Email fundraisers pushed the envelope in their designs this cycle to reach donors who were being flooded with requests. In some cases, that meant cycling through different styles of email, or simply incorporating more images so that the campaign ask resembled something more retail or corporate.
“For us, some of our most successful emails that go out are those that look like an all-image email,” Ahmed Champion, a digital strategist at Break Something, said Dec. 15 during a virtual discussion hosted by C&E. “It’s one single image so it looks a lot like enterprise emails or corporate emails that you would get, or something from Instagram in your inbox that is visually dynamic and also grabs the person’s attention.”
Champion said his shop also used accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to get real-time information into clients’ emails. “Those are some small things that can really impact the design, the aesthetics and ultimately the person’s experience that brings campaigns into a more modern realm of the digital world that everybody operates in 2020.”
Zach Stewart, a VP at Blueprint Interactive, said varying the style of emails — as well as the senders — was another key.
“Some of the email styles are going to look totally different — maybe we remove the header, maybe we make it look a little bit more like it came directly from an iPhone, maybe it’s a more graphics-heavy email,” he said Dec. 15. “Varying the approach as you’re increasing frequency I think becomes really, really important because you want to make sure that you’re not just hammering people with the same content over and over and over again.”
That creative variation came a bit more easily for email given the significantly higher send volume. In other verticals, particularly direct mail, there were simply fewer opportunities to vary design and copy this year.
“I think the biggest challenge from the standpoint of creative, is how do you talk about issues other than the pandemic?” Ray Zaborney, a partner at GOP mail shop Red Maverick Media said. “You almost had to bring a lot of issues back to the pandemic. It was something that in almost every piece we did, there was some allusion to it.”
