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I was talking to a new friend of mine, Louis Wing from BeyondROI, recently about email marketing trends and statistics. He was a founder at a company that dealt exclusively with email marketing from the application service provider standpoint. We spoke in detail about his views on email campaigns, technology and to some extent where the market is heading. I have combined his thoughts and my own in an effort to formalize a small, concise style guide for email marketing. This is by no means anything new, just a quick summation of good practices and procedures. If this means nothing to you, I bet your CIO and CMO will find it useful.

In no certain order:

• For the marketer - Use clear, clean and strong text.
  • Refrain from being overly aggressive with your verbiage. The point is to get enough information across while still leaving the viewer needing more.
  • Refrain from using words these words in your subject line: Free, Now, Order Today, Soon, Hurry and the like. Imagine that the SPAM filter has a list of words it hates; I bet these words are on that list.
  • Don’t use punctuation in your subject line. If you use an exclamation point in your subject you might as well just send a note to the SPAM department letting them know ahead of time. The ellipsis is another no-no that tells the SPAM filter to add some more points to the emails SPAM equation.
  • Add a paragraph or two to the bottom of the email, but above the footer. Use this paragraph to talk about the company so that even on small or image intensive emails you have good image to word ratios, not to mention one more place to promote your brand awareness.
• For the designer - Select compelling and germane images.
  • Find and use images that speak to the viewer immediately. Imagery that is complex or requires study is useless when you only have seconds to get them to click the links and visit your site.
  • Use one font color when you can. SPAM filters rack up the points when they see more than one font color on the email; and they especially hate red. So don’t use red.
  • Use bold only when you absolutely have too. Never bold entire sentences or paragraphs - SPAM filters are malicious to bold.
• For the HTML developers - Use clean markup.
  • SPAM filters hate junk HTML, even more that coders. You are not writing your email to be CSS compliant and use the latest HTML tricks. Use HTML that you might have written in 1998, not 2008. No center tags, no DIVs, no SPANs and no FIELDSETs either. They make your site look great; this isn’t your site.
  • Use good ALT text at all times. When Outlook and Gmail open an email, they block the images by default. Use of the ALT text might be the only chance you have at getting your point across.
  • Remove width and height elements from images. This will allow for Outlook and Gmail users to see the message without the funny broken look until they decide to download the images.
  • Never use nested tables. Lotus Notes and Netscape both render these incorrectly, so skip them entirely. I know this is more work from the beginning, but it is worth it.
  • Write your code by hand. WYSIWYG editors are chatty and verbose while SPAM filters are quiet and thoughtful. Make sure your code is under 100 KB.

It is very important to get the members of your marketing lists to add your company email address to their contacts. This will ensure that your messages get to them, circumventing the SPAM filter entirely. Of course, you never know who has done this, so stick to the rules laid out above.

According to Constant Contact, an email marketing firm, the most persuasive and powerful words in the body of an email include the following:

You, your, discover, free, healthy, easy, introducing, gain, new, money, advice, results, sale, proven, benefits, effective, save, value, now, win, right, why, most, safe and guaranteed.

A good tool that I use to check for an emails SPAM rating is this one at contactology: http://www.contactology.com/check_mqs.php. You cut and paste your HTML code into the form and it runs against the rules as contactology sees them. This is subjective, but I applaud their effort. One email that I sent out had a rating of 77 out of 100; I wish I had used this tool first. Granted this site is there to lure you into using contactology, but using the tool is free.

No one wants to be black-listed as a spammer, so making our emails more intelligent and paying attention to the various rules of this game are extremely important to your brands good name in the market. I recommend employing a professional who has played more than a few innings in the game too. Turning to a hosted solution makes a lot of sense. Using an application service provider is a cost savings and you also get a knowledge pool that otherwise you would have to staff internally.

As a side note, eight out of 10 email subscribers say they know exactly what they’re doing when they hit the “Report Spam” button in their email clients, according to a new study by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition. The key take away is the importance of recognition by recipients of the ‘From’ and ‘Subject’ lines for making decisions on how the treat email.

Other results from the survey, which assessed email users’ attitudes and preferences toward email management:

• 83%: Used the Report Spam button in their email clients at least once
• 80%: Use it without opening the message
• 73%: Base decision on the “from” line
• 69%: Base decision on subject line
• 20%: Use the spam button to unsubscribe from the mailing

Source: http://www.espcoalition.org/

For more reading on this subject please visit these links:

• Marketing Stats at EmailLabs: http://www.emaillabs.com/tools/email-marketing-statistics.html
• Design Tips at EmailLabs: http://www.emaillabs.com/email_marketing_articles/html_email_design_tips.html
• HTML email tips from MailChimp: http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/html_email_mistakes.phtml
• Email Marketing 101: http://www.email-marketing-101.com/
• Encoding Email to Prevent SPAM: http://www.ohlone.edu/org/webcenter/emailencoding.html

Lastly, learn and understand the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Not understanding the limitations and liabilities that you and your company face is a hazard you can not accept or overlook. At $11,000 an infraction, you might want you CFO to understand it too. It will help explain your costs on the email marketing front.

Matt

Tags: ASP, BeyondROI, CAN-SPAM Act, contactology, email, EmailLabs, Gmail, Google, iPhone, IT, MailChimp, Microsoft, Outlook, SPAM

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