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EFFECTIVE EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Email marketing is any advertising, or communication to support commerce through email. This includes advertising, newsletters, follow up emails and more, communicating with your customers and potential customers.

Emails come in two forms – html (colours, images and fancy layouts) and plaintext (bog standard text). Html unsurprisingly gets a better response, with more opens and clicks. However, Blackberries and those on low bandwidth may prefer plaintext, so you should try not to forget it.

Have a look in your email inbox and see what sorts of communication and broadcasts you have received from companies you buy from. What do you find useful, annoying, and what do you delete on receipt, and why?

How do I start email marketing?

  • Plan. You need to know the purpose of your email, and what you are setting out to do. Your email will have two seconds, if that, to entice someone to read it, rather than disregard it. Consider your own email habits again – do you open in the preview pane of Outlook and then never return?

  • Roughly, the emails will fall into four types (according to Kaushik):

    1. 1. Acquisition (to find new customers)
    2. 2. Increased sell-through (to existing customers to buy more)
    3. 3. Retention (keep existing customers – special offers)
    4. 4. Standard (autoresponse, order status)

For the purpose of this article, we'll focus more on types 1-3, though the good practise should be carried through to type 4.

Imagine your email is an enticing magazine advert, a medium you may be more familiar with through existing company marketing. However, don’t forget that some of your recipients might only be able to view text only emails (this may include Blackberry users), so ensure that your message still is comprehensive without the clever imagery.

Got the Plan, Now What?

  • You need your creative, the images, text and layout of the email you are going to send. Email programs do not conform to a common display standard, even more than Internet browsers, so the coding may feel like a step back into the past for some designers. You may find it most useful to test in Internet Explorer, which mimics Outlook which controls the largest market share of recipients.

  • Email Viewer Market Share June 2009:

    1. 1. Outlook (2000, 2005, Express) – 32.08%
    2. 2. Yahoo – 15.65%
    3. 3. Hotmail – 15.35%
    4. 4. Outlook (2007) – 7.55%
    5. 5. Apple Mail 3 – 6.36%
    6. 6. Gmail – 5.51%

Unfortunately each have their own quirks and elements of styling that they do or do not support, but following these helpful tips may help you avert most of the problems:

    • • Keep your creative between 600 and 700 pixels wide. This tends to fit nicely in preview panels and viewing panes on most browsers.
    • • Ensure the top 300-400px of your email are eye catching. It is recommended that you try to include a call to action in this area, as it most visible in the preview pane, and will be the first thing the recipient sees.
    • • Assume your images will be blocked. Outlook and Yahoo block images automatically until the recipient clicks to unblock them. Yes, some may have unblocked them, but it is wise to assume a far higher proportion may not even know how to unblock them. Link to an online version prominently at the top of your email creative, provide alt tags and specify height and width of all your images so that your layout shape is preserved if images don’t load.
    • • Use clear calls to action and links. Make it quick to spot where to click for more information or to find your special offer. Recipients won’t spend time hunting for them.
    • • Use tables with inline styling. It may feel like a step back, but your email layout will be far more reliably presented across more providers if you use a table. Inline styling is to get past some providers who strip header styling, and override inherited styling.
    • • Content lists. Longer newsletters might consider a content list to provide a quick summary of the email content.
    • • Unsubscribe instructions or link. You have to include these, and ensure that it is easy to unsubscribe.

The Subject Line

Avoid common spam words or phrases. Would you send your email to junk based on its subject line? There are a few spam line checkers and spam checkers about that you can run your creative and subject line through. Aim to keep your subject line short, snappy and inviting. Intrigue your recipient.

Who Can I Send to?

  • You must ensure you have permission to send your email marketing to everyone on your database, and ensure that the email is relevant to the purpose the recipients signed up for – don’t send an email about motor oil to a list of beauticians for instance.

  • Then, there’s the legal issue – the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. You must ensure you meet the rules set out in the regulation, as a complaint made about your email to the Information Commissioner may occur if you are unlucky. Always ensure your unsubscribe process works.

Its also a nice touch – if you can – to personalise your emails with a name greeting.

Ready to Send?

Test your email, test it again, proof read your text. Does it get caught in the spam filter, did your colleague delete it without reading it? Its better to do this than send and find 70% of your recipients did not even get to read it, as their spam filter rejected it.

The best time to send your campaign is mid morning, after the spam is cleared, so your recipient can read it over lunch, or between 2-3pm in the afternoon, where open and click through rates are ever so slightly lower. Tuesday and Wednesday are the best two days to broadcast. Do not send overnight or early morning, you will most likely end up in the spam.

Talk to us about your email marketing campaign. We can create your template, help you write killer copy, and broadcast your email with our MyHarmony system.