Okay- back at it.
One of the more informative sessions I went to at HOW was the “Design + Email Marketing: Supercharge Your Results” given by 2 of the lovely ladies at Emma out of Nashville. I’ll have to admit, this was a bit of a refresher course for me, but still great and useful information. Over the next few months I’ll be looking at my website, blog and email campaigns to see what needs to change to be more effective and more user friendly.
One statistic that stuck out to me was that for every $1 spent on email marketing, there is an average return of $42. BUT- that’s due largely in part to extending the brand experience to your inbox.
This email was sent out before I redesigned my current website, but is an example of how I extended my brand across a different marketing platform. I like to keep a clean look of the overall design, allowing the images to be the focal point, to keep the look between my emails and my website consistent, allowing for greater brand recognition between marketing platforms. After listening to the information presented in this session, my email structure will most likely change to utilize a lot of the best practices listed below.
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So how do you do that? Well… multiple ways. Let’s start on the back-end prep for email campaigns, first.
To send emails, you need an audience. (duh). For some companies, when they sign up with particular advertisers, a list is provided to them (a lead list) or they are able to purchase lists of their target market from outside companies. Many businesses, especially small businesses will rely on their websites, blogs or word of mouth to build their lists, as this is the most cost effective way. If you go this route, make sure the sign up box is above the fold (more on this in a minute), static on the site (meaning it won’t disappear as someone navigates thru the website) and it’s available on you social media sites. Do you see mine over there? On the far right at the very top? Yup- static, above the fold and super simple. (PSSST… put your name and email address in there.)
So, now that you have someone to talk to in your emails, you want to be able to know if they’re reading what you have to say. Tracking is huge when it comes to email campaigns- what’s the click-thru rate? What’s my bounce rate? How did this email compare to this other email sent last week/month? This can be compared to Google Analytics for email. Lots of great information comes from tracking your emails. Great services like Emma and MadMimi (which I use due to my smaller list size and my emailing schedule) and plenty of others do the tracking for you, which is a huge advantage over building html emails and sending them thru Mac’s Mail, Entourage, etc.
These services also organize your lists in a manner that makes sense to you and how you want to interact with your clients. For instance, if I broke my lead list down to be very specific, I could have one bride in 2-3 different lists based on time of year, month, stage in planning, etc. This could mean they receive 4-6 emails from me a month, depending on my email scheduling.
So, your lists are in order and you’re ready to push your message out to the masses… but what are the best practices for this? This is best explained in a bullet point fashion, so here we go.
- 72dpi and RGB : emails should be handled like web pages, essentially (notice I said LIKE and not AS … big difference, but more on that in a minute). Use small files sizes for images for quick load time.
- 600-700 pixels on average wide. This will keep the majority of your readers from needing to scroll horizontally to read your words of wisdom
- file formats : png- cleaner image presentation, but larger file size … jpg- great for photos, details and gradients … gifs- great for vector art and simple color compositions
Okay- you have the basics of setting up your email. Let’s start designing.
There’s a phrase “above the fold” that comes from the newspaper industry that holds true throughout out all marketing and publishing sectors. Visualize a newspaper on the newsstand, folded in half. What information is most visible? The information at the top of the page where the biggest new story of the day is listed- the headline… where is it? Above the fold. Same goes for the magazine rack and the bookshelf. This is what will grab your audience and what will make your reader “unfold” or scroll thru the rest of your email. Give them a teaser of the information you want them to act upon so that the reader is enticed to keep going or clicking thru to your website, blog or special offer. (This could digress into copywriting best practices, which I’ll try to have one of my copywriting expert buddies cover in a few weeks).
Now, for some, this next step might seem long and drawn out, but it’s a really important step once you learn the value in it (And it will get easier to do on-the-fly after you have a few under your belt). Layout your email using blocks- be it in a design program or on the back of a napkin. Ensuring your information organization make sense to your reader and make sure it has a nice flow is really important to the success of your email campaign. Where do you click? Where do you want images to go? Where am I putting my content? Remember that many of your clients can get hundreds of emails a day, so grabbing them right away with clever copy will make them more likely to click thru and read your entire email, so filling the top portion of the email with images they have to download isn’t very effective.
Now, once you have the look of your designed, let’s get it created. I’m enlisting the ol’ bullet points again for this.
- Old school html and tables are your friend. Many email programs are not able to recognize CSS styles. This is where the LIKE vs AS a website comes into play. To be honest, email is dumb. It doesn’t handle fanciness very well, so apply the KISS method to make sure all platforms of email can read your message.
- Use words, content, whatever you want to call it. Designing with images will only guarantee that your message will not be seen by the majority of your audience. As you’ve probably noticed, many of the email softwares available now block images within emails and prompt you to download them manually. Don’t make your audience work for your message by burying it in an image. This doesn’t mean to eliminate images. It means use them effectively and smart.
- Use alt text if you have an important message in an image. Sometimes it’s inevitable that you’ll want to make an offer or important information stand out from everything else on the page, so you’ll most likely design this piece of information. If that’s the case, be sure to repeat the message in the alt text so that your audience doesn’t miss this message if they opt to not view the images in your email.
All in all, with a little planning and some thought, building a successful email marketing campaign can be relatively easy and after awhile, fast and easy to create.
