While it’s easy to imagine WhatCounts as an incredibly good looking, machine working to make the email world a better place, it’s actually not.
Handsome and a gentleman. Or gentlebot. Whatever.
Making the email world a better place takes a team. And our team is loaded with talent. When two of our awesome folks worked some magic for a client and saw amazing results, we couldn’t help but ask them to share their experience with us. Below is the account of Angela Bee and Adam Sukenik taking Salty’s Seafood to the next level.
With the freshest seafood, the most delightful brunch buffets, and one of the greatest views, Salty’s Waterfront Seafood Grill have always been among customers’ favorite dining experiences.
Given that industry trends show 50% are reading emails on mobile devices, Cindy Smith, Salty’s Marketing & Advertising Director, wanted to extend that positive experience all the way through to the email channel.
“Email is our main marketing strategy with the majority of our reservations filtering through this channel. With all the buzz around responsive design, it became a priority for us to bring our templates up to speed in order to keep our audience engaged and informed about our events.”
It’s a familiar story: Client recently launches a sexy, redesigned website and, well, their emails just aren’t up to par anymore. Cue the Agents of Email with a shiny new template. Salty’s was sending all the right content: updates on limited-time dinner specials, recipes for popular dishes, upcoming events (salsa dance lessons with a seafood dinner? Interesting combo, but definitely click worthy), dynamic content serving up subscriber-preferred restaurant-specific news, and blog posts straight from the head chefs’ keyboards — all paired with drool-inducing images of fresh Seattle seafood.
They just needed to present this content in a template that was consistent with their new site, while adding a couple of new elements to help monetize their email program.
Since switching to this new template 6 months ago, the overall click-to-open rate has increased 48% from the previous year, and the unique click-through rate increased by 56%. This project is a perfect example of how important the customer experience is. The customer engagement is clearly much more effective when emails are designed for the mobile audience. “We are thrilled with the results of the template and excited start executing on the next project to take advantage of new platform features and further improve our email program.”
TLDR? The new responsive design proved to be a tremendous success and had us salivating to share this with you too.
The Design
Angela: We designed the template to focus on what Salty’s audience searched for most often when engaging from a mobile device – reservations, gift cards, and the menu.
Adam: Overall, the design closely mirrored the website. Colorful, distracting, inconsistent background images were replaced with a subdued, light gray background image of illustrated ocean friends. Google web fonts were imported into the email, and newly branded burgundy, khaki, and dark gray colors were splashed throughout headlines, body copy, icons, and calls-to-action. For the first time, Salty’s templates were responsive for easy reading on mobile devices.
The Header
Adam: The email’s header was the most drastically changed area. As mentioned before, monetization of their email program was a main objective. This was done by incorporating “Reservations” and “Gift Cards” navigation links in the header. Click analytics on those links made it easy to monitor conversions and equate emails to patrons chowing down.
Angela: Creating a menu bar at the top of the template allows subscribers to easily navigate from their mobile device to get to what they need. We also introduced pre-header text for the customer to click through to the website without having to scroll through the email. Adding these elements, along with the menu bar links, all now add up to over 40% of the overall click-through rate of each email.
The Content
Adam: Body content was not changed in the redesigned template, but it was given a facelift to be more readable and clickable. Utilizing the z-curve (alternating image placement; left-right-left etc.), we were able to break up the monotony of having the same looking content blocks over and over again. Their button-style calls-to-action were redesigned to have a consistent size and copy treatment. On mobile devices, font and button sizes were increased to provide a best-practice backed mobile experience.
We know we preach long and loud about how important email responsiveness is for subscriber interaction. Salty’s got on board with the message and saw huge returns from their subscribers as a result.
Interested in upping your email game? We’d love to help! Just reach out and we’ll be happy to help you send what counts.