Email marketing is tough business. With so many regulations to follow, spam filters to bypass, and bounces to sort through, I thought I’d compile a list of tips. Follow these suggestions, and you will begin to see results coming your way.
Brand Consistency: You built a brand over the years- right? If not, start immediately! Your brand’s consistency leaves a lasting impression on your prospects and clients. Make sure your email campaigns follow the same guidelines: logos, colors, look and feel of your website, etc.
Image and Text Ratio: Images are nice to look at, sure. But did you know that it can effect your chances of delivery to the inbox? Too many images can get you blocked due to size, or get your campaign classified as SPAM. Many email clients such as Outlook may disable images that are over a certain size- so if your subscriber doesn’t look to enable them, they may miss your message of the week. Avoid relying on text in images and always use plain text for optimal delivery rates.
Use Tables: To keep your campaign as consistent as possible across the many ISPs, your best bet is to code your HTML in tables. Steer away from CSS, as it gets stripped by many ISPs, causing your email to render improperly.
Edit Images: Don’t be lazy- use photo editing software such as Photoshop to optimize your images for the web. It will shrink the file size while keeping the image as crisp as possible. You don’t want your subscribers on slow connections to get frustrated by slow load times, or worst, get your email blocked!
Use Plain Text and Web-Safe Fonts: Pasting text from a website, or MS word passes proprietary formatting code along to your email campaign. This is bad news for when your message hits the inbox and cannot be read properly. To make sure that the text you are pasting is clean, plain text: paste it into a text editor such as Notepad (Windows) or Text Edit (Mac) first, and then copy from there and paste into your email builder to start formatting.
Use ALT Tags: Always use styled ALT tags to make sure your readers experience your content, even when your images get blocked. I constantly come across marketers who ignore this simple best practice.
Be CAN-SPAM Compliant: Take a look into the CAN-SPAM compliance guide to better understand your rights, and what to avoid in your campaigns.
Test and Validate your Code: Errors reduce your message’s effectiveness as well as your brand’s reputation. Make sure your code is valid using the W3 Validation tool.
Go Viral: There’s never been a better time to integrate social media into your emails than now. Create a company page with all the major social networks, build a following, and stay brand consistent!
Good marketing!
