Email Marketing is pretty complicated business. When you start communicating with any large audience, there are so many things to consider.
- Who are you communicating with?
- What is the objective of your communication?
- What style of presentation will you use?
- What are your main points?
- What action do you hope your audience will take?
- How will you persuade them to take that action?
In email marketing, some of these points are complicated further because there is technology between ourselves and our audience. Technology is great stuff. Without it, we’d have to gather large audiences together physically every time we wanted to tell them something. But it also creates problems.
- Technology might cause your beautiful HTML message to lose formatting in some email clients.
- Technology might cause your message to be filtered out of your audiences inbox; meaning that some of your audience won’t even see your message.
- Technology requires that you have some skills to covert your ideas to a visually pleasing presentation.
Our latest release of GroupMail will make it easier to jump over some of these technological obstacles. Our web developers added 20 email marketing templates to make it easy to convert your good ideas into a professional email presentation. They tested these templates on the most popular email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to ensure that the HTML formatting of the templates render well for the majority of your audience.
This way, you can just concentrate on the message that you want to convey to your audience.
You can find out more about our new email templates on our GroupMail blog.
Although most email recipients today receive HTML email, some prefer to receive a text-only version of your message. GroupMail allows senders to include an automatically generated text version of their HTML message or a custom text-only message part for those recipients who prefer text-only format. If you create a text-only part for your message, then that portion will display only when recipients have their email clients set to view text-only format.
More importantly, the text will display to antispam filters who check the image/HTML to text ratio. Adding a text-only part to your HTML message will help to satisfy this criteria of antispam filters.
To create a text-only portion for your next email campaign, simply click on the Plain Text Message Part tab at the bottom of GroupMail’s message editor when composing your message.
Here, you can select to have GroupMail auto-generate a text version or create your own custom text version which is neatly formatted for text-only recipients.
The holiday season is really on top of us again. Today is the 5th day of Chanukah and Christmas is 9 days away! Oy Vey!
If you have customers, it’s a good time to send them a note of thanks and warm wishes for a Happy New Year. The holidays also provide a great opportunity to send a generous gift or discount coupon to your customers. Have you ever considered taking a portion of your advertising budget and spending it directly on your existing, loyal customers rather than on potential business relationships? Think about it.
Here is a selection of holiday email templates available in GroupMail.
GroupMail also allows you to import your own HTML email holiday templates and save them in GroupMail’s template folder. Have you designed a holiday email template that you’re proud of? If so, provide a link in the comments of this post so that we can get inspired.
Recently, I revisited a 2007 article by Jeanne Jennings (of ClickZ fame,) one of today’s leading experts in email marketing. In 15 Tips for Getting Email Delivered to the Inbox, she offers some wise advice and even eludes to the cost of implementing each delivery-enhancing element.
I’ll add two three four more tips to her comprehensive list:
- Send a text-only part of your message along with your HTML email. That way, text-only recipients (and there are some) will get your message and it may please certain filters. (FREE)
- Keep your HTML design simple. Don’t complicate the campaign too much for the sake of snazzy design. Email is not a website. It is a platform for communication. Good content is good content, whether it is wrapped in award-winning design packages or not. The more complicated your design, the more likely filters will flag it and the more likely that it will have problems rendering in some clients. (FREE)
- Monitor your sender reputation and periodically check to see if your mail server IP address is on any DNS based email blacklists. (FREE)
- Have your recipients renew their subscriptions annually. Request that your recipients confirm their email addresses, update subscription information and express their interest in continuing to receive your emails. Be proactive and keep your list well maintained. This will also give you a chance to solicit additional information from your list (maybe include a request for birthday information for special promotions, sans the year or course.)
Can you think of any more delivery tips?
I was involved in some discussions relating to email marketing and spam last year (may require registration to access). It was an enlightening exercise as I discovered that there are so many individual interpretations as to what constitutes spam.
Apparently, many people feel that abiding by the CAN-Spam Act alone will ensure that their message is perceived as spam-free by recipients.
Unfortunately for them, that’s not the case.
Ultimately, your recipient determines what is and what isn’t spam; and that determination usually has nothing to do with the intricacies of the CAN-Spam Act. During my participation in these discussions, I sounded a few things off Mark Brownlow, who has what is perhaps the most comprehensive email marketing site on the Internet. Fortunately for all of us, Mark took the time to clarify a few things about the issue.
Please read his blog post and associated article, Marketing Email or Spam?
I can’t recommend it enough, even for those of us who think that we have a good understanding of the issue already.
