Our editor is divided into a five step process. Anytime during the campaign creation you can click on the progress bar at the top to skip to any step you need.

Step 1
Select the recipients for your Campaign. Expand the folders on the left to find your lists and check them to include them. Uncheck the list to remove it from the campaign. Most campaigns triggered by lead flows don’t need lists so you can skip to Step 2 in many cases. Don’t get hung up on trying to include a list if you really don’t need to.

Step 2
Campaign preferences such as the subject of the email, “From Email”, and “Reply-to Email” are set in Step 2.  You can also take advantage of our Auto-Authentication for improved email deliverability by checking the appropriate box in this step. Name your campaigns in such a way that they are easy to identify for future users of the system. Make sure you create folders to organize your campaigns in a meaningful way.

Step 3
This is the heart of the Email Campaign editor. We provide a WYSIWYG editor powered by TinyMCE to create and edit your HTML messages. Using the provided toolbar you can create an HTML email much like you would create a Word document. If you already have a template in HTML we have provided a place where you can paste that in. Just click the button on the toolbar and a window pops open. Paste in the HTML and save it. Your template is now ready to be tweaked if needed. Make sure you follow our Tips for Better HTML Email Design to get the best delivery rates possible.

Step 4
With one button press you can import your HTML email from Step 3 and save it in plain text. This is a great alternative message for those prospects that still use text-based email clients, especially on the go. The one button import process will sometimes create an email that has breaks in the middle of sentences. I prefer to take a moment and remove those so that it reads as I intended it. I’ll let the recipient email program do any word-wrapping if needed.

Step 5
The final step in the campaign editor is for scheduling the email and setting up advanced options. You can add suppression lists, assign personalization defaults, and even define a BCC recipient email address for every copy of the campaign. Again, you may not need to schedule an email that will be used in a Lead Flow. This is also where you can send a test email to make sure it looks good. Always test your campaigns before you send them out. Always!

You can find our full documentation on the Support Portal.

Richard Murdock (@shinyranger) is the Senior Manager of Customer Support at LoopFuse. Our goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible with our products.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

Using email based marketing campaigns is an effective and affordable way for companies to acquire new customers and build brand awareness. Activities such as email opens, forwards, and click throughs can be tracked and analyzed to provide insight into campaign effectiveness.

In order to better enable the tracking of this information, we recommend using a best practices approach when building the email message and present it here in an easy what to do and, more importantly, what not to do format:

Do:

1. Keep the layout simple. Reserve complex design for landing pages.
2. Use tables. Email clients have strict rules on how they display CSS.
3. Clean up your HTML. Spammers are sloppy. Don’t be a spammer.
4. Use actual size image. Some email clients will not stretch or tile your images like you think.
5. Test, test, test. There are a myriad of email clients out there and they all interpret HTML differently.

Don’t:

1. Compose an email in ALL CAPS. That’s a big trigger for SPAM filters.
2. Embed videos. Universal video support does not yet exist in email clients.
3. Use the word “Free” excessively. SPAM filters might nuke your email.
4. Use too many images. Some people don’t load images & if you have too many, they may never see your email.
5. Use attachments. Provide links for content

Oh, and one more thing – get them to load the images.

The secondary objective of an email campaign is to get the recipient to load the images of the message. Without having the images loaded, there is no way to track opens unless they click a link in the email so make them curious! For example, provide a column of the email message containing images that have a text header indicating the content of the image that they must click on to see the full content.

Keep the layout simple

Email layouts should be simple and direct. You can still communicate quite a lot of information with a simple approach and it will help in creating HTML code that is cross-platform compatible. The three row table (header, body, footer) with nested tables and content within is a good start.

Use tables

Email clients do not handle CSS very well. They especially have a hard time with DIVs for layout. That means that it’s time to dust off the old HTML books – or take the modern approach and look it up online. I’d suggest http://w3schools.com/ for brushing up on your table layout code. They have “Try it Yourself” buttons in each section that you see how code will look in the browser you are using. You may need to use some spacing cells to get things just the way you want them. Experiment until you have it right.

Set widths on cells

You will be relying on cell widths to align columns of text. You can use percentages if you don’t have a lot of images in the email, but they may look strange if scaled improperly. Be specific like this:

<td width=”200”>
<p>Information Here</p>
</td>

Keep the overall width under control

Try to keep the body of your email to no larger than 500-600 pixels wide. Keep in mind what people will be using to preview your email. A lot of consumers will see your email in a preview pane with just a couple of lines visible before they click on it. If that space is taken up by large images or irrelevant information they may not even open it. People are increasingly using their smartphones to access email on the go. Although I love my Android phone, the viewable area is much smaller than my desktop monitor.

Smart use of CSS

Again, CSS is not your best friend in email templates. Never attach it to the <body> tag. Do not try to link to external style sheets. If you do so, many email clients will strip it out before delivering it to the Inbox (*cough* Google *cough*) and that will simply destroy your layout. You can use it sparingly inline like this:

<table style=”font-size: 12px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>
<tr>
<td><h1 style=”color:#000099”>Title text</h1></td>
</tr>
</table>

Most email clients should have no problems with inline styling. If you do see problems in your testing, go back to early HTML formatting:
<font size=”5″ face=”arial” color=”red”>Sample Text</font>

Actual size images

Some email clients will stretch your image just like a web page and others will completely ignore the stretching rules. The only way to avoid this issue is to use images that are exactly the right size. This is where having a simple layout will play to your advantage. If you have a complicated layout with graphics stretching across table cells, you may have to slice them up just right.
There is some debate on whether you should explicitly set the width and height of you images. One problem with doing this is that you risk having gaps in your email while images are blocked. If you’re OK with that, then go ahead and set them, but just be aware.

Don’t embed video

Don’t do it. There are only a couple of email clients that can play video from within, and even then only if it’s in a certain format. If you need to promote a video use a still frame image and link that over to wherever you have it hosted (or on a landing page). This may change as HTML5 picks up and more clients can handle that coding but, for now, you might want to take a more simple approach.

Background Images

Background images are another sticky problem. I would suggest that you avoid use of background images wherever possible because of formatting issues in certain email clients. Outlook 2007 simply won’t load them. If you must use them, background colors or images must be assigned to the cell of the table and then width/height of the cell set explicitly. Even then you need to have content that will fill the height correctly.

Use Alt text for images

It’s generally a good idea to use Alt text for images in web pages and it’s useful in email campaigns as well. If people have blocked images they can still get information that may be interesting to them and prompt them to turn on images for further details.
An example might be a coupon image that promotes 50% off a product and alt text that states “Save money with this coupon”. It’s enough to get the person to turn on images to see what the exact deal is. The side benefit of this is that it will also count as an email open at that point. Blocked images prevent the tracking of email opens.

Use clean HTML code

Close your <li> and <p> tags. Spammers are sloppy. Don’t be a spammer.

Test, test, test

I can’t stress this enough. Test your email in several clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook. Make sure it looks good in Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Test those clients in several browsers such as IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 and 2010 took a great leap *backward* by using Word as their HTML rendering engine rather than Internet Explorer. This caused all sorts of compatibility issues with HTML display for those clients.

As long as you design for the lowest common denominator, you should be able to reach most email clients without a lot of extra workaround code. Keeping the layout simple will also help you focus your message. Be aware of how much space you have to capture a customer’s attention in their email client and use that to your advantage.

There are several places on the web that you can find free email templates, or even pay for some nicer ones. Here are a few examples I found when Googling about:

• HTML Email Gallery – http://www.htmlemailgallery.com/
• CampaignMonitor free downloads – http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/
• Template Zone – http://www.templatezone.com

So how is it that today’s B2B Marketing professionals think? Enter the 4Cs:

• Campaign: Think “outbound”… the catalyst to the chain of events that leads to a conversion at the end of the funnel, ie. tweeting, PR releases, email campaigns, etc…
• Customer: An anonymous web visitor, Prospect, Lead, Contact, or Opportunity.
• Channel: Inbound marketing avenues used by your customers to reach your content, ie. PPC ads, twitter, facebook, organic search engine results…
• Content: Web assets and artifacts such as website pages, landing pages, whitepapers, case-studies, or streaming videos.

More importantly, what led to this new method of B2B Marketing process?

A decade ago I might have said that marketers think in terms of Customers and Campaigns. The web wasn’t as inter-connected as it is today, the ability to track advertising spend was minimal, Google hadn’t made your content relevant, and email marketing was in its infancy. Today, marketers wrestle with the daily challenge of being able to identify which Channels are leading Customers to high-value Content, initiatied by Campaigns. Or to put it simply, which combination of the 4Cs is leading to the highest rates of conversion and sales. This can be a daunting task if it weren’t for the growth of marketing automation systems that tie all of this data together.

Central to the process, is a marketing organization’s ability to create, launch, and measure results. Marketing Automation systems today eliminate much of the heavy-lifting required to get a process such as this in-place. The primary benefit gained from a consolidated marketing platform, is that a marketer can launch a campaign, track customers through channels, analyze content and measure results (ROI) all in one place.

No matter what type of email I am crafting, I always run down a checklist of 5 things before I click the “Send” button. Because once that button has been pressed – there is no going back.

1. I want to make sure my call-to-action is compelling enough for the list of prospects I am targeting. Did I create content that is relevant to my target audience? Is there a call-to-action? Remember who your audience is before sending any email out. Is this a prospect list of C-level people or IT management? Customer or prospect? A technical whitepaper may be appealing to your IT friends but few CEOs will find the time or have the interest in this type of material. Read through your message one more time – make sure you have put something in the subject line that will grab your audience’s attention and make them click-thru.

2. I double-check that my personalized fields are pulling accurate data. The personalization feature in our email marketing tool is pretty powerful. I can add lead information directly from my CRM and populate it into an email campaign I am sending. Or I can pull contact information from an existing list in Loopfuse like a tradeshow attendee list. I think it is nice to add a personal touch to an email but you have to know your list and the accuracy of the fields you are pulling from. I used a list from a recent tradeshow where we had gathered information through a lead retrieval machine. The way that the conference had collected information was First Name/Middle Initial in the First Name column. If I would have sent an email using the personalization feature for the first name it would look unprofessional – “Hi Cindy C.” Always check your list for contact information accuracy. In addition, did you set your “personalization defaults?” This will prevent any of the personalized fields you have entered from appearing blank.  Instead of Hi “blank” your recipient would see Hi “valued customer.”

3. I read through my email and do everything possible to decrease my chances of looking like spam to my target list. First, make sure your unsubscribe link is functional and looks good. In Loopfuse, you have the ability to customize the link so that you are not just ending an email with some bold, black link at the bottom of the page. Let’s be honest, as a marketing or sales person you sometimes wish that unsubscribe link was not there. So I take the time to incorporate the link into the overall design of my email template. Now it is an integrated part of my email design and can even look like you personally added it similar to your signature. Second, have a read through my message and avoided any “spam” terms; for instance, do I have the word “free” scribbled throughout the text. And lastly, have I utilized the Auto-Authentication feature in our product. New to Loopfuse, using this feature lets the receiving email server know that the email is coming from “Loopfuse”, on behalf of “you” making your email look less spammy.

4. I send a test email. I cannot stress the testing enough. And Loopfuse makes it really easy with its new user interface to send test emails as you create your content. You just type in up to 10 email addresses straight from the campaign wizard and hit send. This gives you the ability to send your email to multiple email addresses and test the appearance within the different email clients. For example, when I test my campaigns I test to my @loopfuse, @yahoo and @gmail addresses. This allows me to see how my HTML renders in each client. Not only do you need relevant content in your email but you want them to look professional – no misspellings or weird characters added into the message.

5. I schedule my email campaign for a future date or build a lead flow that will send it out based on the prospect’s activity. Avoid sending emails to prospects too frequently. The last thing you want is a hot prospect to be turned off because he has received 5 emails from you in one week. Make sure you check to see how recently your list of prospects has been emailed. I avoid this issue by building leadflows for my prospects which automatically sends out emails over a certain time period – not too often but often enough to stay relevant.

Until next time…

The list below is composed of technology and usability items that we believe are a base-line for achieving increased deliverablity rates from your email marketing campaigns.

• IP Segmentation : Eliminating the techno-babble and simplifying this a bit… buyers should verify that a vendor is sending from more than one server. Why? If just one customer sends SPAM from that one server, every customer will be negatively affected, because in the eye of the blacklist-gods, you all look the same (because you share the same IP address). Most vendors provide groups of IP addresses that they routinely monitor and additionally segment high-volume or high-paying customers in certain groups. IP Segmentation and IP management by your vendor are the most important factor in email deliverability. If a vendor looks confused when you ask them about these concepts… run!
• Auto-Authentication : Many email marketing vendors today offer a built-in method to “auto-authenticate” your email messages as they are sent from their systems. Authentication lets the receiving email server know that the email is coming from “LoopFuse”, on behalf of “you”. By doing this, your email appears less suspect to email spam filters, because the email headers are not altered as though the email originated from a different source (something that spammers normally do). This is a great way to increase email deliverability… some vendors automatically enforce this, and other leave it optional. Keep in mind, that how your email will “look” to a recipient will change, read more.
• Opt-Out Enforcement : The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 makes it unlawful for an email sender to not include a mechanism for a recipient to unsubscribe from future mailings. Verify that your marketing automation vendor has some measures in place to force opt-out links or other means for recipients to unsubscribe.
• SPAM and Abuse Policy : A missing or laissez-faire SPAM or email abuse policy is a signal of impending doom for your email marketing programs. If your marketing automation vendor does not enforce good email sending best practices, you can count the minutes until every email server the vendor has will be blacklisted and so will your email marketing programs.
• Email Blacklist Monitoring : Vendors normally subscribe to third-party blacklist monitoring solutions which enable them to monitor which of their IP addresses have been blacklisted and quickly remove that IP address from the available group of sending IPs. It is difficult to verify whether a vendor is actively monitoring blacklists and taking appropriate steps, but in any event, the question should be put to the vendors.
• Email Abuse Handling : Verify that your marketing automation vendor offers some method for recipients to report email abuse. Marketers may not want to be reported, but look at it this way… it is better that your vendors be alerted to a spam complaint than a blacklist be alerted. An email abuse page will typically consist of a short form, much like this one, where a recipient can go to file a report.

Still with me?

Good. Now for the dirty little secret most marketers don’t know… every vendor gets blacklisted at some point by some random blacklist somewhere in the random universe (or multiverse, for you Stephen Hawking fans). Getting blacklisted is not an issue of “if”, but “when”. The important things to ask yourself as a buyer is, “Does this vendor have plans and resources in place to react to a blacklist-event?”. Hopefully this short article will lead you on your way to asking the right set of questions and choosing the vendor that’s right for you.