The basics of getting Email Marketing right

Following on from my post yesterday on the basics of SEO, I thought I would do a follow up, the basics of getting Email Marketing right.

The major problem with email marketing is that there are so many email clients out there: Outlook, Google mail, Yahoo mail, Thunderbird. There is a great pdf from Campaign Monitor detailing which HTML elements work in which clients.

The first step has to be the design. Everything I design I put into Photoshop first and decide where I want the bits and pieces to go and how I want them to look. When I am happy with the design (and the client is happy with the design) I talk away from it for a couple of hours. This is because the next stage is turning the design into a functioning HTML document – and no matter what anyone tells you this is a process of problem solving not creativity. The one design tool I would stress when creating Email HTML documents is the use of tables – say away from positional CSS as much as possible, use inline styles and table elements to layout your page. Campaign Monitor’s blog is a great online source of information for Email Marketing. 

Second you need a list of names, because at the end of the day you need to send the Email out. To the best of your ability make the list as active as possible. Try and put together email addresses and names you have had recent contact with. There are a number of sources where you can buy lists of email addresses but I try to stay away from that as much as possible. There is no definitive list of people you want to target, and these lists are expensive, there will be some people you want but there will also be some people you don’t. I’m not saying, never buy a list – sometimes B2B lists are very good sources of drumming up new business, but whenever I can I try to get my clients to employ data capture and create their own list because at the end of the day they are going to know their clients and/or prospective leads better that a generic mailing list.

So now you’ve got the design, the HTML document and the list of names you need a program to distribute them. There are a number of open source email newsletter scripts online – check out SourceForge and I’d air on the side of PHP coding, but use whatever you find most comfortable installing onto your web server. The other option is to use Microsoft Word. Word converts HTML but it retains the structure as often as it doesn’t so it might take some tweaking it you want to use that. The major benefit of Word is that it embeds images so if you send an email through Word you are guaranteed to see the images in Outlook and considering that is the most common email client it might be fit for purpose. 

Once you have picked your distribution method, test, test, and test again. You are going to be sending an email out to a large number of people – take the extra 10 minutes to make sure it is right. Below is a check list of things to check:

• If your personalising, make sure you have the right person with each email address, if you’ve got one wrong then you’ve definitely got two wrong and there will probably be more.
• If you’re using imaging, and you probably should, make sure the images are small. When you’re testing you will be able to see the amount of time it takes to send an email through to your Email client.
• Consider the email address you are sending from. Do you want it to be a person’s email address, or do you want it to be an email account setup specifically for Email Marketing? Both have advantages, using a person’s Email makes the Email more personal and more people are likely to click through to the main body of the Email. Using a specific account, on the other hand, means that a number of people can monitor the account and that you can set up bounce back and positive and negative response folders to organise your Email campaign. 

As an extra point make sure that you don’t spam people in your list, monthly communications, in most cases, is the best idea. Also make sure you include an unsubscribe hyperlink within your Email, you don’t want people having to receive something they don’t want – that doesn’t help anyone.

This post was inspired by a post from themamakstall