E-mail marketing tips from the pros
Recently, I attended a webinar on e-mail marketing sponsored by Target Marketing. There were no big surprises. The experts discussed a few tactical principles that generally help improve effectiveness. Here’s a summary with some of my own thoughts thrown in:
1. Keep your copy short. E-mail is not as much a reader medium as a scanner medium. People get a lot of e-mail and want to breeze through it. If you have a big pitch, link to a page where you can expand on your topic.
2. Keep the design simple. Yes, many people have high-speed connections. But as bandwidth has increased so has volume. Simple designs with small, optimized images load quickly. Text-only messages loads even faster and may have the added benefit of avoiding spam filters, since a lot of spam is now image-based.
3. Give people several clicks. There may be some debate on how many, but from what the gurus said in this webinar and from my own experience, I’d say from 3 to 7 links on average. However, the experts didn’t talk much about text e-mails which can work quite well with a couple sentences and one link. Then there are e-mail newsletter formats that could have dozens. So as always, rules of thumb are not really rules. Read more
The e-mail marketing problem you never knew you had (and why you can’t fix it)
If you’ve been doing e-mail marketing for more than a week, you know about some of the problems with this exciting new medium.
Lists filled with undeliverable addresses, wildly inconsistent spam filtering rules across e-mail servers, and inconsistent rendering of design by different e-mail readers are some of the most common issues that will plague you.
But there’s one pernicious problem you probably don’t know about. It’s lurking behind every e-mail marketing campaign you launch. And it can cause you enormous grief.
The worst part? You can’t do a darn thing about it.
I’m talking about the system administrators who sit in front of computer screens and make on-the-fly decisions about your e-mail.
The politically correct line is that marketers and Internet tech guys are on the same side, both wanting to block spam and assure the delivery of properly conceived e-mail marketing. The reality is that many system administrators are antagonistic to the commercialization of the Internet. And they’re not at all happy about your using e-mail to sell things.
One such system administrator recently told me, “CAN-SPAM isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. What you have to watch out for are system administrators having a bad week.” In his opinion, ANY e-mail you send that isn’t specifically requested is spam. Period. End of discussion.
That probably strikes you as extreme. But it’s not uncommon. For some, spam has come to mean just about any e-mail that people don’t want, whether the sender follows the rules or not. Read more
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