A few weeks ago a new email client was launched by Basecamp. And the name of it “HEY”. This email service is promised to be 100% user and privacy centric. HEY introduces many features that the email industry had never experienced before and this will bring a new way of doing this in the Email Marketing industry. In the far future, the new tactics that marketers will have to take into consideration will reveal the best practices of Email Marketing.
On HEY’s features page will see the full list of features that may affect your Email Marketing strategy. First things first, zero tracking. HEY promises to provide a zero tracking email experience for its users. This means only one thing for marketers: false or zero statistics! But, let’s go through some of the basic features fo this service and see how you will still be able to tell whether your campaigns were successful.
The Screener
The Screener is where emails arrive every time you email a @hey.com email address. The HEY user then determines whether they will accept the initial email they received and future emails. That way, the user will determine themselves what is spam for them. The receiver/subscriber will be able to see a list will all the new email addresses that have emailed them. That being said, they will have to decide whether they will accept an email based on a very short part of the email on the very to of it and the subject line.
Tip:
- As a marketer, you already knew that the subject line and firth part of email should look sharp in order to attract as many opens as possible, but this time this is a necessity. Let’s take the scenario that someone subscribes to your newsletter(s) today and they don’t head over immediately to their email inbox to confirm their subscription. After a few hours or days, they will forget completely about your newsletter. At first, try to avoid sending email addresses that look like no-reply@company.com. Instead, try to use a more friendly email address like newsletter@company.com or even the person that prepares the newsletter content within the company, ex alex@company.com.
- Create a descriptive subject line to make it easier for your subscribers to remember you and the reason they subscribed to your newsletter.
- Invite your subscribers to enter their ‘Speakeasy code’. This is one more new feature that HEY introduces for emails. The Speakeasy code is a code that every @hey.com user can create on their account dashboard and when someone inserts that code on their subject line, this email will bypass the Screener.
The Feed
Within the HEY inbox newsletters have a special place. The Feed is a tab dedicated for newsletters to be displayed same as they would get displayed on any social media feed page. The user gets to see only the subject line of each newsletter and a short preview of the upper part of the content. In order to increase chances that your newsletter will be clicked and opened, consider avoiding adding pictures in the begging so you can fit more content and make your campaign recognizable. Also, content on The Feed is sorted chronologically. This means that if your campaign arrives at your subscriber’s Feed page early in the morning, by the end of the day it will be at the bottom because other newsletters will have arrived. See now why a good introduction is needed? 😉
Campaign design
As you probably have understood by now, HEY users have full control of the content they receive. Your campaign design is very important because it is a key element that will make your subscribers remember and distinguish you from other newsletters with similar content.
As HEY only shows a preview of your campaign content, consider:
- Avoid white spacing. A common issue across different email clients is spacing between paragraphs or images. White spacing is what marketers use to eliminate or reduce such issues.
- Avoid pictures on top of the text content. No matter whether this image is going a small image or your organization’s logo, you can fill this space with a short summary of your campaign.
- Avoid ads on top of the campaign. Other than the reasons stated above, imagine yourself in the position of a HEY user. Would you choose to receive email campaigns that contain ads?
But, don’t panic!
Yes, HEY introduces many features that no other service provides but this is not a bad thing. If your content is good it will make it to a HEY user’s Imbox. Maybe this is a great moment to get more familiar with the notion of List Segmentation and use that to maximize impact for HEY users!
Have in mind that HEY is a paid service and no matter how innovative its features are it will be hard to compete with other free E-mail services. Gmail is the most popular email service worldwide and it will be hard to convince wide audiences who are not familiar with how email tracking works to switch to a paid service. Email Marketing experts don’t expect that Email Marketing trends will change any soon with the arrival of HEY, but you should always have an eye on the latest updates.