Here are the three most common email marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them.

Not having their permission

The most important point first, not having permission. Suite26 is based on permission marketing. This means a recipient must have opted-in to receive emails from you or given you their permission directly, because they are interested in what you have to offer.

Purchasing a data list is definitely a no go area. If a recipient hasn’t given you their direct permission to contact them, they shouldn’t be emailed.  It is more beneficial to contact those people that do want to hear from you, than those that don’t and could report you as a spammer.  Plus those data lists are never as accurate as the vendors will have you believe.

Assuming your customers remember who you are

It’s easy to assume that your customers will remember who you are. However, your customers could be receiving plenty emails from several companies like yours, and so, we recommend that you include a sentence at the top of your emails reminding them who you are and why they are receiving the email from you.

This will immediately help hem indentify you and therefore, your customers may be more inclined to read your email, click the links and respond to your message or offer.

Incorrect links and spelling errors

We would always recommend including links in your email as they ultimately provide a way of tracking the success of your emails, using the click through stats. However, it’s important to use relevant links that the recipient will be interested in viewing and directs them straight to that webpage. Don’t just assume that the reader will navigate their own way to the relevant page from your site’s homepage.

It is very easy to make a spelling mistake in your email, or even type the wrong word completely and not notice it yourself. Always get a second pair of eyes to look over your email.  If possible ask a colleague or friend to read through your campaign and test your links before you send.

If there were ever a perfect example of why you should avoid purchasing data, this is it.

Today we received a copy of our local town council's business directory full of local business listings and yet we (Global Gold Network) were surprised not see ourselves amongst the listings.  We couldn't work out why we were left out and wondered what was the selection process was of our council's marketing people in choosing who did and did not feature in the directory.  You would have thought that 7 years residence should surely qualify us.

So we decided to contact our local town council and enquire about the missing listing.  To cut a long story short, it turns out that they used a Marketing company to produce the directory and they had purchased data containing "all the businesses in our town", but as it turns out, the data wasn't update, by 7 years it would seem.

And so, we get left out the directory and therefore miss out on potential business from local companies, all because a marketing company used purchased data. It’s not their fault the data wasn't accurate, but that’s the risk you take with purchased data.

Email Marketing Tip:

We have recently noticed that some web browsers are stopping the export contacts task from completing, therefore leaving some customers wondering where their downloaded file has gone. Fear not, here is how you can retrieve it:

- Click on Contacts in the top menu
- On the Contacts dashboard, find the widget box called Recent Contact Exports
- If it’s not on your dashboard, click on Add Widget
- In the Recent Contact Exports widget there will be a record of your recent export

- Click on Details
- Click on Download File

This will now give you your export contacts on a CSV file.

Suite26 allows you to personalise the subject line and content of your email marketing campaign with data pulled from your contacts database.  This will help to project a more personal and friendlier image for your email marketing campaign and help encourage recipients to open the email.

The majority of the contact data fields and any custom fields you setup within Suite26 can be inserted into either the subject line, email content or both.

How to Personalise your subject lines:

If, for example, you wanted to add the recipient's first name to your subject line you would place the following piece of code into your campaign details: {FIELD($firstname)}

Simply follow these steps to add personalisation to the subject line:

-Go into your email campaign
-Click on Edit Primary Content
-Scroll down to Insert Field

-Click on the dropdown menu and select your required data field (e.g. First Name)
-Click on Insert
-Highlight the code and copy it

-Come out of the edit primary content screen
-Click on Edit Campaign details
-Click on the Subject line field and paste in the code.

Happy New Everyone.  Lets kick things off with a new year email marketing tip for you.

Adding Alternative Text To Images

Images on HTML email designs do not always display automatically in most email clients, so adding a short sentence or description (alternative text or alt text) for each image gives the recipient a quick overview of what to expect, either before their email client loads the images or before the reader has to right click and download the images.

Another benefit of including alt text on your images is that it helps improve your text to image ratio on your email. Having an even text to image ratio is something that increases your emails’ chances of getting through spam filters and landing in your customers’ inbox.

To add alternative text to your images in Suite26:

-Click on Edit Primary Content
-Select Insert/Edit Image
-In the Image Properties box, type in your alt text description in the Alternative Text field as shown below.

How to add alt text to your images

After inserting your logo and images onto your email template, why not make them link through to a specific landing page on your website.

To set-up a link and drive more traffic to your site:

- Simply click on the image or logo you want to set-up as a link

- Click on the Insert/Edit link button in the toolbar menu.

- Type in your desired URL (e.g. www.yourcompany.co.uk/specificpage)

- Hit Ok.

You may then notice blue border appear around your image or logo (as shown above) and no doubt, you’d like to remove it.

To remove the blue border and make your email look sharper:

- Click on the image or logo again

-  Click on the Insert/Edit Image button in the tool bar menu. An image properties pop-up window will appear

- Type a 0 in the boarder field, as shown on the left.

If you need any help inserting images, creating links or removing the blue border, please give Mark a call on 0845 313 0912 or email enquiries@26.co.uk

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]—>