Lucid Digital Media

Email marking is a complex beast, and one not altogether easy to get right.  There is a mine field of do's and dont's, technical and non-technical, to keep in mind whilst you construct your campaign.  In this post, we'll quickly take you through some of the more obvious things you'll want to consider.

Focus your email 

Firstly, what type of email are you trying to send?  What are you trying to get across to your customer?  Will this be a promotional email promoting a special offer or your products of the week? Or are you sending a news update with important new information about your organisation or its services?  All these questions have a large bearing on how your email will look, specifically, how it will be laid out, how the copy will read, etc.  Its important you define the purpose of your email and who its intended for before you start.

Design

Once you've defined the focus of your email, its time to start designing and building it.  The design should be clear and well laid out, get straight to the point, avoid unnecessarily large logos and headers.  Product images should be of good quality, as large as practical and special offer pricing should be clearly visible, clearly showing the savings that can be made.  Newletter type content should be split under appropriate headers, if possible, include some sort of nav that allows the user to quickly get to the content they are interested in.  There is a lot to consider here, so be sure to test your design on potential customers, getting feedback at each stage.  You should also be sure to provide facilities (a link or contact address) where people can go to opt-out of your future email campaigns, in some countries this is a legal requirement!

Build

There is also a lot to consider when building your email.  Bear in mind that there are a lot of email clients in circulation, many render emails differently and its not an area where standards prevail.  The trick is to test your email on as many email clients you can get your hands on.  As a minimum, you should be testing on all versions of MS Outlook since 2003, recent versions of Windows Mail and outlook express, Apple Mail 2 and 3, MS Entourage 2004 and 2008 and Mozilla Thunderbird.  This will cover 99% of your potential viewers.  You should also make sure you craft a text only version of the email specifically for people who either choose not to, or for whatever reason can't receive HTML emails.

Audience

It goes without saying that your mailing list is key.  You should only be sending emails to customers who have signed up to receive them (customers who have opted-in).  Sending emails to people who don't know you is called Spamming and can lead to your future emails being marked as SPAM on a SPAM black-list and being lost in the ether.  In some countries this is also illegal and could lead to a heavy fine (or worse!).

Sending

So you now have your design, its built and tested on as many email clients as you can lay your hands on, your mailing list is clean and ready to go! Next you need to find a way to actually send your emails.  There are several ways you can achieve this, ranging from putting all the email addresses in the BCC field of your MS Outlook (not recommended!), through to writing your own bulk emailing script and sending it through your own email servers!  The way we favor is to find a 3rd party bulk emailing company such as dotMailer or Communicator.  

These companies provide extensive facilities for easily sending your email through their servers.  You can easily upload your mailing list, test your email build with small groups of testers and make tweaks and changes to your hearts content.  These services also provide extensive tracking facilities which help you to determine the effectiveness and ROI of your campaign, you can then use these stats to help inform and tune your next campaign and increase effectiveness.  They will automatically track bounce backs and handle opt-outs (people who don't want to receive your emails anymore!).  In addition, they will also isolate you as far as possible from SPAM blacklists which are the bane of any email campaign.

One last thing...

One last thing to consider before you finally click that send button is actually when to send your campaign.  There are varying schools of thought as to what is the best time to send an eshot.  We take the opinion that it largely comes down to a combination of common sense and knowing your audience.  It pays here to do some market research and try and find out when your customers are likely to be online and willing to look at your email.  As a rule of thumb, don't send it last thing on a Friday, or towards the end of the day.  Try to send it during the day if possible when people are looking at and paying attention to their emails, if they see it in their in-box first thing in the morning, they are likely to tidy it straight into their trash before they properly start for the day, especially on a Monday!

Hopefully this post will give you some helpful guidance on the sorts of things you should be considering as you construct your email campaign.  Every email campaign is different so there will be things here that are more or less relevant to yours.  Above all, do your research and know your audience.  Lastly, test, test and test again, once you press the send button you can't go back so give yourself the best chance of success the first time around!