No matter what level of email marketing experience you have, failing to follow these simple email marketing best practices can affect your email campaigns’ success.

By sticking to this checklist, you can help guarantee more opens, clicks, responses and ultimately sales, (if that’s your goal?)

Branding:

• Does your email feature your logo, corporate branding and colours?
• Does the branding on your email match the same style and feel as your website?

Content:

• Does your message contain the benefits to the reader? How will they benefit from your offer, latest news or new product or service etc?
• Does your email include well-placed, clear and compelling call-to-actions? Is it obvious what you want them to do next?
• Is your email well structured and have an even balance between text, images and links?
• Have you avoided using spammy words in your subject line and body text?
• Is your subject line intriguing and persuasive enough to make the recipient want to read on?

Personalisation:

• Have you tried personalising your email with the customer’s name, yet without over-personalising the email?
• Is your ‘From Name’ a named person or just a generic one such as info, sales or support? Using a name can help make it feel friendlier.

Data Management:

• Have you recently checked to see how up to date your email address data and contact groups are?
• Is your sign-up process as easy as it can possibly be? Have you personally tested it recently?

Legal Bits:

• Does your email contain any of your corporate details? Full company name, head office address, a contact number?
• Is your unsubscribe link clearly visible, simple and straightforward?

Technical Design & Testing:

• Have you tested the your email to see how it renders in different mail clients and web browsers? Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo etc?
• Have you included a link for the email to be viewed in a new web browser page?
• Do your images have alt text so that content will still appear even if the images cannot due to certain mail client settings?
• Have you kept the resolution size of your images and logos small and checked that they load properly and quickly?

If you can tick all these boxes, you’re ready to go!

For many email marketing campaigns, it is all about trying to increase your click rates and drive more customers to your website.  A simple tip to help you achieve this is to try using visual ‘buttons’ for your call-to-actions instead of words and sentences with links.  A well placed, compelling and persuasive button may just help you drive more traffic to your website.

Actionable buttons like ‘Sign Up Now’, ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Download Now’ will help customers easily identify what you want them to do next.

As always, test your email campaigns to see what kind of responses your emails with button links receive, and whether your customers use them more.

For more information or help setting up your button links, please call Mark on 0845 313 0912 or email enquiries@26.co.uk

Whenever you create your HTML email campaign in Suite26 or download your own predesigned email template, always make sure you have a plain text version created as a backup.

Why create a plain text version?

1. Mail Client spam filters are much more likely to filter an email that does not include a plain text version as well as the HTML version.
2. Some people prefer plain text and have their mail client settings configured to only display plain text. No plain text version = blank email.
3. Some mail clients and mobile devices cannot display HTML emails.

How it works

When you create both an HTML version and a plain text version of an email, Suite26 will automatically send the email as one combined email. If a recipients’ email client can read HTML, they receive the HTML version, but if the recipient’s email client cannot read HTML, then they receive the plain text version and not a blank email.

How to create your plain text version

After you have finished putting the finishing touches to your HTML version of the email, simply highlight all the content (select All) and press copy. Then click on the Plain Text Content tab, and paste it in. This will insert all the text content in a plain text version without your graphics and using minimal formatting.

For more information or help with creating your plain text version, please call 0845 313 0912.

It has been bane of email marketing for designers and marketers for years, but it has just been revealed that background images can now finally display in Outlook 2007.

With a few modifications to the code, here is how to set it up:

First you have to add xmlns: v=“urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml” to your html tag.

Secondly, within your style tag, add the following selector:

v\:* {
behavior: url(#default#VML);
display:inline-block;

Then finally, within your table cell, you must add:

<td width="600" height="402" valign="top" bgcolor="#000000" background="images/yourimage.gif">
<!—[if gte mso 9]>
<v:image id="image" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:1;' src="images/yourimage.gif"/>
<v:shape id="text" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:2;'>
<![endif]—>
<p align="center" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#ffffff; font-size:18px;">This is the text in front of the background image.</p>
<!—[if gte mso 9]>
</v:shape>
<![endif]—>

When selecting your subject lines always remember: the shorter you keep your subject lines, the more deliveries you’ll receive and the higher open rates you’ll achieve.

Before you send your next campaign, take a look at the link between the length of the subject lines from previous email campaigns and the number of unique opens and total clicks they received.

You should also carefully consider that subject line word choice, word order and recipient awareness are also vital factors in receiving more deliveries and opens.

We recommend that you stick to these points when writing your next subject lines:

1) Keep the subject line as short as possible
2) Avoid using ‘Spammy’ words such as; Urgent, Free, Buy Now and symbols like !!, ££, **
3) Only use longer subject lines when there is considerable reason to do so
4) Whenever you’re unsure, always test your emails.

It appears that a recent change to Gmail has automatically started adding margins around images.

Most people will not notice the change, but if you sending an email which requires to images to  be placed right next to each other you will may see a gap between them.

This can be remedied by adding a simple "display: block;" to your images like so:

<img src="image.png" style="display: block;" />

When creating your email campaigns you want to do everything you can to ensure that your mail reaches your recipient's inbox.  Whilst most spam filters keep tight lipped about what would cause a message to be marked as spam, Microsoft has released a short guide of things to avoid getting caught in the Outlook junk filter.

You'll find the guide here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010450051033.aspx

Most points there are fairly obvious and would never be used by legitimate mailers, but a couple there may catch people out who use a term in a legitimate way.

The guide is not a complete list and there are many other factors that could still cause your email to get blocked.   It should also be noted that this guide is for the filter built into the Outlook client only.

Here at Suite26 we always advise you to test your email campaigns as much as possible in as many different email clients before sending.   It's easy to register a Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail account and just send a preview message to those accounts, but we would also recommend using an email testing service such as LitmusApp which will test your email in a number of different email clients and against lots of different spam filters.

Recently Gmail announced a new feature that allows recipients to click a 'unsubscribe from this sender' link within the Gmail interface to be removed from future mailings.   The same feature is also available to Gmail users when they use the 'Report Spam' button.

Gmail users access this link by first clicking on the 'Show Details' link when they receive a message, as seen in the image below.

We are pleased to announce that Suite26 now supports the additional unsubscribe method the Gmail is providing.   A Gmail recipient clicking on this link will be unsubscribed from you contacts within minutes of clicking the link and you will see the unsubscribe recorded in your usual campaign reports with a reason of 'Feedback Loop'.

At present Gmail will only show this unsubscribe link when the email has been signed with DomainKeys/DKIM so that they can be sure that the email has come from a valid sender, it is therefore important for you to setup an authenticated domain with Suite26.  It only takes a few minutes to setup an authenticated domain, it's totally free with Suite26 (many providers will charge you £100s to do this) and, even better, it will help your deliverability - what are you waiting for?

We are often asked why the links in an email campaign often show up in blue when received by a number of different email clients (ie; Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc).   Blue links are the default behaviour for most of these email clients but there are a couple of quick things you can do to ensure your links are the desired colour in the majority of them.

Please see our help article about changing link colours in your email for full details.

By adding an authenticated domain into your Suite26 account you could improve the deliverability of your e-mail campaigns.   Sending from an authenticated domain ensures your mail is signed by DomainKeys, DKIM and validates against SPF records.   Additionally, the link tracking URLs in your campaign will use the same authenticated domain which can sometimes help when it comes to getting past spam filters on your recipient's computers.

An authenticated domain is by no means a guaranteed way of ensuring your email does not end up in spam folder, but it can certainly help.

For more information please see our help article about authenticated domains, DomainKeys, DKIM and SPF.

Setting up a domain is easy and should only take a few minutes.   You will need to know how to make some DNS entries for your domain (your web host should be able to help you with this).  If your domain is already hosted with Global Gold then we can make the changes for you.

There are no disadvantages to setting up and authenticated domain, only advantages, therefore we recommend that all users set up an authenticated domain as soon as possible.

Full instructions can be found in our help centre: Set up an authenticated domain for DomainKeys, DKIM, SPF and SenderID

As always, if you need any assistance please do not hesitate to contact us.