Optimising your Alt text copy and style for different email clients
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary : A real nitty gritty piece of best practice advice for improving email marketing by changing the way you use image Alt text. Following the advice here won't transform your email marketing, but it should boost response and there is also some interesting data on the most popular email clients you should be testing against:
Marketing implications : You probably know that careful tailoring of the Alt tag can help your messages stand out where images is are blocked.
This post from Campaign monitor gives some best practice tips on using the Alt tag
There are a couple of tips here about using shorter Alt text and styling of Alt text which is needed in some clients such as Yahoo! Mail, iPhone and Outlook 2007/2010.
Recommended link: Popularity of different email clients and…
A whitepaper on good practice
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary : Best practice for Enewsletters and promotional emails are discussed a lot; See, for example, our posts on Enewsletter Best Practice.
But how to make the most of emails accompany sales and service transactions are covered less often, eventhough these are important by volume and context - they probably get more attention from recipients than other types of emails (75% are opened according to the report)
This whitepaper by Sally Lowery of ESP Bronto does a fine job of summarising the issues to be reviewed.
Marketing implications : It's important to remember the main aim of transactional emails is as a service email, but there other opportunities for brand-building and increasing awareness about available product categories. It's also worth noting that from a data protection point of view service emails are classed differently.
Good…
2010 DMA National Client Email Marketing Report
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary : I recently wrote the conclusion for the 2010 Annual Client Email report for the UK Direct Marketing Association.
Here I share what I took from the report and highlight some of the key findings through charts (click twice to read) which show the importance of email marketing and the most popular techniques. You can see that despite some of the mispronouncements that Email Marketing is Dead, Email is a key part of communications strategy for many organisations but given the competition in the inbox from rise of social media and prioritised inboxes it needs to evolve to continue to cut-through.
Marketing implications :
For me, the rate of innovation within digital marketing is one of its greatest appeals. Whether it"€™s the introduction of new technologies, marketing approaches or resulting changes in consumer behaviour, change is a constant challenge. The annual UK…
Towards a strategy for integrating email marketing with social media
Value : [rating=4]
Our commentary : The article explains that many email service providers have introduced "share to social" features enabling email marketers to include buttons to share email content through Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. While these can be useful, it's much more important to think through the overall strategy of integration between email and social and how they fit.
Marketing implications : For me, the strategy implications prompted are:
1. Prioritisation. You need to prioritise your many social channel choices, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Blog, Community and Enewsletter to focus on the ones that works best for your audience and marketplace. E.G. Perhaps Email, Twitter and Linked-In for professional B2B marketing. It's not about providing infinite choice in most cases, it's about using the best approaches.
2. Value proposition You need to define a clear differentiated value proposition for each channel to offer…
9 Tips to engage your email subscribers
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: This 12 page whitepaper download from Selligent (registration required) advises brands on how to tackle the ongoing challenge of the best way to engage customers with email marketing.
Marketing implications: I think these guidelines are the most useful part of the report, so I'm sharing them here with my commentary.
1. Offer a choice of communications. This is a preference centre to enable customers to receive the type of emails they want.
2. Respect permission. Double opt-in is suggested. I don't agree with this in all markets, all cases. It's essential if you're selling a list, but in a customer relationship which starts with an on-site enewsletter signup or during the checkout I think it's unecessary because the relationship is already developed.
3. Analyse, automate, segment and target. I like this call to action! But these are each individually major challenges to refine your email…
Email marketers were all-a-flutter recently when Google announced the Priority Inbox feature for Gmail. And for good reason.
Not because the Priority Inbox is a big deal in itself, but because of what it represents: the era of the intelligent inbox. This intelligent (and social) inbox was one of the four trends we identified earlier this year as crucial to future email marketing, so Gmail's announcement is a timely reminder to explore that topic in more depth.
In this post I'll briefly review the implications for email marketers and then suggest three approaches to help your email marketing achieve cut-through.
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Minimising Email marketing mistakes
Value/importance: [rating=3]
Our commentary: This post from Dela Quist at Alchemy Worx reminds us of the potential mistakes we can make with our email marketing based on the many campaigns he reviews.
Marketing implications: Review the 6 mistakes and check how good your processes and tools are for avoiding them
Recommended link: Avoiding the most common email marketing mistakes…
Value: [rating=3]
Our commentary: Mark Brownlow's review of Litmus - an inbox preview tool shows the benefits of knowing how your emails appear in different inboxes. It's always been difficult to get emails to render correctly for the main readers. You're very dependent on the skills of your email designer in tailoring their HTML and CSS for Email since it's so different to web design.
Marketing implications: It's particularly you ask your agency to test a new design against all the main email reading platforms listed here.
Increasingly, email service providers like the SmartFOCUS tool we use incorporates email platform preview within the system and make it part of the process of editing and reviewing and email, so make sure you ask the question when you switch providers too.
Recommended link: Email Tool review - review of Litmus…
In the days of Heraclitus, mobile messages involved horses. But his wise words about the constancy of change apply so well to mobile email.
Mobile long meant a senior executive armed with a BlackBerry that turned HTML email into something suited to a modern art exhibition.
Email designers scratched their heads and hoped the problem would go away. Email marketers took solace in the fact that most audiences were BlackBerry-free. Then along came the iPhone and mobile email has never been the same.
Keeping your head in the sand is no longer an option: mobile email is one of the four trends driving email marketing change. This post explores the challenges and solutions for the forward-thinking marketer.
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Last month I gave four reasons why the status quo isn't good enough for your email marketing.
One reason was growing email competition, so it seems sensible to review some of the things you can do to ensure it's your email that gets attention in the inbox.
We'll start with the in-email factors (from line, subject line, preview pane and preheader) and then address out-of-email factors (which most people forget about).
The from line
We tend to focus on the subject line, but we also know that the name of the sender is at least as important in helping recipients decide whether an email is worth attention or not.
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