5 Ways to Balance Email Campaigns

“Evermore in this world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good balance brings harmony to your life. When proper attention is given to both work and family, success and happiness abound. Without balance, structures crumble – work suffers – relationships falter. So do email marketing campaigns.

Here are 5 way to balance your email marketing campaigns.

1. Include both an HTML and Text-Only (Multi-part MIME) part in your email message. Doing so will do two things. First, it will allow those email recipients who have their email clients configured to receive text-only email to see your text-only version which is properly formatted for text display. Secondly, it will help increase your delivery rates as the extra text will help to balance the HTML portion of your message, which anti-spam filters like.
2. Spend as much time and effort managing your unsubscribe requests as you do on collecting and processing your new subscriptions. Getting someone off your list who doesn’t want to be on it is as important, if not more so, than adding a new email address to that same list.
3. Design your message in proper balance with the email screen. Don’t overfill the screen with content and images. Think of white space as a the matting for a framed piece of art. You don’t have to fill the screen right to the edges. Consider the different ways that people might view your message – your design should look balanced both in the preview pane and full screen views.
4. Give and give. If you are asking your recipients to give you something – money, time, support, membership, understanding; ensure that you give them something back. Provide incentives, good value and appreciation in balance with your calls-to-action, requests and solicitations. Every email should be win-win.
5. Make email a two-way system. Give your recipients opportunities to have a voice. When they reply to your message, get back to them promptly with the information they need. Solicit feedback and most importantly, listen to what your audience has to say. Treat the email messages that you send as one part of a conversation rather than as a monologue. Encourage participation in the dialog