Email Marketing
Best practice guide
The ROI index of email marketing is 70% higher than any other direct-response marketing vehicle. Are you benefiting from a well-executed email marketing strategy?
1) Sell it in a sentence
The subject line is probably the most important piece of copy in your entire email.
It has a major influence on whether recipients open and read emails. Keep it short and avoid using CAPS, exclamation marks or words like ‘free’.
It's important that your site gives them what they are looking for quickly and simply.
2) Make it worth opening
The content in the email should be readable, easy to digest, eye catching, relevant and most importantly – make it worth while.
Don’t send spam. Be respectful of people's time by giving them the incentive to read more up front. Ask yourself this: "Would I be pleased to receive this email?”
3) Make it well designed
Make the email visually appealing and prioritise the messaging by putting the important stuff up front. Be familiar with the limitations of different email clients and design an effective email accordingly.
4) Consider the preview pane
Many email clients have one. It's a window below or to the right of your inbox that shows you the top-leftmost portion of the email, preview style.
In many cases, this is the most a recipient will see of your email. This is your prime real estate. Use it wisely. Ensure that your call to action appears in the preview pane.
5) Every email client is different
Outlook, OSX Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, Claris Emailer, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, AOL, Hotmail, mail.com... the list keeps going, and the challenges keep growing.
To ensure that your email can be rendered and viewed correctly requires the knowledge of the limitations and nuances of all of these email clients.
6) Make your point clearly
Always remember the goal of the email. Provide a clear call-to-action and if you’re asking for information, then give them something for their time.
7) Take it back to the old skool
Fresh Prince, flannel shirts and 56kb connections. The tools of HTML email design are stuck in this same embarrassing period with 640 x 480 pixels and web-safe colours.
Forget about Javascript, Frames, Forms, CSS, FLASH, AJAX et al.
Keep the code simple and the design straight-forward. This will ensure your message is displayed consistently and make life easier for your recipients.
8) Flexible and future proof
Take into account areas that may be taller or wider in different environments. Make sure that the images are large enough or repeatable to accommodate all of the display possibilities.
Future emails may be longer than the current email you're designing, so taking vertical height into account in the beginning will save you from making modifications and retrofits later on.
And as a fail-safe mechanism, always include a link to a web hosted version of the email so that users have the option to view the email as a Web page.
9) Get permission first
Get the customer’s consent to contact them. This will ensure you comply with Data Protection legislation and will avoid annoying potential customers with unsolicited emails.
Collect email addresses from your customers at every opportunity and buy into a targeted, qualified distribution list.
10) Track, analyse and optimise
Tracking key statistics can give you a valuable snapshot of your email campaign results, Statistics such as: send/receive, open/read, click-through, bounce, unsubscribe, and send-to-a-friend rates help you catch trends and make recommendations for future online marketing communications.
