‘Sending Email’ Articles

In our many blog posts we’ve covered a lot of ways to improve your email campaigns. We get so many questions about best practices and how to improve results that we thought that we’d gather up all of our best practices tips and put them in one place. Here is a list of our most important “Best Practices”.

1. Write great subject lines.

This is the first rule of email marketing. Subject lines are the first things your customer sees and the deciding factor in how much attention they give your email. Don’t hurry writing your subject line, come up with several different ideas and chose the one you think would appeal to your customer most. Be honest in your subject and avoid the hard sell and SPAM language.

2. Don’t forget the preview pane!

The preview pane is that handy little window in email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird that shows a preview of the email before it is actually “opened”. It’s so useful in fact, that many people read their emails almost exclusively in this manor. Create your email so that the most important part of your offer or message is visible in this window. Which means, the top section of your email is most important. This would be the case regardless since grabbing your reader’s interest is your primary goal anyway.

3. Avoid SPAM language.

Chances are you’ve gotten SPAM before in your email inbox but have you ever notice how they all seem share the same language? SPAM filters have been designed to pick up on this recurring “language of SPAM” by using Bayesian style filters. These types of filters have been popular for years and use common “SPAM words” to filter messages. Actually it’s a lot more complicate than that and you can read more here, but the general idea is that avoiding certain words and phrases can make your email more deliverable. We’ve compiled a list of some of those words in our Email and Spam Blockers FAQ.

4. Make it look good.

Anyone who sees your email campaign is going to judge it based on how it looks. You might do everything else right but if you have a bad design, you can ruin any potential for success your campaign may have had. Not every email needs to be a work of art but take some time and objectively view your email. Ask yourself, “Does it look like SPAM? Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this company?” Make your campaign look professional and your clients will be more apt to click your links and buy your products.

5. Treat your recipients like real people.

There are many ways to appeal to your audience and no one way is best, but in the world of bulk email, treating your clients with a respectful, personal touch can be the difference between success and a failure. Email can be notoriously cold and impersonal, if you find a way to break that mold and connect with your recipients, you will give them a refreshing surprise that they are sure to respond to.

6. Focus on meaningful content.

Find out what your customers want and give it to them. Too many marketers get so wrapped up in their product that they forget about the consumer. If you provide your recipients with something valuable, your campaign will be a success. Blatant solicitation is a waste of everyone’s time.

7. Establish your brand.

Assuming you are already producing content that your recipients actually want, the next step is to ensure that they don’t overlook your email. Maintaining similar design and messaging will make your email familiar and allow your recipients to pick your email out of a crowd. If they have a high traffic inbox, this can be crucial to the success of your campaign.

8. Include an offer.

Including an offer can be a fantastic way to attract attention but also has the potential to be gimmicky. Don’t bother with this unless you think your customer will get legitimate value from the offer you are providing. Avoid being misleading at all costs. Exclusive offers can be more attractive and have the potential of prompting recipients to forward your email to a friend if they find it to be an exceptional value. Free marketing doesn’t get any better than that!

9. Avoid large images.

Large images can give your email a higher probability of tripping SPAM filters and may also ruin your email design. Along with the fact that many email clients block images by default, you have plenty of good reasons not to include large images in your message. You may want to show off their pictures in full detail but an email is not the place to do it. Include a thumbnail of the image and have it link to the full sized image hosted elsewhere.

10. Ask to be on their list.

There is no better way to ensure that your future emails don’t wind up in a willing recipients SPAM folder than just asking nicely. Ask them to add you to their contacts list and, in most email clients, your messages will be ensured delivery. You can include this request in your first campaign or in all of your campaigns.

11. Know and follow CAN-SPAM regulations.

This one is simple, CAN-SPAM regulations are the law and if you break them you could find yourself with a hefty fine and a nasty mark on your reputation. Avoid these problems by understanding the regulations before starting any email campaign.

12. Study major email providers policy.

Professionals in any field always do their homework. They know more about the topic than anyone else and they use that knowledge to their advantage. If you want to be a pro in the email marketing world you need to know the policy’s of the major email providers. You wouldn’t ship goods somewhere without knowing the docking regulations of the port, so don’t be uninformed of the rules and regulations of companies like Yahoo!, Google, or Microsoft.

Many email marketers choose to use image-based emails to create a seamless and professional look for their email campaigns despite the fact that quite a few email clients block images automatically. You can do this too, IF you know the right way to do it!

The main thing you have to accept when sending an image-based email campaign is that your images WILL get blocked by a majority of email clients. Your customers can choose to accept these images later, but on initial receipt the images will be blocked. If you understand that fact and its implications and you still want to use this tactic, by all means proceed.

When you decide to send an image-based email, a great way to ensure that your customers get your message, even when your images are blocked, is by including alternative text. Including alternative text for images is always a good practice but becomes especially important when there is no other content for your recipients to see. Alternate text will show up when an image is blocked so that your customer will at least be able to read a small part of your message. This text can assure them that the email is from a trusted source and they might be more likely to view the images after reading it.

With the Admail.net system it is extremely simple to provide alternative text for your images. All you need to do is include your alternative text in the “Image Description” when you add the image to your message in Email Builder. If you are going to use HTML code to construct your email, you probably already know that you can include alternative text through the “alt” tag included with your image.

Another way to keep your image-based emails manageable is to avoid using one large image file. It is more prudent to slice the image into several pieces and then construct the image out of these pieces. Why is this a commonly followed practice? For two reasons: Primarily because it makes the message more likely to be viewed. Several small files provide an opportunity to include more alternate text and it reduces the chance of tripping spam filters. Secondly, slicing allows you to make each individual section of your image a clickable link. Which means if you have one section that is your logo, you can make it a link to your website’s front page, and if you have a section that is a product, you can make it a link to a page for that product. Remember, image map code does not work in most email browsers. At Admail we encourage best practices like this, that is why our default image upload size is 40kbs or less per image.

Slicing an image is a fairly simple process that can be carried out by your company’s graphic designer or anyone who is competent with photo editing software. You can also do it online here: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/is/ When you use this tool make sure you uncheck the boxes that say enable links and mouse over effect unless you are an advance user. After making any changes on this page, including unchecking the boxes you must click the “process” button for the changes to take effect. Once you have made your changes, click download. You’ll be prompted to download a zip file which will contain your slices.

Now that you have a sliced piece of artwork that you would like to send, how do you turn it into an email? The best way to handle imaged-based email creation is to have an experienced website designer or someone very familiar with HTML create a simple layout and then import it into our system. Another possibility is to modify a template for your needs. Simply insert the images in the arrangement you would like them to be. We suggest that you use as few slices as possible to keep this manageable. Slicing the image in half is usually enough. Through our own testing we found that anything over four slices begins to get pretty complicated. In order to get images to lay flush against one another, you may need to change individual image alignment. When you have one image above another you’ll see that you’ll have a space between the two. Simply align the image on top with the alignment of “bottom”, you do this by click the image and then click the image button, you’ll then  and this should solve your problem.

If you are unfamiliar with the more advanced editing features of Email Builder 2.0, we highly suggest that you experiment with the system. By right-clicking on the layout view of the template you can access a host of options that let your modify the template. You can copy sections and you can split them into additional columns. Padding changes can be made by right clicking and choosing the modify option in the drop down. After a little experimentation you should have a firm grasp on the layout editor, if not, you’re welcome to call us and we’ll be more than happy to walk you through it!

A great example of alternative text and slicing done right.

In previous posts we have described a condition with which many email marketers are afflicted. This “disease” can break down a marketer, bringing progress to a halt with confusion and distress.

Analytic paralysis is the condition of being completely hung up on the analytic reports of your emails. Those with this illness disregard common sense and place too much importance on numbers they don’t quite understand.

Today I hope to cure some cases of analytic paralysis by discussing the email open rate. The email open rate refers to the number of people who have opened and read your email. It was created for the purpose of giving marketers a way to see how many people opened their emails rather than just deleting it on the spot; however, these numbers are almost always blurred and don’t give accurate real time representations of how many recipients actually read your email.

Why are the numbers skewed? Read below to gain a bit more understanding.

Statistics show that 84% of people 18-34 use an email preview pane. An email preview pane exists in email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird. It allows you to view a preview of your email in a small window under or next to your inbox. The way opens are reported when an email is viewed in a preview pane is inconsistent. In many instances your recipient may have read your email in their preview pane but their view will not register as an open.

Email open rates are collected based on a hidden image placed into your email. When this hidden image is loaded the recipient can be counted as an open. Many email programs, including Outlook and Gmail, block images automatically. Meaning, users who have viewed your image will not be counted as an open unless they go out of the way to allow the images of your email to be seen, something many people don’t do even if they value the content of the email.

So what does this all mean to you, an email marketer trying to find a good way to judge the success of your emails? Basically it means that open rates are a great way to compare a campaign against one another, but not for much else. If your open rates increase or decrease drastically you’ll know you’re either doing something right or your screwed up.

Open rates are not a good way to judge the individual success of a campaign or your email marketing efforts in general. A low open rate may seem discouraging, but the percentages reported can be very misleading. An open rate percentage should not be used as a hard and fast number to report how many people you have reached. A more effective judge of success of any email campaign is the click-through rate. Click-throughs are recorded more accurately and give you a sense of who has acted based on your email. Action, of course being the goal of any marketing effort.

Don’t let the numbers throw a wrench in your efforts. If you are doing the right things in your email campaign such as providing valuable content, avoiding spam flags and sending to a good list, you will have success.

Avoid analytic paralysis by remembering this information and don’t forget, advertising can only bring customers to your product, you are responsible for giving them something of quality that they truly want or need. No amount of advertising, despite it’s brilliance, can maintain a product lacking in value.

You don’t have to be a programmer, developer, or graphic designer to be a good email marketer. You certainly don’t have to be a wiz with CSS or Javascript. Good email marketing requires nothing more than an employee who understands their customers and who can provide valuable content. That being said, having a basic understanding of the technology you are dealing with can be a great help and it may just save you from some serious technology induced headaches.

When something goes wrong and your email doesn’t look or function the way you want it to, what do you do? Many email marketers use HTML creation programs like frontpage, dreamweaver, or other template based systems to create good looking emails with little to no knowledge of HTML. These can be extremely helpful tools but they don’t always translate perfectly to email. So when a problem does arise where will you turn?

By learning some rudimentary HTML code you could solve many of these problems yourself. I’m not suggesting you spend days or even weeks to become an expert or even to memorize any code. If you’d like you could simply print out this blog or any of the more complete HTML cheat sheets online, and use it as an instant reference. At any rate, understanding some basic HTML code and finding out how it all functions will give you a valuable tool set and make you a greater asset in the workplace.

I’ve listed and explained some of the most simple and common HTML tags here.

<p>: This indicates the start of a paragraph, as with all HTML code the tag must be closed after the element is complete. Therefore at the end of a paragraph you would complete the tag by putting a closing tag like so </p>

Example: <p>This is my newest email!</p>

<img src=”insert location here” />: This is the appropriate tag to insert an image into html. Note that if you use a image location on your local machine others will NOT be able to view it. This problem occurs when using pictures from your computer in frontpage and then copying that HTML code. You will be able to see the pictures but no one else will. You need to use a location that is hosted somewhere on the web, in my example you will see that I used a image hosted on Admail.

Example: <img src=”https://www.admail.net/thumbnail/154/”></img>

<a href=”insert internet address here”>link </a>: This is the HTML tag to create a link. The word or phrase in-between the opening and closing tag will be made into the link.

Example: <a href=”http://www.admail.net”>Visit Our Website!</a>

Other tags include <b>, this will make your font bold, and <i>, which will make your font italic.

These are very rudimentary tags but they will help you understand some of the more simple elements of HTML. For those interested in learning more, websites like www.w3schools.com provide an online knowledge base and free online training.

Armed with this knowledge you will have a better grasp of your medium and, with a bit of study and training, you may be able to troubleshoot your own problems, saving you and your company valuable time.

To recap:

<p>: Paragraph </p>
<img src=”/>: Image
<a href=”>: Link </a>
<b>: Bold </b>
<i>: Italic </i>

Thaddy Claus (Thaddeus) is tying the bow on our seasonal present for our customers. With the arrival of Email Builder 2.0 we hope to answer some of your email marketing holiday wishes. Email Builder 2.0 is an improved version of our already powerful template system. It has many new features, of which include:

1. Controls and editing tools that are more familiar and more accessible for users.
2. Emails are now saved more often and the “Resume Last Email” function allows users to #  Admail Services # design # Email Marketing # HTML # Ncome back to work they may have previously lost.
3. Templates are easier to modify and format. Changes to background color and field sizes can be made with simple drop down menus.
4. Undo and redo buttons have been introduced.
5. Images are now easier to re-size. Images can be formatted by dragging the edges until it meets the desired height and width. (Not available in Safari)

Email Builder 2.0 provides these features and many more! We at Admail.net look forward to the New Year and the full implementation of Email Builder 2.0. If you’d like to try the beta version, please select the beta category when choosing a template in Email Builder. *Please note bugs may be present that will not be included in the final release.