London Unspam, May 2022
I attended Unspam hosted by Really Good Emails in London on May 27th and 28th this year, and it marked my second Unspam in a city that I absolutely love.
London is a brilliant location for an Unspam. It’s a center for different cultures, languages, and demographics. So bringing together a group of individuals passionate about email is bound to push together great minds, and different opinions (which can be a VERY good thing when it comes to marketing).
As a sidebar, when I worked for Braze in 2019 out of their London office, one of my favorite takeaways was that I was able to onboard and connect with customers that weren’t in my normal and very comfortable North American circle. A new online course creation platform from France? COOL! A music streaming service from Scandinavia? Love it. A travel rewards app from Israel? A whole new horizon of potential.
You don’t get the same exposure to different ways of working, strategies, etc in North America IMO. No day-to-day work experience compares to the learnings that one can get from connecting with others from different backgrounds.
Anyways, back to Unspam .
Over two days, we connected, collaborated, and challenged one another to think outside of the box. Here are my three main takeaways.
Email allows brands to provide value
I think we already know this but I needed to summarize this first point, so there ya go.
Email can be a medium to provide value even when you don’t have anything to sell. Holly Mander, from Action Rocket, delivered a great talk on brands that deliver their brand values really well.
One of my favorite parts of attending talks is to get insight and examples from brands that do email well, so hearing from an agency with examples I could ogle at feels like Christmas morning.
It’s a given that many brands, companies, and individuals alike were impacted by COVID. Holly led us through a campaign from Pizza Express, a pizza (not sure if I need to clarify this) chain restaurant in the UK that was shut down for almost all of COVID. Did it end all email marketing initiatives? No. It delivered fun games for various age ranges. Crossword puzzles, word searches, all that fun jazz.
Pizza Express is a great example of how they gamified their website despite being completely shut during the pandemic. They had no value to provide in regards to hard sells. They just wanted to continue to build a relationship with their consumers.
I’m sure that this gamification wasn’t for everyone, but with millennials developing a diminishing digital attention span (and I’m sure other generations as well), these initiatives could be what keeps Pizza Express top of mind for when COVID restrictions did lift for those in the UK.
“Just because people like your offers, doesn’t mean they like you.”
This quote from Holly is one that I will not forget. Be mindful of the way you are driving strategy when trying to maintain a top-of-mind presence in a subscriber’s inbox.
Accessibility is ours to drive
We’re at a point in time where unless there are 50 hours in the day, and at least two of ourselves, it’s difficult for the average marketer to make sure they are checking all of the accessibility boxes when it comes to email.
Instead of focusing on accessibility, we spend time on the pretty things:
Rounded corners,
animation,
brand fonts,
interactive email,
pixel perfect layouts,
box shadows
Why do we do this? Because oftentimes the ESP makes it easier for us to build these aspects out instead of addressing things like allowing zoom to work, or setting a language within the HTML of our email when we are using a Drag & Drop.
Mark Robbins, led us through an easy-to-digest dev discussion regarding accessibility in email.
Quoting the recent initiative that we ran at Parcel whereby we tested 6000 emails, only 2 of them came out with a clean bill of health from Parcel’s Accessibility Checker.
5,998/6,000 emails have accessibility issues.
If you peel back the onion and instead say it how it is “some people can’t read, understand, or see our emails, we’re aware of that, and we choose to not do anything about it and we’re aware we’re missing out on revenue” - it’s a bit weird, right?
We can only ever be temporarily able-bodied, if we live long enough our bodies begin to fail - Mark Robbins
Why are we, as marketers, not doing anything to ensure that in a couple of years, or decades, we’ll be able to access and understand our own work?
Ok, you can stop thinking about that question now because it probably is going to boil down to our marketing team’s resourcing and capabilities. Although there are steps we can take to run emails through things like Parcel’s accessibility checker, it isn’t until ESP’s and MAP’s make it easy to fix those concerns that we’ll start to see rapid developments towards accessibility for all.
My main point for this point and learning is that when we spot things that aren’t easily fixable, we need to flag them to the tools themselves. We need to be the change we want to see.
Run your email through Parcel’s Accessibility Checker
Identify accessibility errors
Work with your ESP to make them easier to address
Repeat
Stop siloing email
Did we really spend time on this at an email conference? Kind of!
Gavin Laugenie, Head of Content at Dotdigital spoke on the overall customer experience that users have these days from various brands. From email to customer experience, to cross-channel, there are multiple things at play.
Should we be mindful of how these are all interacting? Absolutely! And similar to the above, we should be flagging things to our wider teams when we send an email to a page on our marketing site with a broken live chat, instead of turning a blind eye because it’s easier.
We should be looking at how we acquire email addresses, respecting their preferences, and letting audiences know what is next via clear CTA’s.
Delivering an exceptional customer experience shouldn’t be siloed to one area of the business (for us, it usually ends up being email).
TLDR;
Unspam was great. I didn’t once feel like I wanted a talk to end, or feel trapped talking to someone I didn’t want to be speaking with. I genuinely enjoyed each connection I made. I felt comfortable raising my hand and asking a question, and standing next to a speaker during a coffee break. Things weren’t untouchable or out of reach. A very refreshing way to step back into in-person events in a weird, weird, post (are we post?) COVID world. I’ll be back in October at their next event, and I can’t wait!
