While social and con­tent mar­ket­ing long enjoyed the lime­light, email suf­fered as a mar­ket­ing tool. But, barber&hewitt’s Michael Bar­ber recent­ly argued that like Mark Twain, the reports of its death by some media out­lets has indeed been great­ly exag­ger­at­ed. And brands that want to har­ness the full poten­tial of this mar­ket­ing tool – which, notably, has been made increas­ing­ly rel­e­vant by mobile devices and wear­ables – should, in part, ensure emails are opti­mized for mobile, per­son­al­ized to each cus­tomer and put said con­sumers in the driver’s seat.

By and large, email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns suck. Or so said Michael Bar­ber, founder of mar­ket­ing firm barber&hewitt at Dig­i­tal Sum­mit Phoenix last week.

That’s in part because 78 per­cent of email is spam and 94 bil­lion mes­sages per day cost the glob­al econ­o­my $20 bil­lion.

In fact, Bar­ber point­ed to one brand that sent nine emails on Cyber Mon­day as a good exam­ple of where email mar­ket­ing has gone wrong.

“For the aver­age per­son, that is over­whelm­ing,” Bar­ber said.

In addi­tion, sub­ject lines and URLs are too long, call-to-action but­tons are too small, mul­ti­ple col­umn lay­outs are too con­fus­ing, and brand emails still go out with greet­ings like, “Dear F*Name,” because brands don’t test their mes­sages first.

Yet there’s still a big oppor­tu­ni­ty to tar­get mobile cus­tomers with email. Email inter­ac­tions are up over­all, dri­ven large­ly by mobile. In fact, Bar­ber point­ed to a study that showed 80+ per­cent of smart­phone users said they even use their phones in the bath­room.

Fur­ther, per Bar­ber, Think with Google found email assists in the path to pur­chase and pro­vides a halo effect after­ward. And he cit­ed an addi­tion­al study that found con­sumers that receive email cam­paigns have high­er touch num­bers than those that don’t.

Where Did Email Go Wrong?

“As mar­keters, we were real­ly enam­ored with social and con­tent for the last five years and for­got about email,” Bar­ber said. “While we were all enam­ored with Face­book, Twit­ter, and con­tent strate­gies, devices changed and the media turned on us, but they’re start­ing to turn back.”

In addi­tion, email providers have thrown anoth­er wrench into email mar­ket­ing over­all as they have got­ten bet­ter at fil­ter­ing by giv­ing con­sumers the abil­i­ty to unsub­scribe and instant­ly mark mes­sage as spam, “destroy­ing the rep­u­ta­tion you’ve built up with a con­sumer,” Bar­ber said.

He also said email providers have lay­ered on rep­u­ta­tion data to the met­rics they use to deter­mine whether to deliv­er a mes­sage to an inbox or junk fold­er or whether to quar­an­tine or block it.

“You do not con­trol this rep­u­ta­tion data as a brand or agency. This is con­trolled by the con­sumer,” Bar­ber said. “How many con­sumers open the email, how many mark it as spam, how many delete it…if you have a good rep­u­ta­tion, you’ll hit the inbox. If not, you’ll go to junk, etc.”

What’s more, some email providers have moved pro­mo­tion­al emails out of the inbox alto­geth­er. Fur­ther, Gmail’s inbox app allows users to delete a thread by swip­ing left, which means an entire brand cat­e­go­ry could, in the­o­ry, be gone in a sin­gle swipe.

Fed­er­al gov­ern­ments have also got­ten smarter about email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and spam. Bar­ber point­ed to Canada’s tough anti-spam leg­is­la­tion, CASL, in which con­sumers have to give explic­it opt-ins that brands can doc­u­ment that say they are allowed to send con­sumers emails. Bar­ber doesn’t expect rules like this to appear in the U.S. “in our life­time,” but not­ed it will pop up in oth­er coun­tries, mak­ing this an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion for brands and agen­cies doing inter­na­tion­al cam­paigns.

So, Bar­ber said, email mar­keters must sim­ply make their mes­sages suck less. And they can do that by focus­ing on what he calls the Three Ps: Portable, Per­son­al, and Pre­scrip­tive.

Portable

Portable emails go every­where users go and fol­low them through­out their days. Any email that doesn’t do this sim­ply isn’t rel­e­vant, Bar­ber said.

And the first step toward cre­at­ing portable mes­sages is to use a sin­gle-col­umn for­mat, like the emails from fur­ni­ture retail­er Room & Board that also have sin­gle calls to action around one top­ic.

“It gets to the point and tells me what it is doing,” Bar­ber said.

Sin­gle-col­umn emails also respect that users are busy.

In oth­er words, Bar­ber said, “Tell me what you want me to care about because I don’t have a lot of time.”

In addi­tion, emails should be respon­sive or mobile aware so they are deliv­ered the right way for the right kind of device.

And calls to action should be larg­er than 44 pix­els to make it easy for con­sumers to click and arrive at the desired des­ti­na­tion, even if they have fat fin­gers, Bar­ber said. He also high­ly rec­om­mend­ed elim­i­nat­ing “click here to register”-buttons alto­geth­er.

For a brand look­ing to stand out from the crowd, Bar­ber said it’s easy to incor­po­rate GIFs or videos, such as men’s cloth­ing retail­ers Bono­bos and Jack Spade do.

“If you have the abil­i­ty to cre­ate inter­ac­tion, you should do it,” Bar­ber said.

And don’t for­get pre-head­ers, which are like sec­ondary sub­ject lines and increase the clar­i­ty of val­ue for con­sumers.

Good tools include ReallyGoodEmails.com, Lit­mus, Targeted.io, and Email on Acid, Bar­ber said.

Personal

Brand emails must cater to the needs and desires of each con­sumer and the expe­ri­ence must be unique to each cus­tomer. Per­son­al emails uti­lize data on what con­sumers do on the web and in social and on what pur­chas­es they make to meet those objec­tives, Bar­ber said.

That means using tags to lay­er on inter­est­ing ele­ments or social icons to have con­ver­sa­tions and expose con­sumers to a wider audi­ence and to dri­ve social opt-ins.

Brands can even bake in social con­tent by putting real-time social feeds into email cam­paigns based on when the email is opened, mak­ing that mes­sage time­ly and rel­e­vant, Bar­ber said.

Con­sumer data also allows brands to do things like send a wel­come email, Bar­ber said. Those mes­sages have 20 to 30 per­cent high­er open rates. And it doesn’t hurt to remem­ber dates like birth­days and anniver­saries, which also mean tap­ping user data in smart ways.

Brands can also tap into infor­ma­tion about gen­der to cater email con­tent or even sea­son­al ele­ments like weath­er to have con­ver­sa­tions with con­sumers based on what is hap­pen­ing in real life, such as retail­ers Jack­Threads and Bono­bos did when it was snow­ing in Col­orado in late May 2014.

“Always give me some­thing more,” Bar­ber said.

He also point­ed to Bono­bos, which sent a link to a cat video to watch after he placed an order as some­thing to do while he wait­ed for his pants.

“It makes me want to open it,” Bar­ber said. “I can’t help but want to open [future emails] just because I want to con­tin­ue to inter­act with the brand.”

Tools for per­son­al­iza­tion include: StrongView, Jan­rain, and Full­Con­tact.

Prescriptive

Brands are no longer in con­trol of their email con­ver­sa­tions. They need to let con­sumers take con­trol or risk destruc­tion of the chan­nel, Bar­ber said. Pre­scrip­tive emails do just that.

“We are no longer in con­trol of the con­ver­sa­tion,” Bar­ber said.

When work­ing with Mary­land water­front resort des­ti­na­tion Nation­al Har­bor, Bar­ber said the brand asked its 400,000 sub­scribers what sub­jects they want­ed to hear about and cus­tomized its first large call to action based on those respons­es.

“A real­ly great way to get insights is sim­ply to ask cus­tomers what they want,” Bar­ber said.

Brands should also ask con­sumers how fre­quent­ly they want to hear from them and give them lots of options.

Also: Give con­sumers rea­sons to inter­act. And if cus­tomers don’t start inter­act­ing, get a reen­gage­ment strat­e­gy in place, Bar­ber said.

“Start a cam­paign flow to get them to be part of the con­ver­sa­tion,” he added.

But if cus­tomers want to get out of the con­ver­sa­tion, make it easy, he rec­om­mend­ed, point­ing to yoga retail­er Lul­ule­mon, which puts its unsub­scribe but­ton at the top of the page.

Or, give that cus­tomer a rea­son to stay, Bar­ber said, point­ing to deal-of-the-day web­site Groupon, which has a cre­ative “Pun­ish Der­rick” video for its cus­tomers that want to unsub­scribe.

And, final­ly, Bar­ber said, “Die pur­chase lists, just die.”

“Every sin­gle met­ric [and piece of] research says it doesn’t do any­thing good for you. Com­plaint rates and CTR go in the wrong direc­tion,” he said. “Please stop buy­ing them…this is not what you want to hap­pen.”