examples of well designed email campaigns, download our LookBook now!

Summer months represent the peak season for companies in the travel and hospitality industries, especially as so many of us travel, take vacations, rent a car, and (hopefully) get the chance to unwind.

Yet marketing teams in these industries realize that the traditional holiday season also represents a significant opportunity to help them increase their “heads-in-beds” and other utilization metrics, and ultimately, maximize revenues. 

So if you’re looking for a little inspiration, or an idea to turbocharge your marketing efforts this year, here are some proven holiday email marketing tips, tricks, and best practices from two of the world’s leading travel and hospitality brands: Celebrity Cruises and Hertz. 

Celebrity Cruises increases revenues by 3X with email personalization

Celebrity Cruises recently needed a new approach to its standard emails in order to increase click-through rates, engagement metrics, and generate higher revenues. The brand also hoped to move away from using too many promotion-based emails—a standard approach in the industry—to further maximize profitability.

Celebrity Cruises partnered with Liveclicker to design and deploy highly personalized, highly engaging email campaigns for loyal guests, one of the company’s most profitable segments. The objective was to use each customers’ data in creative ways to relive their past experience or their overall journey as a loyal guest.

The emails accomplished this goal—and so much more.

For example, using innovative real-time personalization strategies, Celebrity Cruises’ marketing team came up with fun new ways to display significant milestones in each guest’s sail history. For example, different emails featured personalized content to highlight key details such as:

• The guest’s first name, which was rendered as a stylized image as the email was opened
• The number of ships the guest had sailed on
• The date the guest first sailed
• The number of cruises the guest had taken
• The number of nights the guest had cruised
• Three suggested regions to visit based on propensity-modeled data

By all accounts, the entire campaign was a success. Celebrity Cruise developed engaging emails its customers loved, and in doing so, generated revenues three times higher than its standard “business-as-usual” emails. 

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Holiday marketing tip: Use customer information to personalize holiday email marketing campaigns in ways your audience may not expect. You’ll foster long-term relationships and create a first-class experience that is bound to pay off!

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Hertz creates an engaging new experience

Hertz needed a better approach for its reservation confirmation emails. Specifically, the company was looking to delight its customers by providing as much helpful information into these emails as possible.

In working with Liveclicker, the Hertz marketing team realized that it could display maps and clickable directions that would help its customers find their specific rental locations to pick up their cars.

Hertz used an API link to a native map application to successfully automate the process of adding and updating maps on a regular basis. This new capability enabled Hertz to create dynamic reservation confirmation emails that included a map and detailed directions to the exact location. 

Additionally, to provide more information and deliver an even better experience, Hertz also incorporated weather details, forecasts, and local activities to help customers plan ahead. The brand even created a specific poll to ask interactive questions for follow-up emails. This capability helped Hertz quickly gather valuable feedback about customers’ rental experiences.

In addition, Hertz used Liveclicker’s LivePoll feature to ask interactive questions in follow-up emails. This capability helped the rental car companies quickly gather valuable feedback about customers’ rental experiences. 

These emails exceeded expectations. Not only did they increase click-through rates and reduce production times, but they generated impressive customer response.

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Holiday marketing tip: Leave no stone unturned in your search to find new ways to communicate with customers and deliver engaging new experiences. Reservation confirmations and even order-tracking emails can now be used to communicate valuable information and continue to market your products or services.

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All the holiday inspiration you need, all in one ebook

Looking for even more holiday email marketing ideas, you can download our new guide, “9 Solutions (With Real-Life Examples!) to Retailers’ Biggest Headaches,” now!

We hope you’ve been enjoying our articles on holiday-related email marketing ideas, and that each one gives you valuable ideas you can use in your ongoing email marketing efforts. We enjoy providing specific tips and real-world examples, so stay tuned for additional updates, or you can always download our Holiday Email Personalization LookBook for more illustrated examples all in one place.

It’s time to focus on the next big holiday coming up: Father’s Day Email Marketing (June 16 for 2019).

By some measures, Father’s Day isn’t as big as it could be. According to research from the National Retail Federation, Americans spent a total of $23.1 billion on Mother’s Day in 2018. Yet for Father’s Day, that figure reached just $15.3 billion. Similarly, NRF found that where 86% of Americans celebrate Mother’s Day, only 77% do the same for Father’s Day.

To help make a bigger splash for Dad this year, here are 15 ways you can use advanced real-time personalization experiences in your Father’s Day email marketing campaigns this year (or for any holiday)!

15 Tips for Using Real-Time Personalization in Father’s Day Campaigns

1. Use a timer to count down to the big day. Actually, there are two recommendations here: First, you can use a timer to show exactly how much time is left before Father’s Day, or, you can be a little more creative by counting down to a special sale. Both create urgency and encourage shopping.
2. Put important dates on the calendar. Similarly, you can use a calendar function to put a Father’s Day event on an official calendar or call attention to the final deadline when someone can buy a gift and still receive it in time. Make sure you include critical information and links directly in the meeting invite.
3. Include shipping details in the email itself. Now, marketers can add tracking information directly with a order-confirmation email. This saves time and doesn’t require recipients to visit third-party shipping sites for that information. They’ll be impressed…and more likely to buy more!
4. Engage them in a new way—a fun poll: Come up with a fun, creative way to ask a poll question. (Maybe“What type of gift don’t Dads like to get?”) Recipients can see the total responses in the email itself, or you can encourage them to visit a dedicated landing page complete with gifts any Dad would love.
5. Get social. Personalize emails with images and updates from your company’s social media sites. For example, pull in images from last year’s Father’s Day celebrations or other events.
6. Use real images to show great gift options. Offer website images based on their past interests and behaviors to make purchase decisions a no brainer.
7. Combine images with personalization. Consider adding their first name or other personalization to become part of the image. It will definitely catch their attention and increase your credibility and allure.
8. Use images with time-based targeting. This may take a creative approach but dream up an email campaign with different offers that expire, but only to reveal other attractive offer. For example, a restaurant could display different promotions related to Father’s Day breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and have the email dynamically change to show the most appropriate offer based on the time.
9. Use images in creative new ways. If you have the data, you could offer gift recommendations from a wife, the kids, or anyone else in Dad’s life. Get creative!
10. Reveal something special. Use our LiveReveal capability to build excitement around a special offer, discount or promotion. These emails always encourage action, whether recipients should scratch off an offer, open a gift, or click a spinning wheel. They’ll love the experience—and the ultimate “prize.”
11. Animate your email! Use images as animated gifs to create interest and engagement.
12. Take it up a notch with video.The idea of adding video in email still has a tough reputation—many marketers think it’s harder than it actually is—but embedding videos can make your email shine.
13. Use slides to show range of products he may be interested in. Golf clubs, clothes, tools, sunglasses—all will look better in a dynamic slideshow view.
14. Map it! You can use geo targeting to create a map to your store or special Father’s Day destination.
15. Offer real-time information. If appealing, scrape real-time information off of your website, including updating pricing information or special promotions, and serve it all up in a personalized, meaningful way.

Finally, become an email personalization ninja by combining many of these real-time advanced email experiences into one campaign or customer experience. You’re bound to create memorable, engaging, simply-can’t-resist types of email experiences any father will appreciate.

As an email marketer, you know how important it is to use real-time personalization to create engaging, effective email experiences. Yet the bar is constantly being raised, especially as your competition catches on.

This means you need to be more creative in your email personalization strategies and constantly consider innovative new approaches. (For example, who could have guessed that weather conditions could be used to create great marketing emails and even solve specific business challenges?)

Less clicking = more connecting

Now you can improve personalization—and stand apart in the inbox—by embedding customers’ order tracking information right in your order confirmation email.

According to Narvar’s “Consumer Report 2017, Bots, Text, and Voice: What Cuts through the Clutter” report, 73% of consumers ranked order tracking as one of the most important messages they receive from retailers. That’s why we developed LiveTracker to give retailers and e-commerce companies a way to give their customers the experience they crave.

LiveTracker enables customers to track an order directly within a confirmation email or landing page. Unlike past approaches that added tracking links that took recipients away from your email (and usually to a third-party shipping site), embedded order tracking now lets you present a complete view of all the information customers need, all in your email.

This creates an engaging, helpful email experience your customers will appreciate. Just as importantly, it keeps them in your email longer and gives them a reason to open it again and again. That means marketers have more opportunities to cross-sell/upsell, solicit further engagement, and drive traffic to relevant content.

Leading brands experiencing success with LiveTracker

Many leading brands are already taking advantage of LiveTracker capabilities to add complete shipping details within their emails or custom landing pages.

Follow the LEGO bricks to … your order

For example, LEGO’s order confirmation email built excitement by letting customers know their order was on its way, and included their specific tracking number and the scheduled delivery date.

LEGO’s marketing team even had a little fun by creating a custom graphic that used LEGO’s iconic bricks in a new way to show the progress of the overall shipment. The email even included complete live package tracking details from the shipping provider, so recipients could see exactly where their order was.

BistroMD surprises and delights its audience

BistroMD also used LiveTracker to create highly personalized emails through the use of order-tracking information. The BistroMD campaign quickly caught the reader’s eye with a prominent headline that let them know their order had shipped.

From there, the email creative used first name personalization and served up everything the customer would want to know, including product order information, order-tracking details, and a custom graphic to show progress of the shipment.

Get on track for personalization success with LiveTracker

Email marketers have to do all they can to stay a step ahead of the competition and focus on connecting with customers in new and meaningful ways. This means they need to be as creative as possible with real-time personalization tools and strategies.

Embedding order tracking information in emails is a proven way to deliver more engaging customer experiences—and one that encourages consumers to continue to buy your products and services.

Feeling inspired by these awesome examples? Find even more ways to incorporate real-time personalization into your emails with our latest ebook, Automating Personalization: 5 Ways to Scale Relevance in Your Email Marketing.

The importance of personalization in marketing is well-documented at this point, and most marketers have realized the value of making experiences and messages more relevant to individuals.

But despite this growing focus on 1:1 marketing, many marketing programs go without meaningful personalization in their emails. Nearly 40% of marketers said they almost never personalize their emails last year.

Even among organizations that do conduct some amount of personalization, it is often limited to the same basic customization marketers have been using for years: a first name in the salutation, a recent purchase in the body, and so on. These can be effective tactics, but today’s consumers have come to expect much more from brands.

Obstacles to Relevance

Most marketers would probably do more personalization if they could. But adding meaningful, individualized relevance to emails is often some combination of expensive, time consuming, or prohibitively difficult.

As I explained in our recent webinar, there are some constantly-growing headwinds marketers across industries and business sizes have to fight if we want to find success:

“Email volumes are continuing to rise, so standing out in a crowded inbox is more and more important to marketers and brands. Technologies are continuing to advance, and customer expectations are rising around what the brand experience is and they’re expecting more customized, more relevant experiences to be communicated with them. We’ve seen universally across the board email marketing teams tend to be resource-constrained, making it a challenge for brands to adapt to the high expectations of consumers. And it’s vital that marketers are able to offer compelling experiences in a way that’s scalable and sustainable for these resource-strapped programs.”

It’s impossible to hand-craft a customized email to every person on the mailing list. That just would not sustainable at any significant scale. There’s only one way marketers can deliver personalized experiences to all their subscribers: automation.

The beauty and magic of email automation is that it lets you scale up personalization to broad audiences. And not just elementary personalization like putting a name in the subject line, but advanced email personalization experiences as well.

If you need a way to upgrade your automated personalized emails to drive better results, try one of these powerful email personalization automation hacks:

Insert Evolving Content that Never Gets Old

Try inserting content into your that stays ‘evergreen’ and gives openers a reason to come back for more. Adding email features that automatically update upon open means you can constantly serve a fresh experience with minimal upfront input.

Some ideas:

• A social media feed that automatically displays the hottest posts on a trending topic or the most recent posts by your brand. This is an especially effective way to take advantage of the power of User Generated Content. Word of caution: depending on the feed you set up, this may need some curation to make sure all the content is appropriate!
• Elements that display content hosted on your site that changes frequently, like featured blog posts or the latest articles on a subject the recipient has expressed interest in.
• A stream of products pulled from your ecommerce site highlighting current hot best-sellers, updating based on available inventory.

For maximum relevance, make sure this content is structured to update upon open—not just when the emails are deployed. That not only makes sure you’re sending the freshest, most pertinent information; it makes each email open a fresh, novel experience.

As my webinar co-host and Oracle Marketing Cloud Product Marketing Manager Bryan Finfrock explained:

“This is just a great example of doing something above and beyond for customers; adding value and giving them a reason to open that next message, giving them something to look forward to in the experience that makes them want to participate with your brand.”

Send Emails That Adapt to Their Environment

Today’s consumers are more mercurial than ever; constantly on the go and rapidly shifting their interest from one topic to the next. Your email automation needs to change fast to keep up and perpetually bring value through real-time relevance.

Make emails capable of adapting to open-time context for the best relevance and engagement. Include elements that respond to the context of the opener—and your business—right when the email is opened. Some inspiration to try:

• A map feature displaying your brand’s closest store or facility to the subscriber to the location it was opened.
• Play off of real-time environmental factors for the opener’s location, like weather or pollen count, to make your messaging more impactful
• Display real-time pricing and the latest deals at the time-of-open.

These are just a few of the ways you can increase relevance and personalization in your email marketing without having to make a big incremental investment in time and resources. We included a more comprehensive list, complete with effective and inspiring examples, in our latest ebook, Automating Personalization: 5 Ways to Scale Relevance in Your Email Marketing.

Download it now entirely free and start down the path to more relevant, more engaging, more effective emails!

Consistent streams of high quality, hyperpersonalized emails can keep customers engaged, build loyalty, and develop relationships. But it’s triggered emails, not promotional campaigns or nurture drips, that are usually most effective for driving immediate conversions.

About ¾ of email ROI comes from “segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.” It makes sense; triggered email marketing connects brands with customers right at the moment they’re most willing and able to engage.

Given all the potential for conversions and revenue, shouldn’t you be making sure you get the absolute most out of your trigger-based email marketing?

The Power of Triggered Email Marketing

Expertly implemented trigger emails bring a lot to the table for digital marketers. Sailthru listed a few of them on its comprehensive guide to trigger-based email marketing:

• Grow list size
• Minimize subscriber churn and attrition
• Grow conversions and revenue from email
• Maximize ROI on customer acquisition campaigns
• Boost average order value
• Convert passive prospects into active buyers
• Act on upsell and cross-sell opportunities to compel repeat customers

To top it off, setting up triggered emails with contextual relevance and personalization is easier than ever thanks to real-time email automation technology. Need some ideas to energize your marketing performance? Draw inspiration from these ROI-generating triggered email examples!

The Warmest of Welcomes

Welcome emails are opened at a higher rate than almost any other kind of direct marketing message. When someone subscribes to your newsletter, joins your loyalty program, or registers an account with your ecommerce site, that’s your opportunity to make a big first impression that will keep them coming back for more!

Need a triggered email example to inspire your welcome series? Chuck E Cheese’s sets the tone for its brand relationship with new rewards program members with a colorful, fun, and highly personalized welcome email. The brand combines dynamic images that adjust to the subscriber’s name, a live map that shows the way to the nearest destination, and real-time geo-data that gives new members everything they need to start planning their next visit right away.

Sophisticated email marketers send multiple messages in a welcome series. This strategy provides additional opportunities to direct consumers to complete high-value activities. If you know that your best customers are those with a loyalty membership, follow you on Instagram, and have set explicit preferences for products consider highlighting these in a multi-step welcome flow.

Weather Triggered Emails

Weather is one of those universal factors that binds us all together. There’s a reason it’s been one of the most popular pieces conversation starters and small-talk fuel for ages untold.

But weather isn’t just basic water cooler chit-chat material; it’s a great way to start conversations with your audience with the power of weather triggered emails. As Paul Walsch, Weather Channel weather and climate specialist said, “Weather is such an important driver of consumer sentiment and activity…but it’s not as well known and leveraged as it should be.”

Imagine having an email set to automatically deploy on a rainy day to invite subscribers into your stores for some shelter (and savings!). Or including live forecasts in a triggered email leading up to a personally-relevant event like a vacation or concert to add even more value.

Hotels.com includes both real-time weather information and an up-to-date forecast in an email triggered to send a few days before a reservation. This information helps customers prepare to make the most of their stays, gives them a reason to re-open, and enhances the customer experience to motivate repeat purchases.

Abandoned Cart Email Triggers

Some 69% of digital shopping carts get abandoned throughout the conversion process. This is the perfect opportunity for a targeted, direct message. Your prospect has made the effort to register an account and choose products she’s interested in; often a little extra motivation is all that’s needed to give her that extra nudge into customerhood.

Automated emails targeted at cart-deserters have impressive engagement and conversion rates that can have an immediate and substantial impact on digital revenue:

Keep Collective makes excellent use of their abandoned cart triggers. The brand uses friendly language and dynamic product-feature elements that adapt in real time to exclude any items that the shopper goes on to purchase or that are currently out of stock. The email reminds people of what they’re missing out on—while cleverly omitting any content that could be confusing or disappointing.

Looking for more highly-effective triggered email examples? Check out our Lookbook or download this inspirational triggered emails guide for creative, results-driving ideas to steal for your own programs!

As originally published on the Oracle Modern Marketing blog.

It’s beginning to look a lot like … September.

Which means your holiday planning is in full swing! Instead of writing an article with vague ideas that only add to your growing to-do list for your holiday marketing plan, we decided to give four specific tactics you can execute NOW to better position your programs for a successful holiday season and Q4.

Tip #1: Test, Test, Test

The first item on your holiday prep list should be to A/B test. Now is the time to determine the right creative mix for subject lines and email designs so your content is fully optimized and ready for the holiday season.

It’s a real opportunity, especially when you consider a surprisingly high number of marketers still aren’t testing. In fact, research shows that nearly 39 percent of brands never or rarely A/B test their broadcast and segmented emails.

The good news is that there are tools that can help automate the process and deliver winning creative in real time. This reduces the effort needed to analyze results and send a winning version.

Your broadcast messages shouldn’t be the only touch points to benefit from a test – also consider testing your automated and triggered messages for maximum impact. According to the same research, successful email marketers are 70 percent more likely to A/B test their triggered emails at least once a year. Also, these marketers are 95 percent more likely to A/B test their transactional emails at least once a year.

Start your test now, and carry it through the holiday season with dynamic testing tools that continuously test creative versions to ensure the champion version is always deployed.

Tip #2: Refresh Your Welcome Emails

The next item to tackle is a welcome series refresh. Your welcome series is your chance at a first impression, and if you are not personalizing that content, the impact of personalization later in the journey can be lost.

Here are a few suggestions any brand can implement to improve their welcome series – and generate better results:

• • In welcome message No. 1, start your relationship off on the right foot by featuring first name personalization in a fun font over an image.

You can also begin to progressively collect user preferences via a poll to personalize future emails.

• • In welcome message No. 2, dynamically serve up category or product recommendations aligned with the preferences you collected in the poll using a targeted webscrape. This email is also a great place to start telling your brand story – feature an embedded video that brings your company story to life.

• • Finally, use welcome No. 3 and 4 to collect even more user preferences with additional polls, surveys, and other interactive devices. Just remember, use the preference data you collect to serve your customer with the personalized experience they expect.

Tip #3: Don’t Forget Transactional Emails

Think quick: What is the one message all converted shoppers receive in their experience with your brand?

Shipping confirmations are often an afterthought in the marketing strategy – sometimes they are even executed by a different team – but think of the opportunity these messages represent. WIth high open and re-open rates, as customers anxiously await and track their precious packages, these emails are the perfect opportunity to keep a customer in your branded experience instead of sending them to a third-party tracking site.

For example, digital retailer Evine uses live business context data to display live package location information in its shipping confirmation emails. This tactic increased month-over-month click-to-open rates by 16 percent.

Tip #4: Plan Ahead with Time-Based Campaigns

Our last recommendation focuses on planning. The phrase, holiday rush, is not an exaggeration. Timely offers and communications are key for a consumer looking for the best deal, and driving urgency is one of the most effective tools in your marketing playbook.

This demand is the perfect opportunity to use time-based targeted messages. Create an hourly, daily, or weekly deals campaign, and drive urgency with a mix of countdown timers, add-to-calendar calls to action, and images that change in real time as offers expire and new promotions come online.

These types of messages successfully cut through the clutter by delivering dynamic content that is always up to date and never provides the negative experience of an expired offer.

A Gift Any Email Marketer Will Love

As you start developing this year’s holiday campaigns, don’t resort to the same old, same old approach. This year, get creative with innovative new strategies and technologies that are proven to increase important email metrics and improve sales. With these four tips, you can truly give the gift that keeps giving – highly engaging email campaigns your customers will love.

More like this: 

Take a look at our Holiday LookBook for even more great ideas, or download our holiday checklist to make sure you stay on track.