Email news and strategy

Happy Riding,
The Team at Big Mountain Bikes

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Choose Your Recipients: This is where you'll choose which customers or groups of customers are selected to receive this particular email. Using the FileMaker Business Productivity Kit, you can choose to send your message to specific groups or individuals who have opted to receive email from you. FileMaker or a similar program then will merge in personalized information for each customer into an email and place the personalized emails in your email applications' Drafts folder where you can review them to ensure everything looks good.

Then you're ready to send away. Be sure to read the next section before you press "Send" to make sure your timing is just right!

Send Your Email: Timing of the email is important. Most only have a life of three days. Thus, if you are marketing to business people at their offices, sending early in the week is usually better than sending on a Friday.

If you're sending to homes, recent studies show that weekends--especially Sundays--are best. But good days for sending email change as often as the hot new color for fall, so just test for yourself to see what works best for you.

Mysterious Image Gaps in Gmail

Have you noticed Gmail ruining your beautiful HTML emails? Are mysterious gaps appearing between your images? Well fear not, there’s an easy fix.

Recently, Google made a change to the way Gmail handles images in HTML-formatted emails. I’ll probably never know why they did this, but I’m sure there was a good reason. This doesn’t change the fact that it has caused problems for many people, like myself, that create and send emails.  As a result of Google’s change to Gmail, any image in your email that is supposed to fit tightly against another image will now show a horizontal gap.

Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome users are the ones experiencing this mysterious gap or spacing. Don’t ask me how Internet Explorer managed to avoid this problem. Some of you may have dealt with a similar problem in Hotmail already. The fix for that was to add<style>img {display:block}</style> to the top of your HTML file.

While both Hotmail and Gmail have the same issue, you’ll need to do some extra work for Gmail since it ignores style definitions that are not “inline”. Like I said earlier, it’s quite easy to fix. You’ll just need to add style=”display:block” into the “img” tag for any images that you want to make sure have no gaps or spacing.

For example:

<img style=”display:block” src=”sample.gif” alt=”sample” />

Also, don’t forget to go back and check any email templates that you created and tested in the past but are still being sent  to your subscribers. Even though they looked fine even last month, this change could wreak havoc on your design now.

Grow Your List the Right email Way

Written By:
Jenni Williams, iContact Senior Product Marketing Manager

How you grow your email subscriber list matters. Grow it the wrong way, and you’ll risk being marked as a spammer, significantly harming your reputation and email delivery rate.

List growth methods fall into three buckets: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Stick to the Good, and you’ll see increased delivery rates and achieve better results from your email marketing campaigns because you will be reaching people who are interested in hearing from you.

The Good: Permission-based

When building your contact list, you must have permission from each and every contact on that list in order to send them emails. When you don’t have permission, your email qualifies as spam. When gathering permission, use an opt-in method, preferably with a double opt-in, where subscribers confirm their intent to join your list by clicking on a link in a confirmation email. If you don’t receive permission via opt-in, then you wander into Bad territory.

The Bad: Automatic Registration or Co-registration

Automatically opting a subscriber into your list after a purchase or transaction does not count as getting permission. Co-registration is having an opt-in on another publisher’s page to generate email subscriptions. These methods may seem acceptable under the assumption that permission is implied, however, without explicit permission, your email is still likely to be marked as spam and increase your complaint rates. As a result, most email service providers – including iContact – prohibit these practices.

The Ugly: Buying or Renting a List

Under no circumstances should you ever buy or rent a list of email addresses. This is the number one reason for high complaints, blacklisting, and reputation-pounding bounces! The subscribers on the list have not given permission for their email addresses to be sold, and they will not appreciate receiving an email from you.

Grow Your Good List into an Even Better List

The key to growing your list is two-fold. First, offer your customers plenty of places to sign up for your list, and second, promote the value of signing up for your email program – include examples of the deals, discounts, white papers, etc. that your subscribers can expect to receive (think about what is in it for them if they sign up, then articulate that benefit).

Following are some good ways to promote your email program:

• Include a sign-up form for your email program on your homepage within the header, footer, and/or navigation bars. Give this critical email marketing tool the real estate it deserves.
• Online retailers, promote your email program via cart checkout with an opt-in checkbox.
• Brick-and-mortar businesses, promote your program at point of sale – gather email addresses electronically (if you are able), keep a fish bowl and paper sign-up forms by the register, but make sure you clearly message to customers that they are signing up for your email program.
• Offer sign-up opportunities via social media marketing. Include a sign-up form on your Facebook page; send tweets about the benefits of joining your email list with a link back to your Web form, etc.
• At events and tradeshows, offer a giveaway for stopping by the booth and dropping in a card or swiping a badge and joining your email list (just be clear that registering for the giveaway also signs a customer up for your email program).
• Include messaging for your email program as well as the Web address for your Web form on your product packaging, brochures and other print materials.
• Train your customer service team to sign customers up for your email program.
• Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your emails to encourage your recipients to forward the content to someone they think might be interested in it. Make sure you include an opt-in form in your email to make it easy for friends to sign up.

Once you get new subscribers, be sure to embrace them immediately by sending a welcome email that thanks them for joining your list. You may even include a subscriber-only discount or coupon in the welcome email to help increase engagement. Follow these tips and principles, and you’ll be on your way to a more successful email marketing program.

What are some ways that you’ve found to be particularly effective for growing your list?

10 don’ts when designing for email

Email marketing is probably the oldest and the most successful form of marketing for the web. Broadly, email marketing involves sending specialized custom emails to generate leads, promote an offer, serve targeted advertisements or initiate deals. Email marketing increases your brand’s radius, allowing you, the marketer to build robust brand value around your product.

But most marketers make a basic mistake – not creating email templates that are optimized for a typical user’s inbox. Sending emails that aren’t formatted, designed or properly structured actually reduces your credibility and when users see a scattered email in their inbox, they simply dont pay attention.

Now, how do you optimize your email templates for maximum conversions? This generally depends on  the subject of the email but regardless of the product or service you’re trying to “sell”, here are a few basic tips to create inbox optimized email templates for better conversions:

1. Don’t use a word processor to compose email templates

Office applications and word processors such as Microsoft Office and Open Office are great for writing documents but when it comes to composing or designing email templates, I would strongly advise you not to use word processing tools at all. This is because when you copy content, images and other elements from a word processor to your email inbox, the word processing application copies additional code into the HTML source of the email message. This can break the design of the email and in the worst case, the recipient may see abrupt code instead of the email text.

Instead, its a good idea to use HTML editors like Microsoft Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver to design email templates. If you’re not familiar with HTML editors, use the good old notepad application but please do not use a word processor for composing email templates.

2. Don’t ignore web-standards for HTML

When you write the HTML code for the email, be careful of how the HTML renders in different browsers. Precisely, the HTML code you use should be standardized and free from errors. Using obscure codes that are not supported in older browsers is considered a bad practice. Pay close attention to HTML formatting, alignment and the best practices that each browser supports and understands.

Email image

3. Don’t use CSS for layout

Even kids know that CSS is the best way to design for the web but in the context of email templates, I would suggest going back to tables. This is because tables make it super easy to customize your email template, anyone can modify the content without having to touch the code. Moreover, some email clients do not render CSS rules as well as a full featured browser does, so it might be a good idea to use tables instead of using CSS designs.

CSS gives you more options and grounds for creative design, but from the usability and compatibility perspective, tables are preferred. You never know how many of your recipients are still rooted to their spartan email clients that do not understand modern day CSS rules.

4. Don’t use external CSS files

I know proficient designers won’t hit a key until they are allowed to write CSS. If you must use CSS, I would suggest writing inline CSS and not calling an external CSS file into your email template. Most email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Outlook.com will remove <head>, <body> and other tags from your code so if you’re using an external CSS file in your code, the email body will break.

The best way to ensure that your CSS styles are rendered properly across every email service provider or client, is to use inline CSS for every element. This could mean writing more code but it’s not as fragile as external CSS.

5. Don’t use relative paths for images

If you write code in an IDE such as eclipse or use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver, you may be using relative paths for images. By relative path, I mean the IDE is given the local address of the image, with reference to your computer or your website’s internal folders. Whatever it may be, you should change all relative image paths to absolute image paths. An absolute image path will work universally while a relative image path will work only in a given set of development environments.

Email image

6. Don’t forget alt attributes for images

Alt attributes for images help search engines understand what your image is all about. Other than search engines, alt attributes can be useful for users too. For example, some email clients tend to block images by default, so the alt tag can give a clue about what the image is all about. If the alt tag appears meaningful to the user, he might be enticed to click through to learn more about your offering.

7. Don’t forget a plain text version

Always offer a plain text version of your email message, no matter how compelling and attractive your HTML email template might be. Some email clients or third party email apps may not support rendering email messages crafted in HTML, so you should also convey your information in an alternative plain text version.

Before you deliver an alternative text only version of your email copy, double check to ensure that the text only version is a mirror copy of the original email message. Both messages should exactly be the same, or it might create discrepancy in communication.

8. Don’t use long URLs

If your email body is long enough and has links in plain text, it’s going to mess up the presentation. A much better and prettier idea would be to shorten the hyperlinks with a URL shortener e.g Goo.glBit.ly

Email image

9. Don’t use video

I agree, videos are worth a million words, but embedding videos in email might not prove to be fruitful enough to justify the overheads — unless of course you upload the video to video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo and embed from there.

If you fetch the video from your website or attach the video as an email attachment, it’s going to take ages to load on the recipient’s end. Moreover, some email clients are pre-configured to filter emails with large file sizes, so attaching a video file can sometimes land your message in the spam folder.

10. Don’t forget etiquette

Okay this one is not really a design tip but it is of no less importance than the ones discussed above. You should be aware of email etiquette — proper salutations, tone, spellings, formatting, grammar, composition; all things that come into play here. If your design is outstanding but your copy sounds boorish, your email may go against you, instead of creating any impact in a positive way. Depending upon the subject of your email campaign, you have to compose the copy of your email, add salutations, compose opening and closing lines and so forth. Using the same lines in every other campaign is certainly a schoolboy error.