Email Best Practice

Success Factors

There are many factors that can determine the success of an email campaign. The DMA define this process as:
the right message to the right person at the right time

The right message needs to be appropriate to the audience in terms of its look, feel and tone - ideally this should closely resemble the look, feel and tone of your website - luxury gifts for example should be presented on an elegant website that is very visual in its design - there are worse ideas than having the email presented in the same way.
The right person refers to who you are sending the email to - everyone on your database or a small segmentation of them, e.g. only those that registered during summer last year.
The right time to send your email out will depend on what your site is about; if you sell gifts then the months leading up to Christmas could be very important to remind people firstly that you are still around and secondarily that your current offers are so good they need to look at your site now. Don't forget there's a lot of other websites doing the same thing, so your email really needs to stand out.......

Email Formats

There are currently three formats of email. The type of email that can be received will depend on the email software package on the recipient's computer. Early email software provided only for a plain text email. This type of email provides for black text only and any links to a web site appear as a complete URL such as http://www.greything.co.uk

Rich text emails - whereas rich text emails allow for different fonts, styles and supports hyperlinks. Rich text is supported by most email packages but don't forget that some people may still be running old software.

Lastly, there is HTML emails. An HTML email has the same look and feel as a web page; which means you can keep the brand look between web and email. Images can become the main focus of HTML emails; used to draw the eye and encourage clicks to your site. In many tests HTML emails have gained a higher click through rate than other formats - but you need to test for yourself, what works on one site may not work on yours.

Unless you've already asked your customers which email format they would like to receive, it's best to send out both a text and HTML email at the same time. Their email software will then show what they prefer to see or best to view.

Many email programmes block images and ask the reader to download and view them, with this mind it's always good to include a link to a version of the email hosted on your website, that way you can ensure they view the email as you intended. Beware that emails that contain no text and only images will display nothing to encourage readers to click through so use a good mix of words and images (it'll also decrease your chances of getting caught in Spam filters).

Email Size

While you could produce a long email with lots of information and nice images, it's best to keep it short and to the point, encouraging people to click a link for more information that is held on your actual site. While pictures used to be embedded in the actual email, these days you should host the images on your site and link to them in the email (as you would on your web pages).

Subject Line

Perhaps the most important element; the email subject line needs to be a strong call to action to ensure when it lands in the inbox, it's interesting enough to be clicked (this is often referred to as the 'open rate'). It's advisable to stay away from keywords that could get picked up by Spam filters, words such as 'free', 'enter' and 'sample' are often thought to be Spam.

Using your site's Brand in the subject line is a good move to increase the relationship, especially if they have previously purchased from your site. It's worth testing subject lines by splitting the data in two and sending the same email with different headings to each group; then seeing which one achieved the best open rate.

Also worth considering ...

Before you send, set up a seed list with various big ISPs at which you can usually set up a free account with most of these, for example Hotmail, Yahoo, Google Mail etc. Send the email to this list and check that it displays correctly. Otherwise you may have an email that looks good in Hotmail but not in Outlook.

Don't keep sending lots of email out to the same addresses; people will start ignoring them, opt out or add you to their spam list.

If you have the real names of people on your list; personalising the email e.g. from a simple 'Hello Bob' or inserting their name into a number of places, can make the email feel special and focused on just that person (even though it's not).

Always include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email - simple data protection, if someone doesn't want to receive email from you and they tell you - you should not send them anymore.

Results of email marketing are usually at hand very quickly; generally people check their email every or every-other day so the majority of campaign results (or at least a very good idea) are available after within 48 hours.