The Whitelist

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!

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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Just like email marketing is made up of many parts, so is the job of the email marketing vendor a multi-faceted affair. That’s why we have a topnotch staff of experienced email marketing experts. Today we profile Dion, the Technical Product Service Manager at ClickMail.

Dion’s direct marketing training and expertise spans over 10 years. A former US Army Special Operations Veteran in Psychological Operations, Dion later went on to become an events marketing manager, project manager and lead generation specialist. His career path led him to managing email marketing projects for numerous B2B and B2C campaigns.
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Email marketing is made up of many moving parts. There are technical parts like the software, policy parts like CAN SPAM compliance, tricky parts like the email delivery, email design parts like alt text, and last and certainly not least, the word parts.
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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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It’s springtime! The birds are singing, buds are bursting and grass is greening. Could your email marketing results use some freshening up too? If so, check out MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Awards Gallery for inspiration.

With 43 inspiring email marketing award winners’ examples and descriptions, you could consider this an email marketing best practices tutorial. Seriously. Take some time to skim it, then go back through and learn from tried-and-true techniques for:
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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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Last week we sat in on ExactTarget’s email deliverability webinar, ‘Getting to the Inbox: Why “Send” Is Not the End and Reputation Is King.’

The webinar pointed out that as concerned as email marketers are with maximizing their email delivery rates, they still aren’t paying enough attention to reputation.

According to the webinar, actions taken by email marketers to improve email delivery in 2008 included:
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Although email marketing happens online, and no hammers or drills are required, it’s still a craft that calls for the right tools, knowledge, skills and dedication to create a great end product. As a reminder as the boy scouts would say—expect the best but prepare for the worst, make sure your email marketing toolbox is fully loaded with all of the following now…before you find yourself in a pinch, with no email hardware store to run to:
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Email marketing is a funny thing, a mix of art and science, and part of that science is the technology behind it. Without the technology, we wouldn’t be able to measure email delivery, track open rates, or test how our email design renders. But not all technology makes sense all the time. Sometimes a new technology comes along and we as an email marketing company must ask: Is this something we should be encouraging our clients to do?
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