Internet Marketing, Web Technologies & News – Best Web Ezy

It is wonderful that you have a large email list.  However, how do you ensure that you have the lowest bounce rate possible, and the email is bringing you the best result? Let us talk about email delivery here.

1. Make sure your contents are relevant
If you have a shopping site, it is a good idea to segment your email list to the products of interest.  Base on the segment you can send emails out with highly targeted content – and hence a jump in conversion.

2. Are You a Safe Sender?
In the welcome email, make sure you ask the subscriber to add your email address as a safe sender.  If your email landed in the junk mail folder, it is very likely that it will not be read.

3. How often do you send? What do you send?
Don’t over/under promise.  If you claimed to send monthly, send monthly. Don’t annoy your subscribers with ‘Act now! Offer close in 48 hours’ every few days.  Moreover, send newsletters with information rather than just products on special.

4. Is your email spammy?
Make sure you go through the spam test (provided by most email services)  and eliminate any spammy words / characters etc.  A line with 10 exclamation marks is not a good idea either.

5. Personalization
Use this carefully as spammers tend to do this now. However, an email with personalized header / subject is more likely to convert.

6. Make the new comers feel special
Along with the welcome email, why not send along your latest newsletter / recent offers?

7. Make sure you keep your permission from the subscriber
Double opt-in is important. Make sure your database keeps such information, in case you receive a complaint or even a law suit later.

8. Focus on what is most important
Open rate – for informative emails
Click through rate – for sales focused emails
I found these the most important.  Every business has different KPI.  Identify and focus on them.

9. Handle unsubscription promptly
Make sure your database handles subscription promptly. If someone unsubscribed, follow up with a ‘I’m sorry to see you go’ email and ask them to come back to visit your site more often.

10. Testing
Last but not least, a poorly designed / broken email design is very likely to drive people away, as this reflects your professionalism.  Make sure you run enough testing before sending it out.  To learn how to compile an HTML email, you can visit my older post Email Marketing Made Easy.

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This was already 3 quarters ago, but still, I am sure many people can make good use of this.

Thanks to Campaign Monitor, this useful guideline has provided a helpful hand to many email coders.

The sad thing about what happened (if you don’t know) was that MS has decided to use Word as the HTML rendering engine for Outlook 2007.  This took the standard back to ancient and has been a nightmare for most of the email marketing coders.  I On the other hand, Windows Live! Hotmail has also been unique in rendering HTML emails as well.

To view the full post, click here:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/04/a_guide_to_css_support_in_emai_2.html

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From Matt Cutts’ blog, it is likely that Gmail is going to release a new feature – time delay.  What it does?   Well, something I don’t use often, but busy people love it – write now, send later.

Basically you write up an email, but choose not to send now.  Instead, you can choose to send it at a later time, determined by you only.

This would certainly slow things down.  You can now have a report that you don’t really want your client to complain about today before EOB – send it at 3am and worry about it tomorrow.

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For the ones who have to design HTML emails for clients, you may have been facing this issue.  When you try to cascade some images, you might find gaps at the bottom of the images – only on Windows Live Hotmail opened in Firefox – they just won’t stick together.

Our company has to process a lot of HTML email send-outs every week, and this has been causing us a lot of trouble.

Finally we found what has gone wrong.

Windows Live Hotmail renders HTML in standard mode.  Any inline element (eg. img) in a table cell will be aligned to the text baseline.  This allows space for any descenders that extend below the baseline for some letters.

To fix this is really simple: put style=”display:block;” on the img tags.

When will MS stop giving us problems?

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If you need to hire someone to put an email together for you, it is better to make sure that you can get the money back.

Therefore, one very important thing is you must provide lots of links to your website on the email, so that recipients would have better chance of clicking through.

For an e-commerce website, it is better for you to feature a variety of products suitable for general use, and provide a link directly goes to that particular product page.

If you need to tell someone you have a stall in an exhibition, be sure to provide enough information so that people would be able to find you.  If you see them face to face you have a big chance of converting.

It is good to include some company news on the email.  But keep in mind, the whole point of sending out the email is to make people buy from you.  They don’t care if you have got 2 new staff in the Hawaii office.  Don’t make this the whole content of the email. Put it on the side in a nicely wrapped table/box.

Remember, lots of links to your website.  Guarantees you success.

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