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CHANGE
Email marketing is undergoing something of a revolution,
says Matt McNeill, founder and CEO of Sign-Up.to.
Talk Business caught up with him to discuss the
changing face of marketing
TB – We hear a lot about
responsive design. What is it,
and why is it so important?
MM – In a nutshell, it’s a
process of coding email
templates so that they
automatically adjust to optimise
the viewer’s experience on
a whole range of devices –
desktop, tablet or smartphone.
The mobile consumption
of emails has increased
dramatically during the last few
years. Today, around 60% of all
emails are opened on a mobile
device, but only 18% of emails
are optimised for that platform.
Non-responsive emails have a
very high abandon rate, above
80%. That’s a lot of potentially
valuable content which is never
reaching its intended audience.
TB – Interesting, how does
it work?
MM – It’s much more than just
scaling the email to fit a smaller
screen. Responsive design
automatically optimises the
content for the viewing device.
This includes re-arrangement
of the layout, removal of less
important content or images,
and scaling of text and other
items to be more prominent.
Responsive design is no longer a
“nice to have”. That’s why all of
the email templates we produce
for our customers are now
responsive from the ground up.
TB – What other innovations are
you working on?
MM – There’s a whole emerging
area based around relevance – we
refer to it as precision marketing.
More than 800 billion emails were
sent last year and, even if you
take out the 70% officially classed
as spam, that still represents a
huge amount of legitimate emails
competing for attention. Precision
marketing is a great way of
targeting highly relevant content
to specific audience groups. Being
relevant is essential for cutting
through the noise and getting
campaigns noticed.
TB – So how does precision
marketing work?
MM – There are two aspects.
Firstly, subscriber profiling –
understanding the individuality
your audience. Profiling
ranges from collecting simple
information like gender, location
or birthday, to a more in-depth
understanding of preferences
and campaign engagement. We
call these profiling ‘dimensions’
and our customers use them
to create segmented groups
or audiences within their
subscriber database.
The second part is targeting.
Audience profiling allows the
creation of customised content
that’s specifically relevant to
the profile characteristics of
each group. It can be done
manually, but dynamic content
is one of the most exciting
developments. It automates the
whole customisation process,
with readers receiving the same
campaign seeing different content
variations depending on their
individual profile characteristics.
Today
around 60%
of all emails
are opened
on a mobile
device, but
only 18% of
emails are
optimised
for that
platform
TB – Can you explain more
about how precision marketing
is being used?
MM – One of the simplest,
but most effective, targeting
applications is birthday
messaging. Many businesses
collect birthday data to send
a timely special offer or
personalised discount voucher.
Multiple profiling dimensions
can be combined so, if the
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