EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS

The Old Way

OK, admit it, you’re using email at work to communicate with peers and the boss, but you’re not using email as part of your marketing mix. It’s amazing how many marketing professionals dismiss email as a way to share their value proposition with prospects. We hear excuses like: it’s just spam or HTML is beyond me. It’s true, there’s a lot of spam floating around these days and HTML itself can be a little frightening but the reality is there are some best practices that can make your email a very effective part of your marketing mix and that don’t require reading HTML for dummies… and let’s not forget, 58% of business people start their day by reading their email.

The Case for Email

Email’s been around longer than the compact disk or even the VHS cassette! But Ray Tomlinson’s ground breaking email sent to himself in 1971 was vastly different than email today. Today email contains images and links in addition to text and can be viewed on anything from a desktop computer to a smartphone. It’s universal, which is the main reason that email should be one of the staples in your marketing mix. Other reasons email remains such a powerful marketing tool is that it travels with us and unlike tweets or text messages, can make a case for something more complex than a choice between potatoes or carrots for dinner. But to be effective, email must be created with care and sent with savvy. Batch and blast emails are doomed to end up in the bit bucket. As you author your email, ask yourself, “What’s first, last, and unusual in my copy?” The first is always the headline. The unusual is the story or example that helps to differentiate your offer. The last…well, the last is a P.S., the final thought. Make the most of your PS. It will be read.

Email Challenges

• Portable Inboxes – one size does not fit all. An iPhone screen displays mail very differently than a 24” LCD monitor
• Inbox Overload – need we say more?
• Mail Client Filtering – increasingly programs like Outlook are pre-filtering emails based on the history of what are, opens, trashes without opening, opens and trashes and opens and saves
• Image filtering – that picture that saved you 1000 words may never be seen by your recipient. Sometimes the words are more effective.

What saavy marketers have learned is that email, because it is nearly as universal as good old paper mail, is an important part of an overall marketing mix and that if best practices for its creation and distribution are used, people will look forward to your emails rather than creating rules that automatically toss your emails into the trash can. 

Best Practices Make the Difference

Here are 10 simple guidelines you can follow to improve the effectiveness of your emails.

1. From: Brief, Recognizable, Trusted. Use From names and phrases that fit these three descriptions to increase the chances that the recipient will open your mail and that an auto filter won’t trash it before the recipient even sees it.
2. Subject: You have 3 seconds to impress me…literally, that’s it. Recipients scan email subjects. The boss may get away with a subject like FYI, Read This, but you won’t. Overused “trap” words like FREE don’t help either – filters are wise that there are no free lunches and your email with words like this in the subject will likely never be seen. 
3. Personalize: Show me that you know me. Use my name in the salutation and in the content where it makes sense. 
4. Test, test, test: Links, spam checker, view in various clients on various platforms
5. Short and Sweet: No scrolling please. Increasingly Outlook users and recipients using web mail clients and mobile devices will trash or keep your email based on what they can see in a preview pane. Make those first few lines compelling!
6. Clicking: Click Here is so not cool. Make your links meaningful. Use 5 – 7 links in your email, remembering that it will be scanned, so placement at the beginning and end of paragraphs is a good idea.
7. Sending: Tuesday @ 11AM is the worst day and time. More and more people read business email after hours and on weekends. Try a Sunday morning or evening. You may be surprised who is reading their email on their day off.
8. Format: Don’t be HTML-centric. Create both HTML and text versions and check them both. Nothing worse than getting a text version formatted and that written like a computer created it. That is grounds for an instant trashing. And remember, itty bitty font sizes that cram your extra detailed value proposition onto a single page may work well on oversized desktop monitors but on a 4 inch phone screen, I may just trash your mail because it didn’t come with a magnifying glass.
9. Deliverability: Avoid attachments. Unless the recipient requested an attachment, including one is a sure way to get stopped by the corporate spam filter. Use a spam checker. Things like the ratio of text to graphics can get you pegged as spam even if your full page image of the sun coming up over the snowy peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro is inspiring.
10. Mix it up: try different subject lines, from addresses, link placement, levels of personalization, time and date for sending. Record your results. Use them to improve your open and click rates.