‘Design’ Articles

Email marketing is not an easy form of marketing. It requires a unique knowledge set and a gread deal of hard work in order to achieve success.

The most common method of creating a marketing email today is to have a designer, who is familiar with HTML, create an email from scratch. Designers with a large HTML skill set and vast knowledge of the email marketing world can create beautiful and functional designs. Of course, this method can be costly and difficult for small companies or for those who just want to test the waters of email marketing. That’s why at Admail.net we provide our customers with several ways to create their email.

If you would like to have a designer create your email using HTML, that is still possible. We allow for the direct input of HTML code into our system. Beware however, HTML for email is not the same as HTML for the web. HTML for email is limited in many ways by the email clients that receive it. You’ll want to be intimately aware of the differences between HTML in a browser and HTML in email. Email clients simply aren’t designed to be as efficient and up-to-date translators of HTML as browsers are. Knowing the limitations, along with testing of your email before sending it out, is crucial.

For our many clients who aren’t going to be using HTML code to create their emails, we have created our Email Builder 2.0 system. It is designed to give our users most of the benefits of creating an email using HTML without the drawback of having to learn the complicated language. Once an email is created in Email Builder, it is also much easier to edit and can be updated, for the most part, by anyone with basic word processor experience. As with anything, there are always trade offs. No HTML editor is 100% perfect and in some instances you won’t be able to do as many complicated things as you could if you wrote HTML from scratch.

Being aware of the limitations of email marketing is a necessity. If you ever have any questions about your campaigns, please call us and we will be happy to guide you. In our 15+ years we’ve seen and dealt with pretty much everything under the sun. We’re here to help you get the most out of your email marketing.

Social media has become an integral part of online marketing strategy. It’s a fantastic way to connect with your customers through the circles that they travel rather than through traditional advertising forums.

Social media marketing is a perfect companion to email marketing. They can each promote one another to increase the effectiveness of all of your marketing strategies.

Email is an effective way to promote your social media endeavors. You can provide links to your social media locations in mailings that you send out. This will inform your list that you are active in the social media community and drive traffic to these sites. The same principle works in reverse, you can use social media to collect email addresses for your mailing list. Social Media provides you with many opportunities to get to know and interact with your possible clients and industry peers.

The most important goal of any email marketing or social media campaign is to connect with your audience. Before you start either, you should sit down with your company heads and decide on a strategy. Discover who your clients are, what the want, and craft a social media story. If you attempt to spread yourself too thin, you won’t connect with anyone. Find out what your niche is and then promote it!

The smartphone industry is absolutely booming. An increasingly large number of consumers and business owners are using these devices every day.  One of the most useful features of smartphones is their ability to check email on the go. Recent marketing surveys indicate that around 60% of business decisions makers are checking email on their mobile devices.

If you want to reach your customers on their mobile devices, you need to consider your email design philosophy. Most traditional email doesn’t translate very well to mobile, because of this email marketers must adopt some new design philosophies. We’ve just released two of our templates that have been optimized for mobile devices. We will be creating more of these templates for our users as time goes on and demand increases. Using our “optimized for mobile” templates in Email Builder makes it easy for you to send email that is readable and visually appealing for mobile users.

Our templates will take you 90% of the way in the quest of making your campaigns smartphone friendly, but there are also guidelines you’ll need to follow when laying out your content. Here are the most important guidelines to follow to ensure that your Admail.net template stays mobile friendly:

1. Keep your font sizes small. Mobile devices have small screens and fonts over 12 point take up far too much space.
2. Image file sizes should be very small (if used at all) and should be no larger than 300 pixels wide.
3. Don’t pack together clickable links. Most smartphones today use touch screen technology and if links are too close to one another they can be difficult to differentiate when selecting.

Using our mobile templates and following these guidelines will optimize your email for smartphone users. Follow these rules and avoid alienating your mobile email users!

A good newsletter is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your clients. If used correctly, your newsletter can entice customers to come into your store, provide them with valuable information, let them know about a special offer that appeals to them, or just keep your company’s name on the tip of their tongue.

It’s difficult to consistently send out a good newsletter. You want is to promote your own business, but you’re also try to do so while providing valuable and intrusive content. The best kind of advertisement doesn’t seem like an advertisement at all. Achieving this is no simple task.

1. Don’t over do it, don’t force it.

Send your newsletter only as often as you can produce interesting content. Nowhere is it written that you must send a newsletter weekly or monthly. Be self aware enough to realize when you have nothing to say. You’ll start to see recipients unsubscribe left and right if your newsletter becomes boring. It’s a real struggle to regain interest once someone on your list decides your email is boring or unhelpful.

2: Target specific consumer groups.

Create multiple versions of your newsletter based on customer interests. You can gather this information by giving people the ability to designate their own interests on your sign up form. Not only will you be able to use this data to target groups in your newsletter, but it can serve as a small sample of your overall customers interests. Sending multiple newsletters is more work because you may need to produce content for several different newsletters but the result is well worth it.

3: Don’t try to trick your users into signing up for your Newsletter.

Many websites will have the default action of signing up as a user of their site or using their checkout form result in the user signing up for their mailing list unless they opt-out by removing a check from a selection box. This is a common practice that you should avoid. Considering that sending email isn’t free, why waste your money on sending to people who don’t care about what you are sending them? These types of practices increase complaints and can cause you big headaches in the future. Why risk having people click the “spam” button in their email client because you tricked them into signing up for your mailing. Building trust with consumers is far more important than building your mailing list.

4: Include an explicit and easy to follow call to action.

You really can’t expect your customers to give you much of a response if you don’t ask them to. If you want them to do something in response to your email, you have to ask them and then make the action as easy as possible. If you want them to make a comment, give them a simple way to do it. The easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to go through with it (duh). Make your call to action clear. Ditch subtlety in this case, straightforward is the way to go.

Hopefully these tips will help you create and execute a better newsletter. For more email marketing best practices, check out this post.

Going from cold to hot isn’t so tough.

It’s no big news that email lists can go cold. It can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe the list building process took longer than you expected, maybe your boss wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on email marketing when the list was forming, or maybe you’ve just bored your list to tears. Regardless of the reason, you can heat your list back up with some fairly easy methods.

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers why they haven’t been responding to your email.

Communication is key. While you may think that asking your customers directly will make you look bad, it doesn’t. They will respect your honesty and if they do have an issue they will know that you care and are making efforts to correct it.

Offer exclusive incentives to returning customers.

Even if a customer has begun to ignore your email, a particularly good incentive can bring back even customers with the most waning interest. If someone was at one time interested in what you have to offer it’s very likely that they will be again under the right circumstances. Give them a reason to come back.

Change your strategy.

If providing one kind of promotion doesn’t seem to be exciting your audience, try something new. Maybe your recipients are still interested in buying something from you but have just grown tired of the same old offers. If you send them a coupon for 10% off every time, it’s not going to be much of an attention grabber after a while. Consider changing up your offers and occasionally doing something very unique to make your customers do a double-take when they receive your email.

Consider an email redesign.

While content may still be king, good looks certainly can’t hurt. If you aren’t seeing the results you want from your campaign, you may consider taking another look at your email design. A really bad design, and trust me they are all over the place, can scare someone away faster than just about anything. If you want your consumers to trust and respect your company your email should have a design that promotes you in the best light, not as some two-bit spammer.

Re-examine your demographic.

Their wants, needs, and how they interact with your company/organization may have changed over time. What was once a popular subject among the people on your list may now be sorely out of date. Make sure you stay current with the interests and trends among your list. Keep your products and ideas up to date. If possible you could offer incentives to some of your recipients for filling out a survey. A great way for retailers to get people into their store is by giving out a five dollar gift card. Since barely anything costs just five dollars, it’s pretty likely they will be spending some of their own cash once they get started.