To keep your subscribers opening, reading, clicking through, and converting make sure you listen to their preferences as they stated them in the preference center they used to sign up. You use a preference center, right? Okay, just making sure. We’ve talked time and again about the importance of email preference centers to your email deliverability rate and overall reputation, and how using an email preference center should be one of your email deliverability tools!

But once they’ve signed up and told you what they’d like to hear from you, make sure that you honor your end of the bargain by doing the following:

Tell them what to expect. By using an email preference center and confirmation messages to provide an overview of your program, subscribers will understand when to expect your emails, and what to expect from them (discounts, newsletters, or helpful tips).

Fulfill their expectations. If they signed up for bi-weekly messages, make sure that you have that system in place and stick to it. No more, no less! Your subscribers will feel respected when their expectations are met, and they won’t, if they aren’t.

Send relevant content. We’ve also talked a good amount about the email deliverability benefits to segmenting your lists. Once you have relevant data, you can send increasingly targeted and relevant content to your subscribers. And the more targeted your content, the more engaged your subscribers.

Email Preview Panes Mean Less Must be More

These days, the majority of email users (around 70%) view their email messages via preview panes, making it even more critical that your email subject lines and first couple lines of body text make a statement. Preview panes make checking email more efficient for users, ensuring they can get a snapshot of each message immediately, without having to open each message first. More and more, users are feeling inundated with emails overwhelming their inboxes, so they are more likely to scan each new group of incoming emails at once, and batch delete without opening. So as an email marketer, this means meeting an additional challenge in order to get your emails opened to achieve maximum ROI from your email marketing campaign. It’s essential that your email messages get straight to the point AND create intrigue and interest, which will lead to higher email open and click-through rates!

How, you ask, can I make my emails pop, to ensure maximum email deliverability?

1) Compelling subject lines: Short and snappy subject lines stand out and are easily readable in preview panes. Well-written and relevant subject lines also illustrate the main point of your email message. For even more on headline words that ensure an opened email, see our blog post on subject lines.

2) Keep the content simple: Because people spend, on average, less than 10 seconds scanning their email inbox before batch-deleting those emails that don’t appeal, simplicity (along with compelling) must reign. Shorter headlines can be strong, and the body of the email can contain white space. Scanning emails is a lot of text to process, so helping yours stand out from the crowd with a few well-designed but bold elements will definitely ensure your email “pops” out from the text-heavy rest.  And that means more email opens and increased email deliverability.

3) Clean, uncluttered email: People approach their email with a short attention span. Where people used to read email, now they are scanning, skimming and deleting. Users are becoming more discriminating about whether to open and act on their email messages or just delete after scanning the preview pane. So be sure to be clean in design and to-the-point in your content. Write to the preview pane, and think about what your users will be able to learn from the first three lines they’ll see. For more on clean and simple design, see our recent blog post on how typography can help your email marketing campaign.

Email Design Includes Landing Pages for the Mobile Device

As a follow up to our June article on making emails mobile, we asked two of our in-house technical whizzes to give us the lowdown on carrying that mobility through to the landing page. After all, if your email marketing best practices are ensuring your emails render correctly on the small screens of smart phones and tablet PCs, shouldn’t that same mobile experience carry through to your landing pages too?

Lucky for us, the team behind the scenes at ClickMail has been paying attention and they were ready to answer all of our questions about mobile landing page design. The July issue of the ClickMail Marketer email marketing newsletter offers their tried-and-true tips for rethinking-and redesigning-your landing pages. Doing so will streamline engagement for your recipients and just might give you a leg up over your competitors who may still be sending mobile users to a clunky, computer-centric landing page.

From coding to copy, fingers to forms, this brief newsletter article covers all the basics you need to know to implement email marketing best practices around serving a mobile audience…even where they land.

What Works for the Web Might Fall Flat in an Email Design

Sure your designer can make your website wow like a coding whiz, but when it comes to email design, those coding skills will definitely need a little adjustment.

Sometimes the best email rendering tool is a little HTML knowledge. Watch out for ugly emails that render nothing like you wanted by knowing the difference between what works on a web page vs. what works in an email.

Below are two commonly misunderstood differences between website and email coding. Make sure you and your email design team are aware of these to ensure an email design that looks good on your customers’ screens…and remember, sometimes those screens are only a couple of inches wide.

1. Make sure any CSS used to define font styles, sizes, colors, line-heights, letter spacing and the like is kept as inline CSS. Any CSS attributes that are kept above the Body tag or intended to be invoked from an external CSS file will work on a web page but will not work in an email environment. That’s because many ISPs strip any coding above the Body tag, and they don’t reference external CSS sources. So be sure to use inline CSS or skip it altogether and design your email without it.

2. JavaScript and ActiveX work great in websites but are typically blocked in emails. Avoid these when building from scratch and make sure to remove if you’ve copied your design over from a web page, or you’ve used a productivity program like Microsoft Word to create your email design.

Getting email design right matters more than ever as the world goes mobile and your emails get smaller in appearance. Knowing differences between what works for the web and fails in email will help get your email design off to a better start.

Email Design and Coding Best Practices

Here at ClickMail, we’re primarily a value-added reseller of ESPs and an email deliverability consultant. However, we also offer email design and technical services, so we keep up with what’s going on in the world of email marketing best practices for everything, including email design and coding.

The newly published “Email Design and Coding Recommendations” guide from Responsys is by far the most detailed email design and coding guide I’ve seen to date. It covers not only HTML email design, but mobile and text email design as well. Yes, text email. This is the first time I’ve seen such detailed instructions for text email design.

It includes advice for Facebook Messages (hint: text will matter!) and coding advice for dealing with an ever-changing world of standards. It also includes advice the likes of which I haven’t seen before, such as including Forward-to-a-Friend and social sharing links as secondary calls to action within the body text of your email; taking into account the size of the finger that’s going to tap on a link; and the use of “recovery modules,” an extra block of content that’s your last ditch effort to offer the recipient something of interest to click on if they didn’t find anything else tempting up above.

Email marketing best practices. They are all around you. To find so many in one place is a real treat, especially for your email design and coding team. Download it now, and share with them…soon. They’ll be grateful!

Tips for Mobile Email Design

Have a cell phone? I bet you do. As do your spouse, your kids and your parents. Usage of cell phones and smart phones is at an all-time high and will only continue to climb. That means you must be monitoring the usage of your teenage daughter who has a tendency to go over her texting limit each month. And it means you’re now responsible for ensuring your company’s email marketing best practices include designing for these mobile devices, as more people use smart phones to read email.

Some email service providers (ESPs) are creating tools for mobile optimization so it could be you will be able to simply leverage what they’re offering rather than creating new templates in-house. Still, it’s smart to be educated about email design best practices for mobile.

A comprehensive StrongMail article titled “The Rapidly Shifting Mobile Landscape” gives plenty of specific advice on designing for mobile. Definitely take a look at it if this is something you’re tackling-or might have to tackle in the future.

You can also turn to ClickMail for help with email design for smart phones. It’s one of the add-on services unique to us as email marketing vendors.

Most important, however, is the testing of how these emails render, both on computers and smart phones. If you design for mobile alone and sacrifice effective rendering on a computer as a result-while most of your audience is still reading your email on a computer-you’re working against your email marketing ROI. Email marketing best practices should include designing for the majority, and allowing for the minority. That means email design that works on a smart phone without email design that looks nonsensical on a computer or laptop screen.

At ClickMail, we’re big proponents of testing. Based on years of experience serving email marketing clients just like you, we encourage you to consider using PivotalVeracity for testing the rendering of your email designs as part of your email marketing best practices. You can use the PivotalVeracity service as a ClickMail client, and at the same time, get our expertise in email marketing best practices…for effective email marketing on any kind of device, PC or Mac.

Whether it’s a Droid or a Dell, a Motorola or a Mac, an iPhone or an IBM, make sure your email design is right–and right on–every time by testing.

Email Marketing Best Practice for Mobile: Test Your Design

Day 6 of our take on the takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ’11 in Las Vegas… 

 Today’s takeaway: Mobile email is on the rise

 This Email Summit ’11 takeaway focuses on how your emails render on mobile devices, with tips for designing for mobile:

• Avoid large images
• Avoid tables and columns
• Shorter messages are better
• Use formatted text

As an email marketing vendor and email deliverability consultant, we’d like to add to that takeaway our own two cents worth on mobile marketing:

1) Remember to design for the majority, not minority.  Don’t lose one large audience for the sake of a newer one.

 2) Know how people interact with emails on their smartphones. People might see or read your email on their phone, but they might not act on it until later.

Email marketing best practices for mobile? Know your market. Test your designs.

How to Improve Your Email Marketing Program in Six Months or Less

It’s the beginning of a new year. Advice is flying at you from all directions. Predictions too. 2011 this and 2011 that… It can be a little overwhelming for an email marketer, especially in light of the growth of social media and all the buzz about content marketing!

At the risk of tossing even more advice your way, we want to suggest you review some of your email tactics. But rather than overwhelm you, we’ll make it easy on you: Here’s a six-month plan for improving your email marketing program.

We’ve chosen six often overlooked email marketing factors. Simply do one of these tasks below per month between now and this summer. Or if you’re on the fast track, make it a six-week plan, or even a six-day plan if you’re super ambitious. The point is, break it down into smaller pieces and you’ll be more likely to do it.

Task 1: Review your welcome message. Does it reflect your brand or is it boring and generic? Do you confirm what you promised, meaning if you’ve promised a monthly newsletter, does your welcome message confirm that? Are you offering any special rewards to people who sign up? Are you selling in your welcome email? Are you tracking the results of your welcome email over time? Choose one factor of your welcome email and run an A/B split test on it.

Task 2: Review how often you’re sending out your newsletter. If you’ve been sending out your email newsletter on the same schedule for over a year now, you might want to reconsider it based on results. What does the trending show, an increasing or decreasing open rate or is the open rate holding steady? How about click throughs? Do you have a preference center that lets subscribers choose how often they want to hear from you? Have you done any testing to see if more or less often gets better results?

Task 3: Review your transactional emails, including your confirmation and shipping emails: Give them the same once over as your welcome emails.

Task 4: Review your email design. Use a tool like eDesign Optimizer from email marketing vendor Pivotal Veracity to make sure your email marketing renders correctly in all email clients.

Task 5: Review your list building efforts. What are you currently doing to grow your in-house email list? Is there anything not working? Can you add one more technique this month, like adding an email sign to your company’s Facebook page?

Task 6: Find a reputable email marketing vendor to partner with when you need a little extra help. The time to find an email deliverability consultant or technical services agency isn’t when you need them. Find them when you have time to do your homework and make a good choice.

This is a doable list, right? And in six months, weeks or days, you’ll likely be seeing better results from your email marketing!

Email Marketing Best Practices: Design for the Majority

A few days ago, we posted a blog on not letting creative rule as an email marketing best practice. Later that same day, the design team whose template I questioned got a chance to defend themselves and their narrow template.

The newsletter was designed for mobile, they said, hence the narrow format. Coming from the standpoint of email marketing best practices like I always do, I challenge this design team on three fronts.

First off, what percentage of the audience is viewing the newsletter on mobile devices? If the majority of email recipients are getting this on a laptop or desktop, then why design for only a small percentage of the audience, sacrificing the possible opens and click throughs of the bigger audience? If you’re not sure, you can ask us to find out who’s opening your email with which device! Getting caught up in the new, but not the tried-and-true, definitely violates email marketing best practices.

Second, what percentage is acting on the newsletter on mobile devices? Just because people might take a cursory look at an email on a mobile device doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll act on it. If acting on an email requires something like entering data, then they will likely do so when they are in front of their PCs. Yes, plenty of people have iPhones and other touch screen PDAs…but not everyone! If you design to the minority, you frustrate the majority.

Third, what is your goal? Is it getting people to act on the newsletter? Or is it to satisfy your aesthetic requirements? If it’s the former, and it should be, then I say, rise to the challenge as a designer. Rather than cram the square peg into the round hole, make it work. Don’t make the email recipient suffer because you put it in a narrow format. Make the narrow formats serve the reader. Maybe put the big photo at the bottom rather than let it cause the blockage it’s currently causing. Find a way to put the user first, not the design first. That is your email marketing best practice.

If this newsletter really has to work on a mobile device above all, and if our biggest concern is click throughs, then maybe the design team needs to lose the focus on branding and imagery, and reduce the “newsletter” to the three links/headlines:

• Enter the contest
• Download the new sales tool
• See new listings

Include a small logo and the corporate brand colors, and voila! Your newsletter. Designed for mobile, ease of use and therefore click throughs. Period.

Best Practices for Email Marketing? Don't Make Your Email a Maze

Based on my morning, I say let’s add this to best practices for email marketing: Don’t let creative rule.

As we just discussed in this email marketing blog, roughly 20% of the success of your email marketing campaign comes from the creative. So why do so many email marketing departments let creative drive the emails?

As part of our job here in teaching best practices for email marketing, I just reviewed two client emails to make suggested improvements. One needed primarily email copywriting changes. The other needed a complete design overhaul before copywriting could even be considered. In fact, the poor design contributed to the copywriting problems!

I think the main problem this email design faced was an identity crisis. It was treated, by the email design team, as a promotional email, heavy on visual impact, with a narrow width and huge photograph right in the middle that took up far too much valuable real estate. But in reality, it was supposed to be an informative, email newsletter type email.

The narrow width put the table of contents at the top, taking up that precious real estate we know as the Preview Pane.

The huge photo spread across the entire width of the template, plus it was square so that made it tall as well, and was such a usability problem that the designer felt compelled to use the words “Read more below” to let the email recipient know there was more to the email than only what appeared above the photo!

The narrow width also made a lot of scrolling necessary, and pretty much guaranteed that the information and links at the end of the email would probably never see the light of day.

In short, we’re looking at all kinds of best practices for email marketing ignored.

My advice? Widen the template and treat the email design like a newsletter. Put the table of contents in the upper left corner where people are used to seeing it. Drastically reduce the size of the photo (and, by the way, make the photo relevant to the content and audience, not just pretty). Then take out the extraneous text that was added to try and help the recipient through the maze of an email. Finally, take all the buried info and add it to the left sidebar.

Only after those changes take place can the content itself be reviewed.

And if all that has to happen for an email marketing expert to make sense of the content, just think how the recipient will struggle with that email design! Oh, wait. He won’t. He’ll take one quick look, get confused, and click delete.

Definitely not the result we want, and definitely a reason for implementing some best practices for email marketing!

And, of course, you always want to test, test, test any changes you make, because in the end, what you want is what works.

Want your email design or message reviewed? Say the word!