In our quest to implement the most up-to-date, sophisticated e-mail marketing practices, it’s easy to forget some of the basics. Here’s a quick checklist, courtesy of the whitepaper “Six Steps to Sending Success” from e-mail marketing services provider eCircle, to ensure that you’re not overlooking the obvious:
· Use your company name as the sender. Subscribers signed up to receive information from your brand, which means it’s your brand that they recognize and trust.
· Remind recipients to add your e-mail address to their address books. If you don’t want to include this reminder in every e-mail, be sure to do so for at least the initial messages.
· If your message includes more than two or three links, use a table of contents. If you send an e-newsletter, for instance, with five or six stories within, list them at the top of the message as a table of contents or directory, and have each title be a link that, when clicked, takes the recipient directly to the item within the e-mail.
· Include multiple ways for readers to get in touch with your brand. Don’t just give them your e-mail address; provide a phone number and a postal address as well. The latter is particularly effective in reassuring recipients that your organization has an offline presence and isn’t just some shadowy virtual business.
· Offer a prominent link to a web version of the e-mail. This is important in case rendering issues on the recipient’s end prevent images from appearing—plus, some people simply prefer to view messages online. And if you don’t already include a link to a mobile version of the message, it’s probably time to start.
· Design your e-mail so that, if at all possible, an image does not take up the top portion of your message. Again, many e-mail browsers do not automatically render images, so if the entire opening third of your message is image only, some recipients will not see anything of significance in their preview pane.
· Include a “forward to a friend” link. Sure, recipients could use the forward button of their e-mail browser to pass along a message to someone. But by embedding a forward function in your template, you can track how many people use the link to forward the e-mail.
· Make it easy for recipients to change their preferences. Perhaps someone originally signed up to receive daily updates but now feels overwhelmed and wants to receive sale notifications only. Or a person who opted in to receive updates for local events has moved across the country. Include a link to your e-mail preference center so that subscribers can be sure of getting the most relevant information.
· While you’re at it, make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Better that someone should unsubscribe than report your e-mails as spam. So make the link easy enough to find, and make the process no more than two clicks. Ideally you should also ask people why they’re unsubscribing.
