Pinpointe - Business Email Marketing Blog » Design for the Inbox

Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes

Pinpointe — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:39:33 +0000

At Pinpointe, we see very smart customers make mistakes that cause their email response rates to suffer. Here are the most common mistakes we see our new customers make: Not running the SPAM checker Pinpointe has a built-in email SPAM checker that evaluates your email content using the popular spamassassin spam engine, gives you a spam score and provides suggestions to help get your email to the inbox. Wise customers use it before sending any email campaign. Yet some customers don’t run the spam check and confidently send their email campaign to thousands of recipients, only to learn that 25% of their emails were blocked or filtered by spam filters because their spam score was too high. In the Pinpointe [...]

Webinar: Tips to Improve HTML Email Response Rates

Pinpointe — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:00:08 +0000

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: Designing for the Inbox: Think "Above the Fold" 21 DOs and DON'Ts - Tips to Improve Email Delivery The on-demand version, accompanying slides and 10 page Q and A sumamry are included.

9 Tips for Writing Email Subject Lines That Work

Pinpointe — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:25:36 +0000

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 … half of the entire time it takes to write a piece of persuasive content on the email subject. The same tip [...]

The Ideal Email Subject Line Length

Pinpointe — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:23:00 +0000

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: 1: %%First%% – [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) 2: %%First%% – [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) *Note 3: [Webinar] Case Studies Webinar: Using Split Testing to Improve HTML Email Response Rates (Feb 4th) – Please Join Us 4: [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) Notes: In version #2 we personalized the email introduction and used the recipient’s first name in several parts of the email. In the subject lines that have squarre brackets – [...]

10 Best Performing Email Subject Lines

Pinpointe — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:28:43 +0000

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 [...]

Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery

Pinpointe — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:10:27 +0000

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 [...]

Using ALT Text Tags in HTML Email

Pinpointe — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:36:38 +0000

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 [...]