Email Marketing Best Practices – Creating Your Message
Second only to creating your opt-in e-mail list, the most important aspect of any e-mail marketing plan is making your messages user friendly. Even though there are as many e-mail styles as there are people creating them, there are a few email marketing best practices to ensure that your reader sees what you intended.
1. Go Old School – the vast majority of marketing e-mails are HTML based. Why? Because it allows you to create nice looking layouts with graphics and links… In the beginning, an HTML page was built by hand so the coding was pretty straightforward using tables and in-line styles. With the advent of what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editors like Dreamweaver, the coding got much more complicated because most people never saw it. The problem is, many e-mail systems can’t read it either so your message comes through looking like an infant created it. Many e-mail services have an application that allows you to create your message in the system. If you are not familiar with HTML, use it! If you are familiar with HTML, stick to the basics and avoid any CSS.
1a. – It should go without saying that if a system has trouble with newer HTML tags, it will have a really bad time with Flash and other fancy stuff. Just walk away! The best case is that you will have a big hole in your message, worst case is that the entire message gets blocked.
2. Don’t use images to convey important information. Many systems block images so the reader can’t see them. Images are great for spiffing up the look of your message, but make sure all of the important info is in the text part. Be sure to use the alt attribute (you know, the one most people blow off) for your images. That way if the image is blocked at least you can tell the viewer what was supposed to be there. The whole point of your email blast is to get the message across – not win a design prize!
3. If you decide to copy and paste text out of your website into your e-mail to save time, that’s perfectly OK. However, after copying the text from the website, paste it into a text editor like Note Pad or Word Pad first. This will remove all of the crazy HTML tags and CSS. Then copy it out of the text editor and into your e-mail. Trust me on this one!
4. Use full addresses for links. If you build websites, you know that you can get away with only using the “page.htm” form of the link address within your site. Why? Because usually all of the pages are in the same directory. However with an e-mail you never really know how the e-mail system is going to handle the files. Therefore be sure to use the entire long form address in your links. For example the absolute address for “page.htm” is actually probably something like http://www.yourpage.com/page.htm. Use it all every time.
5. Keep it as small as possible. For both file size and actual dimensions go as small as you can and still get your message across. For file size, the smaller the better. For dimensions try to keep the width under 640 px. Also be sure to keep the really important stuff “above the fold”. That means have the meat of your message near the top so they don’t have to scroll to get it.
6. Include your company name, street address and phone number on every e-mail. You also must have an easy to find unsubscribe link that really removes someone from you list if they select it. Some systems will shut you down if you don’t include this info because it makes you look like a spammer. If your email blasts are to succeed, they must give the viewer confidence that you are legitimate.
7. If you are selling tangible goods, set up a shopping cart and provide a link so your guests can make a purchase easily. Make it as easy as possible for them to give you money!
You will find a lot of lists out there with many more rules to consider. My experience has been that the ones listed above will help you avoid 95% of the issues you may encounter with your opt-in e-mail plan.
