🔍9 insights from expert’s email examples dissection

New here? This is Inbox Hacking, a Free Newsletter for Awesome email marketers eager to increase Awesomeness. Email marketing insights, tools, & tactics sent twice per week. Someone forwarded you our Newsletter? Please join over 13,894 Email Marketers and sign up for your Free subscription. Today → 9 quick insights from Litmus’ recent email dissections, our email stat section, & a hack you can implement today.

Good morning, you Inbox Hacking heroes. March Madness officially begins tonight and round one is Thursday (managers, prep for missing workers). In the meantime, I’m going to further dissect a dissection of 5 email examples that Litmus broke down with what they loved and what needed work.

You’ll learn how to improve CTAs, keep reader interest, and maximize your email visuals.

Top-3 Useful Insights

See the full Litmus email dissections (8-min read). The top insights I sliced out are:

Infuse visual friction in your CTA links (more on visual friction in a moment)
When quoting someone, use their photo (i.e. experts or user testimonials)
Use more emotion and back it with facts / stats

*I bet 88.254% of email marketers don’t use enough stats and two-thirds of that group bust their bracket by round 2 of The Tournament, on average.😄

What’s Visual Friction?

Visual friction, mentioned in these email examples, is anything that gets your reader to pause and pay attention to something you deem important.

If your most important call-to-action blends in with all the other copy, that’s too smooth.

🔥Add friction to grab readers’ attention.🔥

Example: A newsletter with five “Read More” CTAs in plain text will not stand out. Especially after a subscriber sees the same newsletter week after week.

*Test various visual friction tactics to see which works best in emails.

**One study showed ‘averted human gazes’ in advertising grabbed more attention and was more memorable.

Email Examples Campaign Goals

Sure, I’d like to prep for green St. Patty’s Day beer and relax with college basketball. But I’ve got goals to set for emails. You too.

Goals were highlighted by Litmus for each brand’s email example.

Consumer Reports→ drive clicks to affiliate links / increase subscriptions
Standard Life→ customer retention by nudging readers to their blog
Feed 365→ share updates and express gratitude to the non-profit’s members
AAA→ updates and news designed to remind members of their membership value
Jet Brains→ drive webinar sign-ups

Have a goal, or don’t hit send until you do. Goals shape email campaigns (successful campaigns in case that was unclear 🙃).

Final 6 Email Examples Dissections

Buttons > text links for visual friction
Unique CTAs > common CTAs (i.e. ‘Grab Your Discount’ vs. ’Click Here’)
Respect readers’ time (give read-time estimates & delete the needless)
Use consistent illustrations
Reduce readers’ cognitive load (#1 tactic to achieve this)
Your message / CTA can never be too clear

*Uniquely-phrased CTAs are advisable on button text as well as plain text.

Why Not Do Your Own Email Examples Dissection?

Don’t let Litmus and I have all the fun dissecting other brands’ emails. You may enjoy silently trashing some brands’ emails🤐 as a bonus.

Seriously, you’ll learn a ton by reviewing emails in your inbox. Set aside time each week to dissect what stands out and what’s blatantly blah.

Careful. If you get sucked into an email’s content, you won’t learn much. You’ll just be clicking on CTAs – signing up for AAA then reading about blenders on Consumer Reports.

So, review each email like a scientist. Remove emotion and bias. Focus on the email structure, aesthetics, and patterns. What stands out? What makes no impact?

Grab your scalpel, some safety glasses and start slicing up email examples to learn ways to make your campaigns more effective.

Also, check in with Litmus on their monthly live events because hopefully, they’ll do more of these insightful dissections.

Bonus: Visual friction can be a bad thing on landing pages, 🔧 how to fix yours.

Knowledge Base

🦉Knowledge is power, but first, a snack break w/ the birds.

❌10 content curation mistakes to beware + this misconception.

📃All the fine print on purchasing lists.

🎬14 CTA copy examples via HubSpot.

🔢Content marketers need stats (true ones help), 9 sources here.

🤩Conversion rate of 40%? Getting organic leads on LinkedIn.

Self Help

The simplest solutions are often overlooked.

Turning off social media phone notifications is guaranteed to make you more productive.

Why not simplify further? By deleting social apps from your phone. Use social on desktop only – if it doesn’t work correctly, even better.🙂

Email deliverability is similar. Simplify your practices as far as you can. Whatever produces optimal results with minimal effort.

I believe improving open rates is the simplest deliverability solution.

Other tactics exist but many take too long to produce results. Some are too complex to implement efficiently. So keep that in mind regardless of the email tools or methods you test to improve your deliverability.

Don’t dismiss the simple.

*Shout-out to Inbox Hacking Subscribers →

🚗Morgan at DrivingSuccess (Automotive marketing)

🤝🏼Katie at Clutch (Business guidance)

Facts and Stats

47% of marketers are sure that automation is worth the price (Snov)
88% of users agree they are more likely to respond to an email favorably if it appears specifically created for them
The average unsubscribe & spam complaint rates of triggered emails→ 0.58% & 0.06% respectively

Bonus: 87.2% of people would prefer rando Email Marketers over in-laws tagging along on vacations.

From Our Sponsor

Get the picture…

You’re at checkout behind a guy with a buggy full of groceries. So you grab a candy bar.

An automatic decision. They’re right there + you’re in a shopping mood.

That’s how Inbox Mailers works with marketing emails.

Inbox Mailers triggers your emails to slide into inboxes while subscribers are right there, in the inbox.

It’s an automatic decision for subscribers to open your emails while they open emails they’re already in the mood to read.

Predictable behaviors are what produce 50% – 70% open rates and higher click volume with Inbox Mailers. >>>Book your Demo.

Marketing Musings

Love this guy’s writing — mine, I mean😂.

This guy’s pretty awesome too though→ Sean D’Souza. His quote below.

“The myth that is perpetuated is that you just need to sit at your computer and get an endless number of clients.”

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years.

How face-to-face business will fade away eventually. Also, that you could go on cruise-control once you had big momentum.

Yet, even the most famous music artists in history still went on the road 300 days a year. Live concerts produced a big chunk of album sales back then and merch nowadays.

Face-to-face. Consistently. If that’s what it takes for insanely popular music stars, I’m pretty sure we marketing nerds can’t thrive behind screens only.

What do you think?

Get Hacking

Feeling guilty? Sure, getting your in-laws to invest in FTX was catastrophic, but I’m talking about suspect email practices. Ones that’ll come back to bite ya:

Camouflaging the unsubscribe link
Buying email lists
Not using double opt-ins

I could go on. But no need. Today’s hack is to review your email marketing practices and simply cut out one tactic that could harm your sender reputation. Something you wouldn’t mention over dinner with the folks at Spamhaus— even if toasted 🍻(you or them).

📝Please take survey below. It’s tax-free.

Survey results: