In-boxing clever: email marketing tips

Am I just a late convert, or has html email marketing finally reached mainstream respectability?

I suspect that the range of easy-to-use email marketing systems (and the resulting cost reductions), the rising awareness of best practices and the realisation that email communication campaigns can and should look good may have something to do with it. Not to mention powerful reporting tools that prove the value of good design and compelling content.

So for those newbies beginning to seek illumination into the dark arts of email marketing, I have compiled the following list of must-haves, must-dos and, at the-very-least, must-think-abouts:

Think skinny — emails should be much narrower than websites (think 600 pixels) to allow for email software that often gets set up with multiple panes. The last thing you want is for recipients to be scrolling horizontally as well as vertically.

Think about text — always send a text only version alongside a fully coded and designed version for people that can’t receive html emails. The text version may need to have different content, or different priorities. It certainly needs to be thought about how the text can have the most impact. Use hyphens, capitalisation, spacing and other characters that can give your text visual interest in a world without bold. Oh, and use carriage returns to make sure each line is under 64 characters long to avoid horizontal scrolling.

Think 90s coding — emails should be readable through lots of software packages: Hotmail, Outlook and MacMail all render emails differently as do different devices such as PCs, Blackberrys and iPhones. Therefore an email cannot be as technically sophisticated as an up to the minute website. Most structure is provided by tables for instance; background images are not supported and you can forget about Flash or Ajax.

Think three seconds — Just because someone has signed up to receive emails from you doesn’t mean they’ll open it. You’ve got three seconds in which to grab their attention with your subject line. It’s got to have impact and give them a reason to open them, so in my experience something that is quite long (say 60 characters) with a call to action or a clear benefit to the opener works best. That’s only half the battle though, once they have opened, you need to make sure they read and in many instances, click.

Content is king — It’s obvious, but make sure your email’s content is relevant, your message is concise and there are clear calls to action all within a beautifully designed package that mixes plenty of well laid-out text with high quality images. Design and content of marketing emails have a direct impact on their success.

Keep your mailing list up to date — send an email out to your list at least once a month. This cuts down on recipients marking your email as spam. But of course you shouldn’t keep bugging your list either, so you should build ‘list time’ into any ongoing activity to test the amount of activity that will be most acceptable to your users. If, for instance, you are publishing an email newsletter like, say moconews.net then maybe daily is fine, but if you are a brand that is essentially reminding your customers that you exist then maybe once a month is more appropriate.

Clarity will be rewarded — make it easy for people to leave your list by providing a simple unsubscribe process and remind them why they are on your list. Recipients who trust you will reward you by clicking more frequently.

Reflect your branding — you have spent a lot of money on your branding and your customers trust it, it makes sense to continue the branding in the look and feel of your emails too.

And finally, avoid image-only emails, they might look good, but your clickthrough rate will suffer!

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