Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

(Updated 12/15/09) This is the first in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. The interactive session demonstrates tips to improve delivery and email response rates for your well crafted HTML emails. We also cover tips to help ensure your email gets read once it actually makes it to the inbox.

Email Marketing 101 focuses on email content and covers the following topics:

• Update on CAN-SPAM Requirements
• Designing for the Inbox: Think “Above the Fold”
• 21 DOs and DON’Ts – Tips to Improve Email Delivery

The total play time is 55 minutes; the on-demand version, accompanying slides and 10 page Q and A sumamry are below.

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck below… . And hey, please Diggit, Fave or Tweet about it!

		Download Slide Deck: “Email Marketing 101: Tips to Improve HTML Email Response Rates” (.pdf format)“
		Download 8 page Question and Answer Summary (pdf format)”
		Download the Quicktime (mpeg 4 / .mov) on-demand presentation (57 minutes / 17MBytes -downloads before playing)
		Download the Windows Media (.wmv) on-demand presentation (57 minutes / 21.5MBytes)

If you’re interested in more advanced topics – check out Email Marketing 201 Webinar (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) where we take it up a notch and explain in detail, the end-to-end trials and tribulations of an email message as it flows from your outbox to (hopefully) the recipients inbox. This webinar is more technical and ‘deeper’ than our previous webinars.

Every copywriter and journalist knows the importance of a powerful headline. The same applies for email subject lines, because as much as 40% of a recipient’s decision to open an email is based on the email subject (and sender).  Despite that, many still underestimate just how important the email subject line is. So here are some anecdotes, facts, and guidelines that can help you write even better subject lines (and remind you how much you should focus on them.)

The 50/50 Rule of Email Subjects

According to some of the best copywriters of all time, you should spend … Read the rest of this entry »

We ran multiple experiments on subject lines and summarized one particular case study example in our recent webinar: “Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses (you can download the slides and view the on-demand version).

Here are the email subject variations:

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Our customers ask for advice on how to write killer email subjects. We point them to our advice here “Tips for Writing Email Headlines That Work” where we explain the different approaches to an email promotion and describe top strategies for crafting winning email subject lines. This is an excellent starting point and anyone who takes the 20 minutes to read and apply these common sense guidelines will improve results.

But ‘guidelines’ – whether for email subjects or any other topic – are meant to be a first step to point you in the right direction.  Never underestimate the importance of measuring your campaigns in order to fine tune results. Split testing with a few variations can easily help you double the final response rates. In this entry, we look at empirical data from email campaigns to see how the top strategies match up against actual results and discovered some interesting data points.  In all we reviewed hundreds of campaigns and tens of millions of emails to see how customer campaigns measure up. In general, the advice and guidelines are spot on, but we also found that for every rule, consistently there’s an exception.

Our recommendations?

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This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers.  You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’. 

If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like Pinpointe, Constant Contact or Exact Target, then this applies.  If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply.

What is “SPF” and what does it do?

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam – it is about giving domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren’t. While not all spam is forged, virtually all forgeries are spam. SPF was created in 2003 to help close loopholes in email delivery systems that allow spammers to “spoof” or steal your email address to send bzillions of emails from another company’s domain (like yours). 

SPF is an open standard – it isn’t owned or controlled by any one body or company.  More information about SPF can be found at:

• http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview
• http://old.openspf.org

Why do I want to have SPF records for my domains?

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According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.  Chances are, your email looks downright awful when viewed on a Blackberry or similar.

The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their mobile devices / smart phones to do real-time checking (often skimming) of email, and make a quick decision whether to keep the email and read it in more detail later, or delete it. They then go back and review / act upon more important emails from their desktop.

The survey also indicates mobile email users don’t click on links from their Blackberry or PDA — only 54 percent have ever clicked on a link from their mobile device. Users don’t make online purchases via these devices either (well, not in the US anyway – Europe and AsiaPac are different markets altogether).

A Few Tips for Emailing to Blackberry Users

This is common sense stuff but follow these quick tips, and you’ll improve responses overall:

• Deliver brief, interesting messages in multi-part MIME (both regular HTML and text-only versions).
• Revise your Goal: Aim for the Follow-up.  Since Exec’s using a Blackberry are only skimming and not clicking – make sure the value proposition is concise, clear and uncluttered, and you might as well do away with the links.  Entice the reader to review the email in mode detail when they return to their desk.
• Don’t put links to graphic images at the very beginning of your email.  Depending on the device’s settings, the recipient may simply see an a bunch of links.  The recipient either has to scroll forever (a major source of thumb-cramp syndrome) or more likely, they’ll just delete your email.
• Include a link to the web-version of your email. Most ESPs have this feature – when you create an email, an HTML version is automatically created and hosted on the ESP’s website. Try sending a text-only email with a brief introduction and a link to view the message as a Webpage. This also allows users to view the HTML version when users later view the email on their computer.

What is ‘ALT Text’ and why should you care?

As most of us have now experienced, many email clients now DISABLE graphics images by default. We haven’t seen specific metrics on what % of email inboxes have images disabled by default but general consensus seems to be in the 50% range, and increasing. So, if your email includes images, the recipient will see only a box with a red ‘X’ where the image belongs, until they manually enable ‘display images’ in their email client.  This has implications with respect to email design.

To demonstrate exactly what we mean, here’s what your well-crafted, graphically pleasing email looks like in an Outlook preview pane when image display is disabled:

This doesn’t exactly jump out and say READ ME!

So how do you improve readability and and design if images aren’t going to be displayed?

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