At the time of filming this video, we’ve all been working from home since March 2020. It’s August now and whilst we can start to go out again, many of us are still working from home and it looks set to continue for a fair while yet.
In news this week, Google have announced that its UK staff will continue to work from home for another 2 months yet.
So, as the whole working from home thing looks like it could be here to stay for a fair while yet - what does this mean for your email marketing. What changes should you make to ensure that your open rates remain high - or even get a boost.
- Forward to a friend link
The main factor to bear in mind about people working at home, in isolation is that they can’t print off an email and wander across the office - or invite a colleague to come over to your screen.
Emails need to be forwarded to share something now - with working from home, your network of staff could be based all over the place. We still want recipients to share an email that they find interesting or useful with colleagues though.
This can be done by adding a prominent ‘send to a friend’ email link - this gives the recipient the ability to quickly and easily add an email address and send it on. This is done without the need for cutting and pasting and the risk of formatting getting broken by using the email browser’s forward link.
If you add a forward to a friend link - your email software will easily send the email on without any hassle. This is really important now as sharing useful info with colleagues requires a new approach.
- Re A/B test your send times
I think we can all agree that year, so far has been a strange one - and everything that we took for granted has changed in some way. This is exactly the same with your email campaign send times. As your target audience are more than likely going to be at home, their working hours may be a little more fluid than they previously were.
The fix for this is to A/B test different send times - as you may have done when you first started email marketing. Use an app such as Email Blaster’s A/B test to try different send times and use the strongest results for the main campaign send. Doing this at the moment is a really worthwhile exercise.
- Optimise images for slower connections
Nowadays, most offices are geared up for internet connections that are fast and allow the sending and receiving of lots of data very quickly. Many of us working from home though, don’t have the luxury of a 100gb per second connection. So, it’s worth taking this into consideration with your email marketing.
Make sure that your send doesn’t include large attachments that might not transpose to a slower internet connection speed. Nothing can be more frustrating than waiting to download large files or images in an email.
So it’s worth making sure that any elements that can bump up the file size of the email, such as images are properly optimised for slower connections. You can use a website such as tinypng to optimise images automatically down to really small file size, without losing quality.
- Use email newsletters to forward company news
With everyone working form home - as well as sending out external email marketing, its important not to forget your staff working remotely. It’s easy for people to feel alienated and out of the loop. It’s really worth getting into the routine of sending out company communications via email to your staff.
This really helps everyone still feel like they are part of the fold, it helps to keep people demotivated and also is the most ideal way to communicate company news.
If you’ve never done one before - now is the time to start, these can really work wonders with your staff morale.
- Optimise your designs for smaller screens
With the majority of the workforce working from home, it’s pretty likely that more people than usual will be viewing your email on their mobile phone screen. This means that you need to give the design of your email some thought.
If you normally send out a lengthy newsletter - then it’s worth trying to slim this down quite a bit as large bodies of text can be a frustrating viewing experience on a small screen.
This can often lead to subscribers opting out of future sends. The golden rule here is to keep your marketing brief and to the point with larger fonts
Summary
Ok, so there we have a quick run-through of how to tweak your email marketing for optimum results when your target audience are mainly working form home.