A few tips about getting the most out of your e-mail marketing campaigns. No particular order:
1. Avoid all-caps, symbols. Sending messages with “FREE,” “MAKE MILLIONS FROM HOME,” “$$$$,” “!!!!!” and “NEW YORK JOBS” in the subject line are sure ways to get dumped into the spam filter.
2. Personalize. If your message is customized to a specific, correct first name, it’ll be far more effective.
3. Lose the big fonts. Keep your body copy consistent, avoiding big fonts and variances in size.
4. Look informative. Make your e-mail campaigns look like newsletters, even if they’re not. This includes using tables in your HTML code.
5. Weight Watchers, e-mail style. Are your messages too fat? Put them on a diet. Anything over 40K could get you pinched and sitting in the virtual trash bin.
6. Trusted IP address. Stay away from internal IP addresses and use a trusted third party provider like Constant Contact or ExactTarget, who have relationships with large e-mail service providers like AOL, Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail. Plus, if your own IP gets banned from an e-mail provider, it could cause major, unnecessary headaches.
7. Consistent ‘From.’ Once you get a ‘From’ address that works, stick with it. Changing who an e-mail is from can set off red flags.
8. “Add us to your address book.” When you send e-mails - particularly the initial “Thanks for joining” message - ask the recipient to add your e-mail to their address book in order to get onto their personal whitelist.
9. Remove bounced addresses. An excessive amount of bounce-backs in your campaign can cause problems. Do your best to keep a clean list.
10. Go text. My experience says to stay away from intricate HTML e-mails and opt for text-only. Also, considering the various pixel widths of e-mail providers, the fact that some (Gmail) are starting to automatically delete images from messages and the growth of mobile, text is a good way to go. At a minimum, make sure your third party solution offers both versions when sending out an e-mail (HTML and text-only).
11. Test, test, test. Whether you call it A-B or “Champ vs. Challenger,” test what layout works best with your audience and keep going with the winner.
12. Get a tune-up. If e-mail is an important part of your marketing strategy, consider getting an annual tune-up. A great service to do so is Email Delivery Audit.com.
Yes, the influence of search, the growing importance of RSS, SMS and ever-maturing spam filters are making e-mai’ls life a little tougher, but it’s still the Web’s No. 1 activity. And if used intelligently, it could be your best friend.
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Blog sponsored by Electronic Recruiting Exchange.
April 12th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Great entry. A significant part of our business is delivering targeted emails on behalf of our clients to the 120 million candidates in our network’s targeted email database. We deploy several campaigns a week and so I’ve acquired a fair amount of experience in this field over the years.
I completely agree with almost everything that you’ve written, but disagree with your recommendation about plain text versus HTML emails. In our experience, HTML emails are opened (read) far more often and clicked through far more often, both of which lead to far more applications and hires. Your recommendation to send plain text to those who are only able to receive plain text and HTML to the rest is a good one, but you shouldn’t assume that an HTML email will be delivered without its graphics if you send it to a gmail or other such subscriber. Simply test. Have your vendor or in-house list manager sign up for email accounts with all of the major consumer ISPs. Before deploying the email, test it to those addresses. Proof is in the pudding.
Also, one more suggestion: always include a “tell a friend” feature. You’d be amazed how many people will click on that to forward a copy of the email to their friends if you simply ask them to do so. Yet the same people won’t forward the email to their friends if not asked. It isn’t that they’re trying to do you a favor. It is that the idea of forwarding the email just won’t occur to them unless they’re asked.
April 17th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
We recently conducted four focus groups to “test” our recruitment marketing campaign and interestingly enough the people in the focus group (people who were employed in our industry and with our competitors) were put off by the HTML email we showed them. Their feedback was it felt too “spam-like” and that they would prefer to receive such a message in text versus HTML. Also, they fetl it would get “caught” by their spam blockers. We are going to run a test a little later in the year and send an HTML version to one group and a text message to the other group and see if that open or apply rates differ significantly. Any more info on this subject would be helpful!