I was thinking the other day as I was on the hunt for a new laptop about how long an email campaigns life cycle would be and how it differs between industries.

So let’s take the laptop as an example.  I’m going to want a laptop once every three or four years, depending on the quality.  I would assume that the majority of people would have a similar habit to me on this.

During this time, I want to receive as much information and offers about laptops as I can possibly get so that I can make a well informed decision for the best price I can find.

I would be happy to see a more frequent email campaign coming from any of the laptop companies that I have signed up for; and any computer specialist retailers should really be sending a higher frequency of emails.

You see, as soon as I buy my laptop, I’m not going to be slightly interested in what they have to say anymore, and will unsubscribe from them.  They really only have a very short time frame in which to grab a large majority of their recipients attention, and more importantly, convert them to sales.

At the other end of the spectrum though, are companies that really don’t need to send that many emails at all.  I help a friend with his email campaigns for a valve company.  Now as I’m sure you can guess, the world of valve sales isn’t the fastest paced and intense of marketplaces and he only really does a bi-annual email with latest developments.

When you look at his customers and recipients, they still tend to have a quite high brand loyalty and therefore will not need reminding of his companies presence but can just try to maybe persuade potential customers with new developments.

Again a general rule is to keep the emails more regular than that to ensure that the potential customers’ interest is sustained, but I think that anything more than a bi-annual campaign would be more damaging to a customer’s interest and may cause the subscriber to switch off from the newsletter as the messages get watered down with irrelevant content.

So I think that the frequency of your campaigns isn’t as important as how well received it will be.  Make sure that the campaign you send out isn’t just for the sake of sending an email out but is full of relevant, intriguing information that will maintain your recipient’s interest.

If that means that you must decrease or increase your email activity, don’t be scared off by rules telling you otherwise.

The Absolute Beginning

The width of your email should be at a maximum 650px wide.  This is so the subscriber doesn’t have to scroll left and right to view the emails message.

Also, another basic one which should never be forgotten.  Try to keep all colours and fonts used in the email websafe.  You may have a fantastic and weird font that suits your companies image, but that doesn’t mean the rest of your subscribers do. 

Keep it websafe otherwise your text will revert to the default font for them and you don’t want that happening.

Try and keep your coding as clean and as minimal as possible.  Don’t start putting tables in tables in tables (you get the idea)… You’re just asking for rendering issues!

Text to Image Ratio

Basic: A while back now email clients started to reject image rich emails as spammers were managing to avoid the spam word filters by just creating large images with their message in it.

As a basic rule, I usually suggest to clients that they have a 70% text to 30% image ratio in their emails to ensure that deliverability is kept to a high level.  Though this may raise a designing problem, it’s something that any legitimate company should undertake to ensure that the recipients actually get the chance to read your message. 

Advanced: There are of course ways to get around these problems; whitelisting and accreditation.  Whitelisting is the cheapest solution to you and essentially requires your recipients to mark you as a safe sender in their inboxes.  This way, it allows you to send whichever message you like to your subscribers and they will always receive them in their inboxes. 

The only problem with the whitelisting technique is actually getting them to do this for your company and so, isn’t a viable option if you want image rich emails and a guarantee of inbox deliverability.

A way which does guarantee the delivery into an inbox is the accreditation method.  This though, is a vastly more expensive method and usually is more viable for a medium to large company.  The major accreditation companies are as follows:

Habeas - http://www.habeas.com/Services/For-Senders/SafeList/

Sender Score Certified - http://www.returnpath.net/senderscore/

Goodmail - http://www.goodmailsystems.com/

Surety Mail - http://www.isipp.com/suretymail.php

Certified Senders Alliance - http://www.certified-senders.eu/index_en.htm

Advanced Tip: Avoid 1px x 1px Spacer Gifs

Spacer Gifs have been used to force widths into tables in your email and you should try and avoid this – many clients mark these as spam.

Background Images

Basic: This is generally a no-no in todays email marketing world.  A lot of you I’m sure, are wondering why I’m even mentioning this anymore but you’d be surprised by how many people still don’t know this.

A few of the email clients won’t show background images anymore which basically means that your email will look awful in about 30% of your recipients inboxes – a risk that isn’t worth taking.

Advanced: Okay, so you may still like to use background images as they can really improve the look of your template greatly.  The best way I’ve found around this is to make a standard template that will look nice without the background images and then start to insert the background images after the basic template is created. 

This way, you can feel safe that the 30% of recipients that won’t see the background images will still have a professional looking email message whilst the others will see an enhanced message.   

Tip: Background Colours

Those pesky email clients may also remove your background colours as well.  Best thing to do is put a 100% width table behind all of it and insert your background colour into that.  Then place your newsletter within that table.

Advanced: CSS in Email Design

Quite a lot of the major email clients will block any css created within the <head> tags in the html code and will not render them in the email.  This, can cause server issues with how your email looks and will leave the fonts defaulting back to its original state; usually black font, Times New Roman.

To avoid this, always use css as an inline tag instead if you are to use css at all.  That way you can keep your css to below the <body> tags.  Learn more about css inline tags here or just don’t use it at all and stick to the good old fashioned html font designing.

Basic Tip: Don’t Copy and Paste content from Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word tends to add extra code into the HTML code which can cause rendering issues in your email.  This is also the case for creating whole HTML files in Word and then using them for an email campaign. 

If you think you may have inadvertently done this for a campaign, use this link to try and remove the extra code.

Advanced Tip: Make sure the email is HTML Valid

A great way to ensure that you don’t have any rendering issues is to ensure that your email is html valid.  You can check that here.

Design for an imageless preview

Most email clients don’t show your images as default.  This is due to a point I previously mentioned about spammers using images to get their messages across or sending offensive material through to you. 

The email clients decided that by initially blocking the images from being shown, they could let the subscriber decide whether or not they knew who the email was from and whether they wanted to view the images.

A clever email marketer will bare this in mind when they’re creating their campaign and will ensure that they can either get the message across or entice them to open the whole of the email.

This is another reason to adopt the text to image ratio I mentioned earlier.

Tip: Using Alt tags on images can help to deliver an extra message to people who have images turned off as default.

Remember the Preview Pane

Many of your recipients will view the email initially through their preview pane.  As a designer, your job should be to try and get your message across to them in that short section of the email so as to entice them in further.

Tip: Try and include the main point of the email in this top bit to try and entice them to explore your email.

And there you have it. Keep to these guidelines and tips and you should be creating great-looking, effective emails. I hope this has helped you out and if I’ve missed any, please leave a comment to let everyone know.

1.  Planning

Putting in the effort pre-campaign can be the dividing line between a successful and an ineffective campaign.

Make sure you have meticulously planned out all aspects of what you want from your campaign as you will save yourself a lot of work and frustration in the long run.  Just consider how much extra work it will be if a couple of months down the line you decide you need to segment your list but have a detailed autoresponse campaign set up.

2. Be Objective 

Make sure that when you’re planning your campaign that you know exactly what you want from it.  By always baring this in mind you can always revert back to it when decisions have to be made.

Is your campaign to get sales? Drive people to your website? Keep your branding in their mind?  Make sure you know this before any more decisions are made as this is will shape your forthcoming campaign.

3. Keep to Your Word

Subscribers signed up to your emails as you promised them something; make sure you keep to that.

No-one appreciates the informative newsletter they signed up for suddenly turning into a pure sales email.  This is a guaranteed way to lose your recipients trust and their interest.

4. Be consistent

Very much like the previous point, your recipients will have signed up knowing that they will receive a certain level of communication from you.  By changing the volume of messages either way can harm your messages impact.

If you start bombarding them massive amounts of emails during a certain period, they will become tired and annoyed of you and you run the risk of them unsubscribing.

If you hold off from sending to them for a few months and then start again, you run the risk of them forgetting who you are and once again, unsubscribing.

5. Subject Lines

This is the first point of contact with the recipient and is often an overlooked area.  It doesn’t matter how much effort you have made putting together an amazing looking email with a truly fantastic offer if your recipient isn’t even enticed to open the email.

Subject lines shouldn’t be too long (approx 50 characters max) so that the recipient can read the whole message.  The subject line should describe what’s inside whilst making an effort to encouraging the recipient to open the email.

6. Design

Once the recipient has opened the email, you have to make a good impression.  People will usually make a judgement before reading the bulk of the content so your email must look professional.

Things to consider when creating your template:

Professional Appearance

Clear Call to Action

Branding To Website

Balance between image and text (approx 70% text 30% image)

7. Timing is everything

Make sure your email is sent at an appropriate time.  If it is sent at the wrong time, it will fall upon deaf ears. 

Email is one of those fantastic communications which when sent at the right time can be a marketing message that is lasting, can be referred too and is without other communications getting in the way.

Sent at the wrong time though and it is just an annoyance to the recipient.

Want to know the best time to send?  See point 10.

8. Unsubscribing doesn’t have to be the end

In the past, just letting a subscriber unsubscribe was the end for them.  The thing is, they may have only unsubscribed because they didn’t like a certain aspect of your communications.

The modern practice now is to give them options before they finally say goodbye to your emails.  It could be that they don’t like the frequency of your emails or that they only want to know about upcoming sales.  Either way, let them have the option to choose what they receive so that you can send them what they want to receive.

9. Understand the Results

The results of your campaign can tell you everything about its success.  Different results can tell you a bigger story of where your shortcomings or moments on marketing brilliance have come from.  Here’s a basic rule to follow:

• Open Rates – this will tell you either how deliverable your email was (inbox or junk folder).  This can also show you whether your subject line was effective in pushing for the open.
• Click Through Rate – This will represent the design of the email.  It will show whether the call to action was prominent enough or if your content was interesting to your recipients.
• Bounce Rate – Use this in conjunction with the open stats.  If your open rate is low and bounce rate high, you probably have a deliverability issue.

10. Test Test Test

There is no set rule to success.  Every companies mailing list is different and you must constantly test to see what different factors make your recipients react.  Subject line, design, call to action and timing can all be fine tuned by split testing your mailing list.

This is going to keep carrying on throughout your campaigns life.  No campaign will ever be the perfect campaign.  There will always be room for improvement, and your mailing list will change in habits as time goes on so always re-assess every aspect of your campaign.

Please add your own golden rules below to this list…I’d love to see a definitive list!

People make quick judgements, whether you like to think you’re open minded or not, you will still make an initial judgement on something/someone new within the first few seconds of seeing it/them.

Bearing this in mind, you should really look at the impact of your email when someone first opens it. A judgement will be made almost instantaneously when the email is first opened.

You need to firstly make sure that the campaign looks professional. The best thing to do is look through your inbox and find an email you like, then set that as the benchmark for your campaigns standard. The worst thing you can possibly do is construct an email that ultimately looks no better than the junk that you receive. If your camapaign lacks that air of professionalism about it, it will ultimately fail.

Secondly, the branding of the email can have an influential effect on the success of your campaign. There is still apprehension on trusting online services and if you have a different branded email to your website, a recipient can be (and rightly so) untrusting of the email authenticity. Always use your own website as a base of what your campaign should be constructed around. I’m not saying copy your website, but make sure that the campaign has a familiarity about it.

A lot of people will also scan read something and not pay full attention to it. What your email design needs to do is ensure that the things they do scan over are what you want them to pay attention to the most. If there is an offer on, or you want someone to take note of a certain area of interest in the email, make sure it is prominent to a scan reader. The best thing to do is to place your main points at the top of the page, and then go into further details further down the page.

This also works well for my next point; the preview pane. This should also be thought about as you should be trying to ensure that your email fits neatly within this preview pane. There are obviously different sized preview panes, depending on the email client but a general rule is no longer than 650px wide. This should allow the whole width of the email to be viewed in the pane, meaning you can get your whole message across to them before they open. Further to this point, I tend to find myself not bother with emails when they come into my outlook and I can’t view the full width of the campaign in my preview pane.

Though most design is down to personal taste, if you follow these rules, then you will at least have a good solid foundation to work from.

As more and more companies turn to email marketing, it’s probably best to return back to the main factors in email marketing that need to be considered for a successful campaign.

So many companies come into email marketing hoping for a quick fix that will boost their sales and then very quickly stop the email campaign as they put no real thought into their emails. 

Whats the Objective of Your Campaign?

Probably the best thing to start off with is assessing what your overall plan is with this campaign.  Are you looking to increase sales? Build your brand up? Keep users in touch with latest happenings?

Once decided, you will be able to make better decisions for your campaign.  For instance, if your main goal is to increase sales, probably best to keep the latest developments in your company to a minimum and focus on the main goal.

Design and Layout

This can make the difference from someone opening your campaign, to clicking through to your website and making a purchase.  The first thing a recipient will see is the design of the email as they open it and as we all know, we make quick judgements.  If you send a poorly designed email that looks quite amateurish, then your recipients will see this as that. 

Remember that it is quite likely that these recipients get quite a few promotional emails, some from well-respected companies with good quality emails and yours must be comparable to them for your campaign to work.

The layout of your campaign can also determine how successful your campaign is.  You must make sure that if there is something you particularly want them to click on, that it is clear and obvious for them to click on.  This is otherwise known as the call to action.

Call to Action

Making your call to action prominent in the email is something that shouldn’t be an afterthought in your designing process.  This small part of the design process is also a major factor in your conversion rate, so put a lot of thought into how you want it to look and be placed.  You can try different methods, wording, graphics to get the most out of it.

Subject Line

Obviously this design thought will all be pointless if no-one is opening the email in the first place.  The subject line should be encouraging opens whilst at the same time summarising what is in the email itself.  Try and remember not to make it too long as you want your message to get across to your recipients without it truncating.  Try experimenting with your subject lines to see what factors change open rates.

Experimenting

There really is no definitive formula to making your campaign a success as every industry and recipient is different.  Though you can get the best practices in place, this may not necessarily mean you get instantly high responses.  The best thing to do is experiment with all aspects of your campaign and see which works best.  One of the most common methods is A/B split testing.  This way you can view for yourself which factors are working and which aren’t.  By experimenting for yourself, you’ll be guaranteed a happy and prosperous future in email marketing.

After a recent dispute with someone I started to think about the different factors you need to consider when sending to business addresses.

With webmail addresses it basically comes down to authentication and reputation; with business addresses it’s a completely different game.

You basically have to make a decision. You either:

Accept that some of your emails are going to bounce and not go over the top on compromising on your design and tracking capabilities.

Or

Concentrate your campaign on deliverability and strip out as much as you can. Remove tracking and send a text email.

Okay, so it’s not as black and white as that but you get the idea. And before you ask, there really is no right and wrong answer. I’ve seen customers of ours have success with both methods so it really does depend on what the content is and what you’re trying to achieve from your campaign.

You’ve also got to look at which stage of your email marketing campaigns life you’re in. Are you starting up and generally just looking for exposure? Do you need to gage the success of your campaign to see where you can improve? Is it more the case that you have an amazing offer on at present that you want everyone to see? Is it your companies newsletter that is just updating people on recent events? Are you concerned about really putting your companies branding across?

These questions really have to be brought up at the beginning of your campaign planning so that you have a clear idea of what your goals are.

Unfortunately there is no general rule for business address as each organisation has different rules for what can and can’t get through the filter so don’t be shy to test the water.

This article will have links to previous posts I have created throughout it that go into further depth about certain subjects.  I hope this helps!

1. Your open rate is low

Okay, so your campaign is stumbling at the first hurdle.  You need to ask yourself the following questions:

How was my recipient list created? 
If the answer to that question was “it was bought” then you can’t be expecting miracles.  If you’re receiving opens of around 10 – 15% I wouldn’t be that surprised.  If your list was self built, I’d expect your open rate to be between 15 – 30% as a minimum. 

Is your email subject enticing them in?
It’s all well and good having amazing offers and content in the email, but not letting the world know about it in the subject line is a cardinal sin.  The subject line needs to be a very short summary of what they can expect inside.  Scrap the “March 2008 issue #1” and go for “15% off of selected items with this email” or “deliverability articles and tips”.  That way you can entice people who are interested in the content in. 

If you are doing this but are still receiving low opens you have to ask yourself “am I putting in subject lines that might be specialised to only a group of my recipients?”  By no means is this a bad thing. In fact, it could improve your eventual sales as you’re targeting areas of your list.  Just because you’re getting an open rate of 15% doesn’t mean that the same people are opening your emails; you may have an active readership of 30% but your emails don’t appeal to all of them.  Just remember not to stick to one area though or the other subscribers will switch off.  The best thing to do would be to segment your list into several lists and then send targeted emails to each of them.

Are you receiving a high level of bounced emails?
This could be a deliverability issue.  Firstly, is there a large amount coming from a certain server?  If so, you could have been blacklisted by them.  You will need to contact the postmaster there and sort out the issue with them before sending again.  To prevent this from ever happening though, make sure you have a decent list hygiene routine in place.

If your list is predominantly business addresses opposed to webmail addresses, the likelihood is it is your content that is causing the blocking.  The problem with business addresses  is that there is no standardised reason for getting blocked by them, some filters block tracking links within the email, some block it because of words within the email and some just don’t get along with html altogether.  It really will be a case of trial and error.  Be prepared to compromise on your design and content though.  You may have to lose your tracking facilities to increase the success of your campaign.
 

2.  My link click-through rate is poor

Your open rate seems fine but your click-through isn’t.  The good news is your list are at least still listening to your message but for how long we don’t know.  This can be attributed to the content of your email.

Content
You need to be clear and to the point.  Don’t go over the top with content or you risk losing the recipients attention.  IT could be that the recipient just isn’t interested in what you’re writing about.  In which case you need to look at what you have previously promised, or done.  That subscriber may have initially signed up as you promised to give away special offers exclusively to your email subscribers.  Now though, you’re just updating them on developments about your company and informing them of new lines of clothing….but where’s the offer? 

Design
Maybe you’re keeping to your promise of content but you’re still not getting those click-throughs you desperately want.  Well the finger can be firmly pointed towards your design and layout.  Is your offer tucked away near the bottom of the email?  Is it bold and stand out enough?  You need to make sure that your recipients eyes are directed to wherever your “call to actions” are.  Do this and you will see those click-throughs rocket.   It could though, be that your email just doesn’t look that nice.  People make judgements within the first few seconds of looking at an email and if they don’t like the look of it, they will not even bother with the content (which is also another reason for having your call to action in an eye catching place).

3. My Conversion Rate is Poor

This is probably the most important indicator of your campaign.  If you have so far followed the advice on this article (and the rest of my blog) you should be seeing a good level of conversions now.  If that is still not the case then there could still be a couple of issues that need resolving. 

Firstly, are you directing your recipients to the exact page they wanted to go to.  If they wanted to see the offers on some of your products don’t go and send them to your index page.  Having to look for the product they want will turn them off of the idea. 

Secondly, make sure that your campaign matches your websites branding.  There is a lot of spam on the internet (you may have noticed) that is still hindering people’s confidence in e-business.  It is your job to minimise this, and the best way to do so is by having a consistent branding throughout your communications with the public.

Well, that should have your campaign back in working order now.  If you’re still having problems, email me with your problem and I’ll try and give you a hand.

It wasn’t too long ago that social networks didn’t exist.  You actually had to speak to one another, in person.  The quickest, cheapest (and well, best) way of keeping in touch with people who had moved away was via the old and trusted method of email.  No longer is this the case.  People don’t want to speak to one person anymore; they want the whole world to know that they’re staying in and having Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner tonight.

Tonight’s dinner aside, this is something which needs to be paid attention too.  I have read blogs recently from people who are saying that they are turning back to email in protest to social networking and stating that email is still king.  These people also happen to be in the email marketing field.  Unfortunately, the world of email marketing can’t exist just because there are stubborn email marketers out there who are refusing to change over.  Email marketing will still work with the younger generations; we just have to remember that the concentration on their inbox is probably going to be considerably lower than the older generations of email users.

I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where I a) have brothers and sisters who are full social network addicts; and b) Am at an age where I once used email and converted to social networking, so have knowledge of my own changing attitude towards email.

So when are the younger generation going to use their email inboxes?  I read somewhere that 91% of internet users still read and send emails.  I find this quite a crude generalisation in favour of the effectiveness of email.  Don’t get me wrong though, I do believe email does still work effectively.  What has to be considered is the age generations that read email, read them with different drives.

Okay, so that really isn’t a revelation.  Marketing 101 would tell you that different age generations have different motivators. This though, is about a generation actually changing their motivation from the pre-defined one.  Social Networking has basically drawn the attention away from the inbox and towards them in terms of personal communication.  Though I haven’t read any data to back up this claim, this must mean that the time actually spent looking at their inbox has drastically reduced.

So it comes down to how exactly to grab their attention in that shorter time frame you have.  From personal experience, I don’t really bother with any of the newsletters.  If I’m going to open an email it’s because it says something like 75% off - end of season sale.  I basically don’t want lots of content; I want deals and plenty of them.  I also pay absolutely no attention to emails that have come from 3rd party sources so being on an email list is pretty pointless with me.

Now I know I’m only using a very small group of people as my test subjects (me, my family and close friends) but there was a general consensus that this was the case with the rest of them as well.

What’s even worse is that the emails I do actually bother to open are what I advise our customers not to do in terms of design.  They are just one giant image with clickable links in the image itself.  This has led me to think that content filtering will become even less important in the future of email deliverability and that emphasis will be further placed upon whitelisting and sender reputation.

Why not also consider when these recipients are most likely to concentrate harder on their online email accounts.  Working hours are probably the best time to send your email marketing campaigns.  As most work places have blocked facebook and myspace, the concentration will have shifted towards email during working hours (providing that email hasn’t also been blocked), especially seeing that you can actually view facebook posts from your email account now.

So the future for email marketing will pretty much stay the same in all honesty.  A few things will have to change.  I can see the lure of buying or renting lists diminishing in some areas of the business world as the effectiveness of them decreases.  I can also see us stepping back a bit in terms of content and design.  I think people have already, and will continue to care less about the content and how they word their emails and focus more on the sending reputation they carry.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve said.  Whether you agree or disagree, it’d be great to let me know what you think.