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:
- Keep the layout simple. Reserve complex design for landing pages.
- Use tables. Email clients have strict rules on how they display CSS.
- Clean up your HTML. Spammers are sloppy. Don’t be a spammer.
- Use actual size image. Some email clients will not stretch or tile your images like you think.
- Test, test, test. There are a myriad of email clients out there and they all interpret HTML differently.
Don’t:
- Compose an email in ALL CAPS. That’s a big trigger for SPAM filters.
- Embed videos. Universal video support does not yet exist in email clients.
- Use the word “Free” excessively. SPAM filters might nuke your email.
- Use too many images. Some people don’t load images & if you have too many, they may never see your email.
- 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.
Tags: best practice
