Hope you had a great week. Here’s what’s coming up in today’s issue:

• Stop making these 5 mobile email mistakes. Most emails are read on phones. But a lot of marketers still don’t optimize their emails for mobile. We walk you through what the mistakes are and how to fix them.
  
  

• Some things we’ve been thinking about. This week we’ve been digging into 2 marketing tactics that we think you’ll find interesting too: One-click webinar registration and descending pricing pages.

Let’s jump right in…

📩 Stop making these 5 mobile email mistakes

How are you reading this email right now? More than half of you answered, "on my phone."

Over 61.9% of emails are opened on mobile devices. But most marketers never think about what their email looks like on a phone.

Here are 5 mobile email mistakes that we see all the time. Fix these and you'll get more opens, clicks, and responses.

1) Long subject lines

1-4 word subject lines are the sweet spot. Phone screens are small. There’s not a lot of real estate. Long or complex subject lines get cut off and are more difficult to read.

Instead, use a few simple words that get your point across. Don’t use flowery or salesy language.

Think about emails you send to your internal team and the subject lines you use. Try to match that style for external emails too. 

2) Skipping the pre-header text

People scan emails before reading them. Especially on mobile.

Write attention-catching preview text. Don’t let it default to something like “view this email in your browser.”

3) Complex sentences and paragraphs

Remember that your audience is reading on a small screen. Don’t write complex sentences or really long paragraphs. Big blocks of text fatigue the eyes and are a friction point for your readers.

Instead, write short and straightforward sentences and use line breaks frequently.

4) Forgetting about dark mode

Many mobile devices are set to dark mode. Make sure you account for this when creating your emails. Choose colors and images that will look good on a light or dark background.

Some mobile devices won’t render images at all. Double-check that even if all images were removed, your message still makes sense.

5) Not using white space

Don’t try to cram too much into a small space. Line breaks are your friend.

Make sure there is ample spacing between elements in the email. Especially CTAs. Buttons and links must be easy to tap without accidentally tapping other elements around them.

📰 In the news this week

🤖 GPT-4 has arrived. It will blow ChatGPT out of the water.

📧  Why is nobody reading your marketing emails?

💬  Every advertiser should perform these keyword maintenance tasks regularly.

✂️  Meta cuts an additional 10,000 jobs from the global workforce.

👩‍🚀  Newly unveiled Artemis moon suit is a giant leap for NASA.

🤔 Some things we’ve been thinking about

#1 — One-click webinar registrations

Someone on our team got a cold email this week. It was mostly a generic webinar recruitment email, but there was one thing that made it stand out. It included this link:

We were super intrigued. It was the first time we’d ever seen a one-click webinar registration link.

So we clicked it. Lo and behold we got sent to a confirmation page. Then a minute later we got a confirmation email with the calendar invite and webinar link.

New tactics like this really put us in full ‘Marketing Nerd Mode.’

It kicked up a pretty lively debate on the team about whether one-click webinar registration like this is a good or bad idea.

Here are the pros and cons we came up with.

Pros

1)One-click registration is as low friction as it gets. The traditional webinar registration flow is:

open email > click link > read landing page > complete form fill > now you’re registered.

This flow was:

open email > click link > now you're registered.

It essentially cuts the flow in half. This is good because the more steps in a flow, the more drop-off points there are. The more drop-offs, the lower the conversion rate.

2) Registering for a webinar is an opt-in to receive future marketing messages. Even if they don’t attend the webinar or watch the recording, your marketing team will get more at-bats with them later.

3) It saves time. The marketing team didn’t have to spend time and energy coming up with an excellent webinar landing page. Instead, they could focus all their resources on writing a great email that would drive conversions to the one-click registration link.

Cons

1) People could have a negative reaction to being auto-registered. If they click the link without reading it closely, they might be surprised to find themself on a registration confirmation page.

2) Many people who register for webinars don’t actually end up attending. This tactic might result in a very high registration rate, but a low attendance rate.

Our conclusion: It’s worth testing

Yes, there are some cons to a one-click webinar registration strategy, but there are enough pros, that it's worth experimenting with.

Webinars are a great tactic to nurture leads. The more leads you can get exposed to the webinar and its recording, the better. Maximizing registrations through a low-friction process is a smart marketing play.

It’s true that people could have a negative reaction. So you’d want to test for this. Start by segmenting your webinar target list and only sending the one-click registration email to a small subsection. If there’s no negative feedback, send it to a larger subsection the next time and the next time. Pretty quickly you’ll know if your audience has an issue with the strategy.

If there are no issues, you could do a full rollout.

And yes, not everyone who registers will end up attending the webinar. But this is always the case. Great marketers know that the real power of a webinar come from all the ways you can use the recorded content afterward. Not just from the live event itself.

The more registrations you get, the more recordings you can send out.

#2 — Descending pricing pages

An interesting trend we’re seeing on company websites is descending pricing pages. This is where the highest price is on the left and the lowest price is on the right.

This is the opposite of what you usually see. So why are some companies making the switch?

Because we anchor on the first number we see. It’s called the anchoring effect.

On a descending pricing page, visitors see the most expensive option first. Thanks to the anchoring effect, this means the other prices feel much cheaper.

AKA $999/month feels cheaper if you see $3,999/month first. Perhaps convincing more people to purchase.

Could this work for your business? We can’t say for certain, but it’s at least worth an A/B test.

😂 Marketing meme of the week

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