It’s incredibly unfortunate that there are no enforced standards for email clients like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and Outlook as far as formatting. Email is already kind of “stuck in the stone age” coding-wise. Since email doesn’t recognize css (cascading style sheets — the “rules” for how a website looks), businesses using email marketing have to use basic HTML to construct their message.

And even within this HTML, some email clients will pick up or ignore elements differently than others. Take Gmail for example. Gmail doesn’t recognize background colors, and 9 times out of 10 text will come through a smaller size than you intended it.

And don’t even get me started on Outlook 2007. Although a lot of people use this to look at email, it is by far the worst as far as standardized email formatting. Something about Outlook 2007 using Microsoft Word to run the HTML through causes many email templates to look like they went through a meat grinder.

The only way to make sure your email is going out to every one of your subscribers exactly the way you intend it to is to test, test, test. By far, this is one of the most important tips we can give you. In fact, if you only follow one of our ten email marketing tips, it should be this one.

Your system to be set up to test messages through multiple clients, so that you know what your message looks like in all of them. How does your newsletter look for those using AOL, Mac.com or Mozilla Thunderbird? Don’t know? Maybe it’s time to switch over to a system that can provide you that information, as well as info for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Outlook. You wouldn’t believe how different each of these can look with exactly the same HTML coding.

Testing also gives you the chance to read over your email newsletters multiple times to check for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. Send it to yourself a few times, as well as at least one other person in the office. A fresh pair of eyes can recognize a lot.

Save yourself the embarrassment of a mangled message or poor grammar — test, test, test! And give yourself the time to do so. It’s not worth trading time for quality, is it?

Want to know our secret strategy? We have checklists for everything that we fill out as we test. Everything has to be marked off before we send our messages. We think it’s the best strategy for getting it right, all of the time.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital
2. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission
3. Preview “Pains” – First Impressions DO Matter

However, it’s always a good idea to confirm this. You wouldn’t want to design your email marketing campaign around people 40-60 years old if your subscribers are all 20-35. By now you should know that buying a generic list is both illegal and a dumb marketing move, so you should have a pretty specific group of subscribers that you can analyze.

These are the people who have come to your website and were interested in more information, or people who were interested enough in what your company does to attend one of your events or come into your store. By looking at the kind of people who subscribe to your emails, you should be able to see clearly what kind of groups your subscribers fall into. You have a target market, you just need to determine who that is.

And once you do, make sure that your email marketing campaign is geared toward that group of people. Not everyone is the same.

Is your list mainly prospective clients/customers or are they people you have worked with before? Are they interested in information and tips, or did they subscribe for products and deals? Knowing this information is going to be the key to creating relevant messages and keeping your “list churn” (the amount of people who unsubscribe) down.

Prospective clients and customers want to hear how and why what you offer will benefit them. They want testimonials and incentives. Previous or return clients and customers want to know you care about following up with them — asking how their product or service was and if there’s anything further you can do for them.

Each company’s incentives will look a bit different. Sometimes it’s appropriate to incentivize with monetary deals, like free or reduced-price products and shipping, or a buy-one-get-one-free service or coupons. Sometimes your target market may benefit more from tips and tricks or advice. Think about what is most relevant for your subscribers, and you’ll find that you have a happy list full of people who actually enjoy getting your messages.

And isn’t that the most you could ask for in an email marketing campaign?

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
2. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital
3. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

Here are our tips for making sure your content is great every time:

• Consistency trumps creativity — ultimately, you’d love for your campaign to be both consistent and creative, but sometimes you just don’t have the time that month to find the perfect balance. And the worst thing you can do for your branding is have emails that are off the wall, irrelevant or unrecognizable.
• Match your branding – that means the logo, colors and content in your messages should be similar to, if not that same as, your website and other marketing materials. If people can’t match you up with other contact they have with you or they can’t even recognize that the email they received is from you, they’ll probably think you’re spam.
• Plan ahead, not last minute — if you’re pressed for time and struggling for content, you may throw something totally irrelevant into your message. Remember the saying, ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it at all’? Well, that goes for good content too. Your subscribers aren’t going to want to read something that has nothing to do with you or your business. It’s a great way to end up in the spam pile.
• Brainstorm your ideas & use a list – we recommend setting aside a designated time for brainstorming content for your messages. Think of as many as you can, without edits. Write them all down. You will need to go back later to make sure that the idea is consistent, but brainstorming provides you with a great way to come up with a bunch of creative ideas and keep them for backup. Don’t get stuck trying to think of one thing to say a day before you want your newsletter to launch — get a whole bunch of ideas that you can come back to and draw on.

Content is a way to hook a reader in and make them want to read what you have to say. Don’t spoil that or spam subscribers with bad content — you’re only harming yourself.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key
2. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
3. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

Other than a boring email, why would you want to spend extra time to personalize? Because it is yet another way to develop a relationship with your customers and clients. We’d hope that building a relationship with the people you serve is a priority to you and your company — it should be — and that your goal with email marketing is to further this relationship. There’s almost no better way to do this than to personalize your messages.

Personalizing will provide you with a two way connection. First, you’ll know more about your customers, and second, they’ll see that you took the time to include some information about them and reach out.

Now that you know why you should personalize, here’s how.

First, of course, you will need information about your customers. Basically every piece of data you collect about those on your email list can be used to personalize a message. The important first step is to make sure you’re getting permission, of course — meaning, in this case, that each person is supplying their information to you. Like we mentioned in the last Email Marketing tip, Get Permission, it’s important that the people receiving your messages have given you the go-ahead to use their data.

The easiest way to gather information within the rules is to include an Update Profile link in your emails. This does a couple of things.

1. Initial sign-up is easy — just an email & name — so that there aren’t a thousand boxes to fill out to get your newsletter. This will make sure that you get the highest initial opt-ins, while still giving each person the chance to enter more information later. The less initial information one has to give to sign up, the more likely they are to subscribe. Some studies have shown that even just one extra box can reduce opt-in rates by 40%.

2. If at any point a subscribers information changes, they can easily find and update their profile.

This profile information can be used inside an email message, such as referring to a subscriber’s first name in the greeting or title, or to their company name in the message. It could also be used for segments to send out different, highly relevant information and deals, for example by using their zip code to let people know when a nearby store is having a sale.

The second way you can easily gather information is when customers interact with you. You can document when they purchased an item, when an item was delivered, and even the name of the sale associate that helped them.

This information is great for adding in details to your messages, or to use for triggers. Want a message to be sent to a customer if you haven’t seen them in 60 days? You can do that. Want to send a special thank you to someone for purchasing an item? That’s possible too.

Of course, you can always use Profile information for triggers too — the best example being happy birthday messages.

There’s almost no limit to the categories you can create to personalize your messages.

However…

You don’t want to go overboard. There’s no set maximum amount of personal information to use in a message — that’s a judgment call — but we would recommend you keep it to just a couple key pieces. If you include too much personal attributes, it may distract from your message or be overwhelming to the reader. It’s also a bit Big Brother, and could creep your reader out or turn them off from giving you information.

The best strategy…

Would be to sit down with your team and discuss what the most relevant, useful data about your customers would be. Is it their zip code because you have multiple stores? Is it their birthday so that you can provide special incentives and deals? Is it just who last helped them in the store so they know who to ask for in the future?

Figure these sort of things out, and decide on the methods you’ll use to collect that data. Get to know the people you serve and personalize your messages for them. The benefits are greater than you might imagine.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key
2. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital
3. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

Spam. You get it, I get it, and we all hate it. Did you know that 94% of all email is spam (New York Times)? It’s insane how much of it is floating around in everyone’s inbox.

With so much spam around, here’s the most important thing you can do when setting up your email marketing campaign:

Get Permission

No one likes getting newsletters in their inbox that they don’t remember signing up for or agreeing to. These days, getting one of these unprecedented emails is enough to make readers immediately unsubscribe before reading what you have to say — or worse, flag you as spam.

Even if someone wrote down their email when buying a product or attending an event, if you didn’t mention that their email would be added to a newsletter list, then you don’t permission to add them to your email marketing list. You need to be explicit, not sneaky. Here are some of the things to avoid when developing an email marketing audience, and ways to grow your email marketing audience legitimately.

Bad Examples

• Buying your list off someone else
• Stealing or randomly generating a recipient list
• Adding everyone who has bought a product from you online or has given you their email for some purpose other than subscribing to your newsletter
• Automatically adding and check-marking the “subscribe” button on a sign-up form for something other than your newsletter

Good Examples

• Adding a newsletter subscription form to the front page of your website for visitors to use
• Adding an optional checkbox for newsletter subscription to info forms at events
• Using a double opt-in method, like a confirmation email with an opt-in link

Why We Recommend Getting Permission

Besides being annoying and very similar to spam mail, here is why some of the bad examples are particularly bad. They are against the CAN-SPAM Act requirements.

“The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.”

CAN-SPAM prohibits:

• “Harvesting” email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email
• Generating email addresses using a “dictionary attack” – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations
• Using scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email
• Relaying emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization. (Federal Trade Commission)

Here’s the bottom line:

You want your readers to WANT to read your emails. Getting permission will insure you don’t annoy your readers or get marked as spam.

Plus, wouldn’t you rather have a smaller group of dedicated readers than a massive list of readers who don’t care and/or feel spammed by your email? We thought so.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key
2. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
3. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital

This weekend we followed through on one of our hair-brained guerilla marketing ideas. Hatched months ago, we could barely wait for this day to arrive.

If you are a Mariners fan, or just a baseball fan in general you probably hate the Yankees, unless of course you live in NY. And no one is more loathed than Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) who left the Mariners and the fans that beloved him all in the name of cash. The $120 million or so the Mariners were offering was not nearly enough to buy Pay-Rod’s loyalty.

My personal run-in with his greatness, was outside of the Washington Athletic Club when as I was walking up the street towards him I witnessed him unwrap a piece of gum and just wad up the wrapper and throw it down in the street in front of him and me as he stared off into the distance. In his mind I wasn’t even there – I was nobody to be concerned with anyway. The thing that struck me, other than the incredibly bad manners, was the giant ego one must have to act so rudely right out in the open. I’ve rarely witnessed somebody litter – let alone a superstar. This is exactly the kind of attitude that has nicknamed him “The Cooler” because every team he joins gets better after he leaves.

This year A-Roid was caught taking steroids and finally admitted as much – very awkwardly, a couple of times. You can see the various confessions on YouTube. He also earned a new moniker this year: Stray-Rod when he was caught cheating on his wife who claims he emotionally abandoned both her and his children while philandering. It’s widely reported that he’s now dating Kate Hudson. Run Kate Run.

So with a fresh new batch of ammunition we decided to put a spin on a Mariner fan tradition of throwing out play money when he comes to bat. Our spin – we’d use real money. Of course, we also had to put a sticker on each dollar bill with a clever message (and our logo!). Here’s some of the messages that were used:

• Hit LEGITIMATE marketing home runs.
• Put your marketing on steroids.
• All the marketing power without the acne, needles, or shrinkage.
• Great marketing results, no asterisks needed.
• Cousin recommended email marketing.
• Legal in all 50 states, and the Dominican Republic.
• You can call us E-Broad.
• Marketing that actually hits when it counts.
• Even Scott Boras can’t get you a better deal on your email marketing.
• We’re willing to play for less than $33 million per year.
• Recession put a “Cooler” on your business? Call us.
• Email Marketing so good, your clients will feel “touched for the very first time.”
• Results so good, even YOU can afford the material girl.

We also put a more serious message on every note about Fighting Spam with a web URL. The lack of prosecution for spammers is pathetic – but I’ll leave that for another post.

So what could you do to get noticed that’s a bit outrageous? Think about it.

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