There are certain things that you should always check before sending out an email campaign.
The following is from the transcript of a presentation put together by Tamara Gielen of BeRelevant that you can use as a kind of “pre-flight” checklist for your email marketing campaigns. It’s quite extensive and extremely useful.
The Objective
- Who is your target audience?
- What message are you trying to convey?
- Which action do you want the recipient to take?
- How will you measure success?
The List
- Are you sending the campaign to the correct list?
- Are you sending it only to the interested targets?
- Do you have permission to send emails to the people on your list?
read more…
Dylan Boyd of The Email Wars recently wrote an article for eROI.com outlining eleven email marketing campaigns that failed. You can read it here. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Here’s a quick summary of the eleven ways that these email marketing campaigns failed:
- Sending to an unsubscribed address.
- Sending an irrelevant email with no way to opt-out of future emails.
- Asking unsubscribers to opt-in to another unknown list.
- Swapping lists to send irrelevant emails.
- Designing an email with no copy.
- Too much design, not enough functionality.
- Attacking competitors in your emails.
- Sloppy personalization.
- Disguising a marketing message as a transactional message.
- Letting minor sections of an email take center stage.
- Hijacking other brands for your email message.
If your business is seasonal (ski resort, beach gear, etc) it may be tempting to stop sending your subscribers email in the off-season. Bronto Blog points out that this is not a great strategy.
Why?
Because it’s important to keep your email sending frequency consistent. You can dial it back a bit in the off-season, but you don’t want your readers to forget you exist.
Keeping up the relationship with your readers will make it more likely that they stick with you once your business is back in season.
Not surprisingly, there’s no one standard length that will work for everybody. Testing different lengths and/or surveying your subscribers can give you the information you need to decide on what’s right for you.
Cynthia Edwards at MediaPost’s Email Insider recently wrote an article giving basic guidelines to start with based on the type of newsletter you’re sending out.
Here’s a summary of her advice:
Magazine-style Newletters: Use short copy.
If your newsletter is primarily used as a portal to content on your website (examples given: Martha Stewart Living and The Baby Center), then it’s best to keep your copy short.
Utilitarian: Use a combination of different copy lengths.
If subscribers expect useful information inside the email itself (without clicking) then it’s best to include at least one longer article and then fill out the rest of the newsletter with links to external content accompanied by short teasers.
Hybrid Newsletters: Use medium-length copy.
For hybrid newsletters — which attempt to both inform readers and promote a product or service — you can include a large excerpt from an article and a link to finish reading on the site. That way there’s plenty of information in the email itself, but your promotional message isn’t lost.
Single-Topic Newsletter: Use long copy.
For single topic newsletters, you can include all the information readers want into the email itself. You don’t even have to provide a link to external content.
Cynthia goes more in-depth on each of these types of email newsletters in the full version of her article.
The folks at Campaign Monitor have released an update to their excellent guide to CSS support in email clients.
Each email client (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc) has its own level of support for CSS in email and it’s essential to know what works and what doesn’t when designing an email layout for your campaigns.
This most recent update by Campaign Monitor adds in information on mobile email clients, which are becoming a key market to consider. With the rise of smartphones, mobile email design is going to become increasingly important and should no longer be an afterthought in your email layout design process.
You can view the CSS guide here and they’ve also made it available for downloading in both PDF and Excel format.
Typos. They happen to everyone who runs an email marketing campaign at some point. You send out your carefully crafted message only to discover after the fact that you’ve accidently included spelling or grammar errors. Or maybe you threw in an extra word or two.
What is the best way to deal with it? Constant Contact has an article exploring this topic and they mention four ways to cope:
1) Go back and review the mistakes.
Are you sure they’re that serious? Will people even notice? Keep in mind that a typo or two isn’t the end of the world.
2) Hold a typo scavenger hunt contest.
If you made multiple mistakes you can count them up and turn it into a contest for your readers. See who can find them all and the first person to respond with all of them wins a prize.
3) Send an apology email.
Send an email to your subscribers that explains how the errors happened and what you’re going to do to prevent future errors from being included in the campaign.
4) Apologize and ask readers to send in their “big mistake” stories.
Similar to the scavenger hunt idea, you can turn your typos into a contest that reveals your readers stories about times when they made mistakes.
The Constant Contact article closes out with these thoughts:
“Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself that a typo is small issue and it’s better to move on without even acknowledging it. But an error in your email sets a precedent and starts to erode your customers’ trust in you. And additionally, your follow-up email showcases that you are human and reminds your readers that they are human as well. Remember, people buy from people they like and with whom they feel they have something in common.”
With all the different screen sizes and resolutions out there, it can be difficult to decide on the right width for your emails.
Luckily, Amy Hamilton at Smith-Harmon has done some research on this topic. She surveyed 47 popular retailers and asked for their standard email width.
The industry standard for email width of promotional emails was:
Between 600px and 650px.
The industry standard for email width of content-heavy emails (newsletters, etc.) was:
Between 650px and 700px.
A recent study by ReturnPath showed that 85% of email marketers in the United Kingdom were collecting personal data and then not using it.
Because the collection of personal data is a huge barrier to getting people to sign up for your email list it makes no sense to collect more data than is absolutely necessary. And if you do collect data, make sure you actually put it to use.
Statistic found via Denise Cox’s Blog.
Spam filters can be tricky to avoid, but if you follow email marketing best practices you’ll usually avoid being placed in the spam folder.
In their recent article on email marketing mistakes, the Email Experience Council highlighted nine things about your subject line that may trigger spam filters:
1) Percent of Capital Letters
Having too many capital letters compared to lowercase letters.
2) Repeating Capital Letters
Having too many capital letters in a row.
3) Gaps In Between Letters
Including words with gaps in between letters (ex. s*a*l*e).
read more…
The Email Experience Council has put together a list of nine common email marketing mistakes. Here’s a quick summary of what they came up with:
1) Sloppy Email Copy
Check your spelling, read over your copy before sending, and try to get a second set of eyes to review the email before it’s sent out.
2) Poor Email Coding
Avoid making users scroll horizontally, don’t use css in your html coding, and resist the urge to send email consisting of one giant image.
3) Inadequate Calls To Action
Keep your call to action in text format, include multiple instances of your call to action above the fold, and try to place your call to action in the topmost and leftmost parts of the email where people are most likely to see them.
read more…
