The Whitelist

Dynamite! Dynamic Design Is Your Next Email Marketing Best Practice

You’ve heard of dynamic content, but what about dynamic design? To keep up with email marketing best practices, you’d better add dynamic design to your list! We’ll tell you why in the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer.

If your demographic is aged, your creative is tired, or you’re noticing signs of list fatigue, definitely think about a redesign. This article on dynamic design will help get you started, with tips for making sure it’s a dynamic design, one that will enable more one-to-one marketing, and will move your forward, not keep you stuck in the same old way of doing things.

Read the article on dynamic email design, and be ready to add that toolset to your email marketing best practices.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Be Targeted and Specific in Every Little Detail

You’ve seen countless references to being relevant and targeted as an email marketing best practice. Do we always know what that means?

When I talk to clients about being targeted and specific in their messaging to their prospects and customers, I use this favorite example: If I tell you to picture a car, you could picture any type and color of car. I have no idea what you’re picturing. But if I tell you to picture a red convertible, I have a pretty good idea what you’re envisioning.

When we are telling our story via email marketing, our messaging needs to be specific and targeted, in order to get the result we want. The more vague we are, the less focused the message we try to give to our audience.

This is true for every element of your email campaign or newsletter, not just the words. This applies to your links and graphics too. For example, see this ExactTarget blog on the placement of social media icons within an email newsletter.
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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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