The Whitelist

What looks good on paper might suck on screen. What works in direct mail marketing might bomb as email marketing. And what shines in your version of Outlook might not look so snazzy in Gmail, AOL or Yahoo.

Get some email design peace of mind! Download email solutions provider ExactTarget’s new email design checklist and make sure your email design works on screen, in the inbox, and no matter the email client. From brand to engagement to response, it’s a handy one pager you can review while designing and then refining your next email campaign.
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If you read this blog with any regularity, you’ve seen plenty of references to email best practices. Pick any facet of email marketing, and you’ll find numerous email best practices you should adhere to in order to maximize your email marketing ROI: email copywriting, email subject lines, email delivery, email everything…

…including email design.
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My brain has defrosted just enough to impart the following observations:

An recurring theme here in Miami is how to best reduce the anxiety and friction caused by asking people for information.  Ask a web visitor for their email address or other details and they get their back up.  So the zillion yen question is, how to build the ideal email and landing page?   (more…)

Another day at the Email Summit and another great certification course led by the dynamic Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. Today was the Email Messaging Optimization Professional Certification and as if I didn’t have enough to do as a result of what we covered in yesterday’s course, I now have more insight into how to optimize the ‘email capture to landing page conversion’ process. (more…)

Do you use a PDA, iPhone, BlackBerry or some other mobile device? It’s 2008. Chances are pretty good that you do. Chances are also pretty good that you know email marketing doesn’t always render the way you want on a mobile device, especially a BlackBerry.

Just as emails render differently in different email clients (which our next issue of the ClickMail Marketer will touch on), they look different depending on the mobile device too.

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A fascinating bit of information on email image blocking can be found on page six of MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide:

“In the version with blocked images, we see a higher percentage reading the entire headline instead of scanning and skipping down, which appears to be related to the pull of the image below. When that image is removed, people spend a bit more time reading. That underscores the power and danger of compelling images – they can engage and attract the user’s attention, but they may be stealing it from a key piece of content.”

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…Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports gives us email marketing people a great article warning of the pitfalls of ‘alt’ tags.  As he points out, different email clients handle blocked images different ways.  For one thing, it’s not just about the alt text, although many email marketers focus on that. You have to be careful about attributes too. That means beyond alternative words to display when images are blocked, you must set attributes like height and width too.

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Email marketing has many moving parts to it…often more than those in charge of email marketing are even aware.

It is a truism that for many companies, the email marketing department is either under-staffed or under-trained. Email marketing therefore tends to be a job that people fall into rather than train for and seek out.

But part of our task as an email marketing service provider is to educate. Hence this blog, and our newly launched email newsletter. And our recent whitepaper.  After the jump, an excerpt from the whitepaper on avoiding tags that invite disaster…

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Below is a quick overview of some of the many pieces each of your email marketing messages should include, or not, to up your email marketing ROI. We’ve drawn this list from our newest ClickMail Marketing whitepaper: You’ve made it to the inbox. Now what? Definitely download the email marketing whitepaper to get more details about each of these components. But for now, here’s a high-level list to get you thinking-and checking. Because email marketing and design are much more complicated than some marketers realize! And checklists can help make our jobs just a little bit easier…

To get your email opened, include:

• A From address that is recognizable to the recipient
• A clear, compelling subject line
• As much personalization as is appropriate and possible
• A quick, to-the-point hook

To get your email acted upon, include:

• A professionally crafted description of your offer/message right at the beginning
• A reason to act right away
• A simple and easy way to respond
• 3 to 5 instances of your call-to-action

To follow best practices and please your recipients, include:

• A “view as web page” link
• A straight-forward unsubscribe to opt-out
• A link to a profile center or preferences page

To organically grow your in-house email marketing list, include:

• A FTF/FTC (forward to a friend, forward to a colleague) link

To increase your email marketing ROI even more, do not include:

• Competing links in a campaign email; include only one action

Like I said, this is just a summary, but can at least get you started double-checking your email marketing and design. For more details about these email marketing components, and many others that will help you maximize your email marketing ROI, download the email marketing whitepaper at http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/resources/whitepapers.html.

A few months ago I listened to a speaker talk about emails that were feet long, as in 2 feet, 4 feet. At first, I was confused, then I realized he was talking about as you scroll, that the emails he was referring to really were that long. And he did have an example of one that was 4 feet long!

Picture that as paper: Email doesn’t come in pages the way paper does. A 4 foot long paper document can be 4 or more pages long and therefore manageable. A 4 foot long email is one long piece of paper!

That’s a lot of scrolling! And just because it’s opt-in email marketing doesn’t mean your customers will opt to read it.

I suspect some email marketing departments (or more likely their bosses) figure that’s free real estate so let’s fill it up with everything we could possibly say. Never mind that the customer will either lose their patience or lose their way trying to get through all that text!

But that begs the question of, how long should your email be? Obviously 4 feet is too long! Is 2 feet to long? One foot? Eight inches?

Does it matter? Not so much. In reality, the length of the email doesn’t have to be limited except by common sense.

What does matter is making sure the most important information is “above the fold,” meaning in the area approximately 200 pixels from the top. That’s because after the From address and the subject line, what someone sees in the Preview Pane is what will get them to open your email and interact with it…or not.

It’s also like an ad. Think of the inverted pyramid example I once read about how many people read how far down your ad: At the upside down base of your pyramid, the widest part, you have the most people reading. That’s your headline. But as the pyramid gets narrower and narrower as it goes down the page, fewer and fewer people read.

I suspect the same thing happens with emails, although I don’t have the stats to prove it. Still, that top section is like the top of an ad: It’s the part most people will read.

Make the most of it so they keep reading. Just don’t expect them to read 4 feet worth of anything!