In the last two blogs I discussed the importance of content and design in email marketing and how they both affect the way a target audience digests the information you present to them. You can read PART 1 HERE and PART 2 HERE to play a little catch-up with where we are at now.
In this guide I hope to enlighten those looking to create a successful email marketing campaign for their business, services and/or products.
I provide email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London area, and the tips and tricks I discuss here in the blog are based solely on what I have learnt from my own experiences.
Let’s recap the key factors in creating a healthy, accurate, interesting and successful email marketing strategy and campaign:
- Content
- Design
- Accessibility
- Practices
- Subscribers
We’ve gone through Content and Design, so now let’s take a look at Accessibility.
3. The Science of Accessibility
It’s analogy time – think of yourself as a mad scientist. You need to experiment in order to produce a perfect formula that works.
Email marketing is very much about producing a formula. You need to test it out on different clients to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s a good way to be sure that you are using the right ideas. Check to see how it looks on different email readers. A quick and easy method that won’t cost anything is to set-up accounts on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL, and then send it to all of those accounts. Test it in different browsers too from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox.
Test, test, test. That’s the only way to understand if it is going to work and what bugs need to be fixed.
Remember, some users don’t want to receive emails from you full stop! Be dignified about this fact and make the “unsubscribe” button very visible. Don’t try to trick users… it very rarely works anyway and only serves to make them angry and annoyed. Plus you don’t want to start receiving spam complaints right?
Don’t be afraid to combine plaint text with HTML to create a multipart email. I also recommend that you use a pre-header for email preview that gives the first line of text in the email at the top, usually after the subject line. It makes it clear what this email is about. Never be vague! Use a re-header to summarise the content of your email. Perception is everything from the outset.
In order to make your emails accessible to all you really need to be clear and concise. Testing is the most effective way to get there. Be the mad scientist and find your perfect formula.
In the next blog I’ll be discussing Practices and how they matter in the grand scheme of email marketing.
My name is Pete Winter and I provide a service for email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects.
