Give your subscribers value.
Your subscribers are busy. They typically don’t have time to pay close attention to every piece of information in their inbox, so you’ll need to make the important information very accessible: highlight the main thoughts you want to communicate with a headline, using a larger, bolded font, or a set of bullet points, only providing the details necessary. Provide a link to a blog or a web site for more detailed information. If your subscriber is truly interested in further research, they will follow the link, but you don’t want flood people with too much information, or they won’t process any of the information.
Don’t use too much text in your emails; it will overwhelm your readers. Keep the content small, easily read, with prominent calls to action. Most calls to action will be links to specific areas of a web site. In your email, make use of call out areas in specific areas of the email to highlight specific thoughts. Studies have shown that the content placed at the top and left are most visible to most readers. It’s where we’re trained to start reading, and by default, we tend to look there first.
Offer value to people by providing information that is relevant and meaningful. Don’t try to “hard sell” someone, but rather, simply build the relationship. When you build rapport with your subscribers, they’ll view you as the resident expert, and will certainly consider your knowledge resources in their purchasing decisions. And that is what your emails are all about — increasing your bottom line.
Design Tips: Email Don’ts
Here’s a list of things to avoid in your emails!
• Advanced HTML tags such as <div> or <iframe>.
• A heavily nested table structure
• Javascript
• Cascading Stylesheets to define page layout or advanced CSS to control things like margins and float location.
• Spaces in HTML links.
• Empty cells – best practice is to use spacer images to control cell size
• Flash or other multimedia programs – unless it is clear that some recipients will have issues rendering the multimedia and or flash
• Embedded images – too intensive to download and can be pushed to attachments
• High level ASCII characters such as ®, or ©.
• Large images that frustrate users by taking a long time to download.
• Images with lots of text – use images for pictures only, and send any text as part of the email content. This makes the email smaller and maximizes the number of people who can view the text message.
Email marketing can sometimes be a little daunting, but I hope these tips keep you out of the ditch…
Design Tips: Email Do’s
Here’s a list of some methods we recommend to make your emails most effective:
• Attractive layout and vibrant color schemes
• Font sizing to assign value to the words
• Call-to-action areas: Use repetition to tie in the design elements but make it obvious in some way that it’s different than the rest of the email
• Images – but make sure the overall size of the email and images is kept small (< 100KB)
• Properly formatted, properly closed HTML tags – some email clients are very finicky and will not display poorly formatted HTML.
• Fully qualified links (for example, make sure that each link starts with “http://”) and ideally end in an extension (.html, .htm, .asp, .jsp) or query strings
• If link ends in a directory i.e. http://www.eloqua.com/products ensure you add a backslash “/” to allow for Netscape browsers to realize the link http://www.eloqua.com/products/
• Colour – don’t be afraid of colour but don’t abuse it. Generally, a maximum of three colours should be used (colours in logo or image do not necessarily count towards this colour maximum) as any more than that usually appears messy and amateurish.
• Simple CSS to control the appearance of style elements such as font and bullets.
• Headers that are between 600-800px wide.
Why Email Marketing?
Building Customer Relations with Email Newsletters
Email marketing is one of the best ways to establish and deepen relations with your customers. Why? First, the people who opt-in to your email newsletter are people who are genuinely interested in your products, services and expertise. They want more information. They are members of your targeted market. A prospect sold on your expertise will soon be sold on your products or services.
Secondly, email marketing is incredibly affordable. While traditional advertising requires a hefty budget for design, printing and production, media placement, and so many more, the cost for sending a mass email to many customers and prospective customers is extremely low per contact.
Third, email newsletters are so easy to create and use on a regular basis, and can target customers with messages that are tailored specifically to them. Newsletters can also be formatted to maintain and reinforce a company’s branding and corporate image.
Can’t you just send out an email from your own email account? Sure, you can. But there are inherent risks in doing so, and even more benefits from using a paid service. First, when sending email from your own account to many recipients, you run the risk of being blacklisted by anti-spam measures. While getting blacklisted is not an irreversible obstacle, proving the validity of your emails to the offended anti-spam organization can be troublesome, and your emails, even your normal emails, may be undeliverable to many addresses until the situation is resolved.
On the other hand, using an email service lessens the likelihood of getting flagged by the spam cops. Email campaigns are “dripped” on a specific schedule to specific service providers to stay under the radar of the anti-spam measures.
Most paid services also provide powerful statistics for email campaigns that help measure effectiveness. Imagine being able to see who has read your email, who has clicked links in your mail, which ads were most effective. Imagine being able to track when someone forwards to a friend, and then add their friend to your subscriber list! With statistics like these, your campaigns can be adjusted regularly to return the best results.
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Email newsletters are extremely effective in bringing in more visitors to your website, resulting in more sales. It is greatly effective in bringing return customers and picking up new customers as well. With a proven email newsletter system, your marking campaign will soar! Your email newsletter is an invaluable resource for your business. Get started today with Online Outbox!