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!

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

From this feedback we would like to announce two small new features which may be useful in some circumstances.

Disable WYSIWYG Editor:

Some users design their e-mail templates in their favourite design program (Dreamweaver etc) and host the images for their mailer on their own servers.  In these cases it may be desirable to bypass the built-in WYSIWYG editor functionality. 

To turn off the WYSIWYG you will need to click on the Options tab, then Preferences and tick the Disable WYSIWYG Editor checkbox. With the editor disabled you will simply be provided with a standard text box to paste your HTML code into.

Disable Link Tracking:

Suite26 has always had the ability to turn tracking (opens & clicks) off on a per e-mail basis (available from the Send Campaign wizard), but it is now possible to disable tracking for a specific link within a campaign.

You may want to do this if you have a link which you wish to insert personalised information into (such as a membership number or e-mail address).  To disable tracking for a specific link you will need to switch the WYSIWYG editor into HTML code view and edit the link to add so that it contains rel="s26-no-track" - your link should look like this:

<a rel="s26-no-track" href="http://www.mylinkhere.com/mylink.html">

If you require any help with these new features or need further information, please e-mail support@26.co.uk and we will be happy to assist.