‘Tips’ Articles

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>

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This phrase has been used for years to highlight the value of a good visual image. A phrase that has led many marketers to believe more pictures = better content.

One of the most difficult ideas for new email marketers to understand is that email doesn’t function like traditional medias. There are a number of unique rules and standards that only apply in email marketing. If you decide to step into the realm of email marketing, be prepared to throw some of your old rules out the window and to adopt some strange new ones.

In a series of posts, I am going to address several of the rules and issues that arise in email marketing, especially the ones that throw inexperienced email marketers for a loop.

Today, I want to focus on the misuse of pictures in email marketing. Many new marketers want to fill their emails with many large, impressive images. In the worst case some email marketers make their entire email one large image. The reason people fall victim to this taboo is because they are tempted by the possibility of making a beautiful and technical layouts with photoshop or illustrator. The major downside to doing this is, most of your recipients won’t even see the image. Almost all modern email programs  have a default setting to block images. It’s true, users can choose to allow images after opening the email, but at first glance, if your message is one large picture, your customer will see nothing but a blank page and a “pictures have been blocked” message. This will not make a good impression and will most likely wound your email campaign, possibly fatally.

Another common misstep is loading an email up with images that have massive files sizes. Not only can this put a strain on your email system, but it can also trigger your recipient’s spam filters. Of course you want your clients to see the best quality image you can provide and you may want to show off a beautiful product, but I highly suggest providing a properly re-sized thumbnail that links off to the larger image file hosted elsewhere. This keeps your email file size low and allows you to create concise and attractive layouts. Believe me, this will save you a lot of hassle and will make your emails much more manageable and effective.

As I continue with this series of posts I will discuss a variety of topics directed toward new email marketers, including posts like: Simple HTML Code Every Email Marketer Should Know, Understanding Open Rates, and Long Live The King: A Focus On Content.

Picture this: You spend hours laboriously crafting the perfect email, one that you know your clients will love. You send it out, excitement engulfing you as you imagine how great the response will be. But as the results trickle in, they aren’t quite what you were expecting.

Could it be that your customer never received your email at all, or that it merely went overlooked? Below I’ve outlined two simple but powerful rules to ensure that your hard work isn’t wasted and to increase your email readership.

Get on their list. Ask your customers to put you on their contact list or in their address book.

You want to make sure your emails stay out of the spam folder. The increasingly variable nature of spam filters, and the fact that they are often user defined, makes this a particularly challenging task. There is really only one strategy that ensures that everyone who wants your emails always gets them, and that is to always send your email from the same email address and to ask your recipients to add your sending address to their contact list or address books. Mail sent from a known contacts is always put into the inbox. We suggest you use a simple text email to send new users this request along with an option to opt-out if they are no longer interested.

Use branding in your emails, and that doesn’t stop at including your logo.

Become an expert on your company’s brand and then make sure it is clearly displayed in all the emails you send. By consistently using the same address (as suggested above) your recipients will recognize your message, but if they are quickly scrolling through their inbox, branding can ensure your email is a familiar and trusted sight. While the content of your email, such as pictures and copy, is important, the subject line is the most crucial. It will be the first thing your readers see, and possibly the only thing unless you make a good impression in the subject line. Your opt in customers trusted you and found value in your product, so they will be more apt to open an email if they know it’s from you. This will separate your message from spam and other generic communication.

There are many rules that can be applied to sending marketing emails, but as always the most important is to provide your customer with true value. If the content of your email doesn’t give your customer something they want, the above strategies won’t be able to save you! These strategies simply give your message a chance to be read, its up to you to give your readers something worth paying attention to and acting on.

Visit our website (http://www.admail.net) to sign up for a free 30-day trial, or call us at 800-479-6233

The most dreaded word in the email marketing industry is “SPAM”. No tech word invites more universal hatred than this simple, but very dirty, four letter word.

If an email you send is deemed spam, it will most likely never get across to your clients. Perhaps even worse, if your message does reach their inbox, it will be an annoyance. Once your email address makes its way into a spam folder, it’s very hard to reach that potential customer ever again. Sending spam damages your company’s reputation and is against the law.

Below are guidelines taken from the Federal Trade Commission that you can follow to keep your emails in the inbox and your business out of trouble.

“Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible”

(Information re-posted from the Federal Trade Commission at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm)

At Admail.net we take these, and many other regulations, into account to maximize the deliverability of your emails and keep you out of spam folders. More importantly we do our best to ensure your messages follow all CAN-SPAM regulations to keep you out of trouble.

Visit our website (http://www.admail.net) to sign up for a free 30-day trial, or call us at 800-479-6233