Many web designers and developers fall down at a crucial hurdle when designing email marketing mail outs. Email marketing is troublesome; like web design, it requires constant awareness of best practices and a willingness to learn from your previous campaigns. Strong email marketing comes from learning about the effectiveness or failings of campaigns and an analysis of customer engagement to develop your design and development further.
I’m a freelance web designer in Enfield, London. I’ve seen people do all sorts of unbelievable things when it comes to email marketing. Heck, I’ve done some myself when starting out in the beginning! Here are some more of my tips for a stronger direct marketing campaign.
Subject of much discussion
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of a strong subject line to a web design professional or freelancer, and to any business. A subject line is what draws you into opening an email. Think of it, would you open an email that said SUBJECT: NONE? You wouldn’t, so why should anyone else?
Deadlines are always a good call to action for customers checking their emails. Add a time limit to your offering and you’ll find that more people click through.
Avoid spammy words wherever possible. Words like ‘WIN’ or ‘Free’ could be bad if overused. Avoid excessive punctuation in your subject lines. One exclamation mark is fine if you MUST use it; two or more is wrong, unnecessary and it looks unprofessional. Avoid any sort of aggression in your subject lines and don’t be too forceful. A well-known company – who shall remain nameless – once sent an email newsletter out to over 200,000 people with the subject line: ‘PANIC, PANIC… BUY OR DIE!” Needless to say, a vocal portion of their customer-base didn’t find it amusing. They were forced to apologise to customers in the next edition.
There is no sure-fire formula for a good subject line, but split-testing will allow you to learn which subject lines work best for specific campaigns. Play around, analyse and learn from the data.
Testing: 1,2,3…
A big hurdle for designer-developers is testing. Testing, testing, testing. Testing your email campaign – pre-send! – can help to maximise effectiveness. The following browsers are key for testing how people see your campaigns.
- Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9
- Opera
- Mozilla Firefox 3
- Google Chrome
- Apple Safari 3
Gone are the days of browser simplicity. So many people use different browsers these days that it’s an absolute necessity to test as many as possible to ensure there are no glaring issues for people reading those newsletters. You might design an email marketing masterpiece, but your campaign could be rendered moot if it malfunctions in different browsers. (Bill Gates, we’re looking at IE.) Use as many of these as possible and you’ll be taking a giant leap forward, web designers, into making your direct marketing campaigns as effective and bug-free as possible.
Wide open spaces
Some readers will use the clever trick of previewing the email in their preview panel; they won’t even open the email straight away. The smallest panel is roughly 600px wide, so bear that in mind when you’re designing.
Out of character
Encoding all characters will stop strange symbols from appearing in your newsletter copy.
“It’s this line of code that contains one apostrophe from Microsoft word that could throw everything out”
Make it work:
"It’s this line of code that contains one apostrophe from Microsoft word that could throw everything out"
Little touches like the ones above can really strengthen everything you do. Strong direct digital marketing is a matter of poring over the finest details to improve your design and development offerings for your business or freelance projects.
I’m Pete Winter and I’m a freelance web designer and developer in Enfield in London. Please contact me for more information.
