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.

Embedding video into emails has become a hot topic, and there are recent developments that are leading to some limited support for direct playing of embedded video in email.  However for today – here’s the best way to get video into your email campaign in a way that will be viewable by virtually any email client.

The best method is to change your mindset from ‘how to I embed Video in Email’ to ‘How to I incorporate Video in my Emails?’ (assuming of course that you have determined that your should add video).

We’re simply going to add a graphic image to our email that looks like a video to be played, and we’ll include a link to a hosted video.  The video can be hosted on YouTube, your site, … wherever.  Our example belos is hosted on YourTube.

1. Take a screenshot of the video displaying in a video player. (Here’s a YouTube example from a Mini commercial).
2. Add a prominent “play” button to the center of the image.
3. Put the screen shot in your email, linked to the page where the video is hosted (don’t forget your alternate-text attributes).  Here’s how the graphic within your email will look – you can click on the image below to go to the actual video:

Play the Mini Commercial

Here are 5 great examples by www.stylecampaign.com - they’re consumer-oriented but they’re still excellent examples of how to simulate video in email.

Tip: Make as much of your supporting copy HTML text as possible. The examples above all use images, when they could have used HTML.

Next Up:  how and When to Use Video in Email

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

At Pinpointe, we’ve been using DKIM and SPF for nearly a year for our customers – at no extra charge. 

 If you want to know more about which ISP’s are presently using Authentication and/or Authorization to verify the validity of your email (and thereby decide whether to deliver your email or possibly drop it into Ethertrash) – you can download the full table a the ESPC Coalition site here:

A brief summary is included below:

If you want to learn more about DKIM Authentication or SPF Authorization – two steps you should be taking to improve your email delivery, check out our other Blog entries:

http://www.pinpointe.com/blog/deploying-dkim-authentication-in-4-simple-steps

http://www.pinpointe.com/blog/install-an-spf-record-to-improve-email-delivery

Our goal as marketers is to develop a ‘relationship’ with our audience.  Generally speaking, people respond to people better than they respond to ‘things’ – like your company.

Based on our split testing, we’ve found that in most cases, you’ll see better results by using a specific contact person (yourself for example) vs. a general address like ’support@’ or ’sales@’, or just using your Company name.

Your recipients take only a second or two to decide whether or not to open your email. If they do not recognize your company, they are likely to skip over the email. Also, general addresses are less personal, which reduces open rates.

Actual Results

Based on analysis of various campaigns across our system we have seen that using a specific personal name vs. a general email address as the send-from’ address can improve the net open rate by 15% – 35% (or more), with a similar coresponding lift in click-through rates.

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.

Each Webinar series we run, we get questions about the difference between hard and soft bounces.

A ‘Hard‘ bounce is a permanent fatal error such as – the domain no longer exists (company went out of business), the email does not exist (the person retired / left the company / died). Most Email solutions, including Pinpointe’s on-demand email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’.  Hard bounces are automatically flagged and removed from your list so that you do not ‘waste’ email credits sending to non-existent emails (doing so can also damage your email credibility).

A ‘Soft‘ bounce is an intermittent, temporary condition. For example, the recipient’s email server might be temporarily overloaded or offline; the recipient might be over their inbox quota size or there might be a temporary problem with the remote server configuration.  The most common type of ’soft’ bounce reported is ‘Blocked Due to Content’ – you guessed it – caught in a spam filter.  (Tip: Reduce Blocked Due to Content’ errors by running your online spam checker when editing your email campaign.)

Soft bounces are automatically re-tried up to 3 times over the next 4 days, per campaign. After 3 campaigns (a total of 9 retries), if an email is still undeliverable, it is then considered a hard bounce and the status in Pinpointe is changed to ‘bounced’.

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 »

If you send email campaigns long enough, you will run into spam filter issues.  As a legitimate email marketer you can still expect 20%+ of your emails to just get lost in cyberspace, mostly due to overzealous spam filters. 

SPAM filters / firewalls use multiple techniques to determine whether your legitimate business email is SPAM .   Today’s filters rely heavily on your domain and server reputation, but most filters still factor in your email’s content, and are based on the spamassassin engine.  Content-based filters review your content and assign points each time they see something that looks like a spammy phrase, and certain criteria get more points than others.  If your campaign’s total “spam score” exceeds a certain threshold, your email is sent to the junk folder.

So “what’s the threshold I need to stay under?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Clicks can be tracked for both HTML *and* text based emails (and multi-part emails too since that includes both HTML and text).  How?  Pretty easily.  When your email campaign goes out (assuming you have selected ‘enable tracking’), Pinpointe automatically converts your actual link to a link to a Pinpointe redirect program.  When a recipient clicks your link, they’re redirected from our server to your original URL (in the blink of an eye) and we track the click. That helps us generate our slick, real-time campaign reports telling you which links your recipients clicked and when.  It doesn’t matter whether the email is in HTML, Text or Multi-part – the operation is the same and we instantly record link clicks.

This post explains how Email opens are tracked …