On the subject of Email marketing

Recently a lot of companies are looking to old clients, offline customers or otherwise ‘cold’ contacts to drum up new business.  This is a great idea,  but can seriously harm your company’s reputation if not done well.  Here are some guidelines from our recent experiences.

DO: Put yourself in their shoes

This is the key to all of the items that follow – always spend some time trying to put yourself in your contact’s mindset.  Consider how you react when you get an email from a company you don’t instantly remember.

DO: Introduce yourself

People are not likely to instantly remember that they bought something off you 1 ½ years ago, especially if it was offline and you’re contacting them online. A big part of reminding them of who you are is the look & feel of the email template itself.  Make sure that your template is on-brand and carries over consistent elements such as your logo that they may remember.

Keep branding of your template consistent with offline and other brand implementations

DO: Remind them of how you have their details

Here you want to answer the question “Why are they sending me an email?!” and build up the legitimacy of your message. The more detail you can put into your reminder the better. Including a reminder of how you got their details significantly improves how well the email is recieved.

Examples:

“Dear Rachel,
You ordered some V-Pure from us in September 2008. We are getting in touch again to let you know that now have a brand new website for the world’s highest quality Vegetarian Omega 3. We look forward to seeing you soon!”

“Dear Rachel,
You registered with us in April 2008.  We are getting in touch to show you our new format newsletters and 15% off to our loyal customers.”

DO: Thank them by giving a special offer

Say thank you for their time and patience by giving a special offer code or discount.

Example:

“We want to offer you 10% off to say thank you for being a loyal subscriber!  Just enter the code DATJN15 at the checkout to claim 10% off.”

DO: Allow them to leave your contact list easily

For messages to cold contacts, one of the biggest issues you have to overcome is people hitting the Junk button when they don’t recognise you.  Overcome this by allowing them to unsubscribe easily – and you’ll actually be surprised by how few unsubscribe when you allow them to do so in such an easy way.

Example of an easy unsubscribe

DON’T: Sell, sell, sell

Selling in your email is okay if balanced by all of the above, but certainly do not launch straight into your products without it. If possible, don’t sell at all in your first introduction email, and instead look for the long tail result of converting a cold contact into an interested one.

Selling to cold contacts done well - one product is profiled on an email announcing the new website with a polite introduction.

I’ve just recently joined the Datadial team, and one of my key responsibilities will be to manage the ever-growing need for email marketing. But often it can be hard to think about where to start, so here are my 3 points for growing your email newsletter.

How often will I need to send?

You should be realistic with the frequency, and make sure you stick to it. If you know you’re busy then try to fit the newsletter around your other business routines:

• If you are a service company, like Datadial, then around 4 newsletters a year is sufficient for gently keeping your clients up to date.
• If you are selling products, then seasonal emails for a new collection release, and emails when you are holding a sale or special promotions is appropriate.
• For news and information services, the frequency could even be as often as once a week.

Subscribers should know how often they expect to hear from you before they sign up. This wording can often be incorporated to the sign up form itself, e.g. “Sign up to our weekly newsletter here”.

Your contacts

The most important success factor of your emails will be your contacts list. This is definitely a case of quality over quantity. To get the most from your newsletters, your contacts should be a concise list of interested people – the more targeted your list is, the more effective it will be.

As a guideline, you can get an effective contact list by including anyone who has…

• bought a product or service from you in the last 2 years – they may just need that one reminder to buy again.
• opted-in to receive your email newsletter by signing up from your website.
• signed up to your membership, either online or on a paper-based form, and opted-in to receive your newsletter.

We definitely advise against buying contacts lists from marketing agencies or scrambling around to get as many contacts as possible. This will only lead to people being annoyed at your company for sending them emails they haven’t asked for. Sending newsletters to those who have not opted-in also risks our position as a whitelisted email provider, so we monitor for unusually high bounce or unsubscribe rates to ensure that you are not compromising our permission to send bulk emails.

Once your contacts have signed up, make sure that you do actually live up to your promise of sending a regular newsletter. This may sound very obvious, but when someone has given their explicit permission then they do actually want to hear from you, and it can be damaging to your reputation to only send twice a year when you have told them you’ll send once a month.

Make it look pretty

Don’t underestimate the graphic design of your email. With professional services, you can send attractive graphical emails to your contacts which builds trust with your brand, and makes your email less likely to be interpreted as junk mail. We can also setup your account so that anyone who cannot see the graphics will still get a useful email from you. All of our templates are tested in the main popular email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to make sure that it will look great for all of your contacts.

A small, but very important, factor of your email template is the footer. This is the area that should always include your company details, including a physical address, to show that it is a genuine email. There should also be a friendly unsubscribe link for those that no longer want to receive your email. It does you no favours to hide this link, as it will only make those who have already decided to leave your emails more frustrated at your company. We often word these links something similar to:

“If you no longer wish to receive our emails you may unsubscribe here, but we’ll be sorry to see you go. You can always sign up again from our website if you change your mind.”

Adding the method for signing up again shows that they are in control and that they are always welcome to join the list again.

You may have noticed that AOL recently rolled out a new web based mail client for AOL.com. As part of this change, they are now disabling images by default. AOL are not alone in doing this and they are among a dominant group of clients that block images by default. So the result is that you just have to expect that a vast majority of your contacts will first see your message without images; it’s just a fact of life.

What can be done?

Hopefully most contacts will choose to turn images back on by default, but not everyone will choose not to do this. For those customers who won’t add your From to their address book, and who haven’t turned images on, you need to take the next step: Alternate Text.

Setting Alternate Text

What is Alternate Text? Alternate Text, often called an Alt Tag or Alt Text, is an attribute of an image that is shown when that image isn’t loaded. You can easily add Alternate Text to any image in your message within the image popup in your message editor. And you should always do this to every image as a rule. If you are editing HTML by hand, you just need to add an Alt attribute to your images.That’s it, there’s not too much to do on your part. Hopefully any serious email designers out there were already using Alternate Text for all your images. For those of you who weren’t, now you know, and you should start implementing these changes right away!

Among many other draw backs of office 2007 it is also going to cause headaches for email marketers.

What’s happened?

Previous versions of Outlook used the Internet Explorer engine to render HTML emails.  This  meant that designers were able to use sophisticated, CSS-based designs which is why most email messages look so good these days.  You could be reasonably sure that  if the message looked fine in IE, then it would look fine in Outlook. 

The bad news is that instead of using the IE-based HTML rendering engine, Outlook 2007 will use the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine.  This is bad news.  Word is useless at rendering html and this move by Microsoft signals the end to many of the tricks that email designers rely on to create professional email designs. 

For example, of the effect that this will have take a look at two examples:
Sample email in Outlook 2003�
Same message in Outlook 2007 email client. 

The good news is that these issues are solvable, so dont despair, read on.

What will be different?

For a quick overview of the highlights, read below.  (Note that many of these changes affect HTML-level elements in your email design.)

1. No longer will you be able to have background images in DIV tags and TABLE cells.
2. No nested background colors. A background color in a DIV or TABLE cell displays fine.  However, if you nest another TABLE or DIV within the element, the background color will disappear.
3. No FLOAT or POSITION attribute in DIV tags.  In other words, CSS-based layouts won’t work in Outlook 2007.  Tables only going forward.
4. No FORM tags.  Embedded email surveys will not work in Outlook 2007.  Even worse, Outlook 2007 actually strips out the form elements, so your recipients will not be able to tell if a form was there to begin with.  No animated .gif files or Flash content.  Animated .gif files just won’t animate.  With Flash, you’ll just get a big red X.

If you are a web designer, we suggest that you read the complete, sleep-inducing overview of the design conventions that will not be supported in Outlook 2007.   Also, Microsoft has provided a downloadable validator that will help you validate your HTML for the Outlook 2007 engine.

What does this mean for me?

If none of that made sense, then you’re probably not a web designer.  In which case, you need to know the following:

1. Don’t panic.  The whole world isn’t going to switch to Outlook 2007 overnight, thus, you have plenty of time to re-think and re-work your email design(s).  Given that many of your recipients will migrate to Outlook 2007 over time, you and/or your designer should obviously take these restrictions into consideration going forward. 
2. Email design isn’t dead.  These restrictions will not bring back the days of ASCII text in a telnet terminal.  You’ll still be able to convey your brand and “design” in your email marketing communications, you just might have to jump through a few more hoops to get there.
3. Some Bronto templates will need an overhaul.  For those of you that use Bronto’s default templates, we’ve already identified those that we will need to re-design in order to adapt to these changes.  We’ll get started with these soon, so stay tuned for an update.
4. Test!  You can download a free trial of Outlook 2007 and add it to your testing routine.  Whilst Outlook 2007 is not widely used at the moment, undoubtedly it soon will be.