Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

(Updated March 6, 2010) This is our fourth in a series of educational webinars covering topics to help improve email marketing response rates.  Pinpointe is joined by NetProspex to present ”Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates.”  Based on analysis of millions of B2B emails that have been sent through Pinpointe’s email marketing platform, this Webinar provides real examples of the best and worst performing emails, and specific writing tips to help improve email response rates.  Join us for this 50 minute on-demand Webinar (you can also download the slide deck), where we’ll cover:

- The Top 10 Best / Worst Performing Email Subjects
– Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates
– B2B Email Content – How to Structure Your Email Content
- Analysis and Tips for Effective Link Usage

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

		Download the Windows Media (.wmv) on-demand presentation (55 minutes / 28 MBytes)
		Download the Apple QuickTime (.mov) Downloads presentation (55 minutes / 21 MBytes)
		Download Slide Deck: “Email Marketing – Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates” (.pdf format) / 2MB”

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.

(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.

Embedding Video In Email – Overview

With over 15B emails being viewed online each month in the US alone, we’re seeing an uptick in customers asking about embedding video in email.  This led us to head off and investigate a few different questions:

• Can video be embedded in email?
• If Video can be embedded – how exactly do you do it?
• How / when to use video in email – will your recipients care?
• The future of Video in email

We’ll cover each of these in a series of posts.

Can Video be Embedded in Email?

There are a handful of possible ways to embed video with an email – here’s a quick rundown of the possibilities:

• Flash.  Flash can be embedded in a web page by using an OBJECT tag with an EMBED tag placed inside, to embed a Javascript that will detect if Flash is installed. But… Email doesn’t support Javascript.  Bummer – that means there’s no way to detect if Flash is installed.
• Quicktime.  In web design, Quicktime is typically inserted in a web page the same way as Flash is – using the OBJECT and EMBED tags to embed a Javascript snippet.  Strike-out for Quicktime.
• Windows Media. Again – embedding Windows Media in a web page relies on using a OBJECT tag to embed the media file.  Struck out again.
• Embedded MPEG. Turns out that there is a tricky way to embed MPEG video, but the solution is complicated and can only display if the recipient is using web-based mail and displaying in Internet Explorer version 7, (version 8 no longer works).  Keep in mind that you’re now sending a huge emails – since the video file will be embedded and delivered to each recipient. 
  Given these restrictions, support is not really practical.  However, for the techno-curious among us – here’ a blog post by Anna Yeaman that describes the trick:  http://stylecampaign.com/blog/?cat=3&paged=5
• Animated GIF. Aahh. An animated GIF should look just like a GIF image, right?  Well Outlook 2007 explicitly does not support embedded animated GIFs (Outlook only displays the first frame of an animated GIF – thanks Microsoft…)  For other email clients that do support animated GIFs – there are still some tricky considerations.  In a nutshell:
  • Animated GIF’s don’t include sound.Animated GIF emails are not mobile friendly.
  • Animated GIFs are still subject to image blocking; their large file size will greatly increase the likelihood of being blocked altogether
  • Potentially high CPU load when playing back animated GIFs.
  • No user control – the animated GIF plays on opening

If you want to cut to the chase and know how the heck to get video in your email – here’s our “How to Embed Video in Email’ posting.

Otherwise, here are our findings — we pulled together the table below that summarizes video support in a range of email clients:

Support for Video in Various Email Clients

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 already covered the top 10 Best performing headlines – so read, review and emulate.  Since no top 10 ‘Best’ list would be complete without the corresponding ‘10 worst’  list, here are the subject lines associated with the 10 worst performing emails campaigns, along with our opinion of what the recipient may have thought when they skimmed through their inbox.. and decided to delete the email instead of open it.

Join Us for a FREE Webinar on April 2 2009!

- Webinar about what? Why? From Whom? Aren’t most Webinars FREE?

Shop Early and Save!

- Oooh. Yet another promotional email. I’ve only received 219 of these today.

- What will I be shopping for? Early for what? Save how much?

Register to Win Your FREE iPod!!

- I already have 4 iPods.

- BTW, “Free” and “iPod” caused some of the emails to be filtered
(the email content for this email didn’t help either).

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »