We outline the do's and don'ts of email marketing including copy writing, HTML tips, subject lines and much more.

1. Email Best Practice – How to Make Your Email
Campaign Perform Well
There are 4 critical stages to an effective email campaign:
1. Planning 3. Production
2. Preparation 4. Performance
What planning is needed?
Look at your business objectives to ensure you know your goals and how you will measure success.
Plan email campaigns in advance. Try to have a schedule for the year ahead looking at seasonal
opportunities as well as where you can create your own.
Look at industry email benchmarks and ask yourself what you are hoping to achieve with your email
campaigns and have a clear goal in mind for each campaign.
Brief email campaigns/creative well in advance of launch to ensure you have time to perfect.
Preparation is key to success
Data collection:
Collect quality data – via homepage touch points and sign up opportunities. Include a preference centre
on your website where consumers can update their details including email communication preferences.
Include a call to action on your newsletter inviting them to forward to a friend. Make use of in-store data
collection opportunities (if applicable).
Permissions – use a double opt-in if possible. This validates the subscriber and means cleaner data.
Targeting & Relevance:
Segment your data – look at your recipients’ preferences, buying behaviour and where they are in the
life cycle e.g. are they a new buyer, repeat buyer, old enquirer etc. Target appropriately with relevant
messages. Don’t treat prospects the same as buyers.
Copy & Creative:
There are many things to think about when creating your email. Here are just some of the things to bear in mind:
Subject Lines
o Must be interesting and enticing but reflect what the email is about.
o Mention benefits rather than features.
o Use no more than 50 characters or up to 70 characters if there is more than one message.
From Name
o Must be immediately recognizable. Recipients take about 3 seconds to decide whether to open an
email or not and this, combined with the subject line, will drive their decision.
Copy
o Must be clear, concise, interesting and informative and include clear calls to action.
o List any benefits and offers - what’s in it for the recipient?
o Personalise or use dynamic content to target specific segmented lists to make it more relevant.
Calls to Action
o Should be prominent, clear and encourage recipient to click through to your website.
o Use different calls to action and test them to see what works best for you and your customer.
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2. Design
o The email should enhance brand identity and value and have a similar look and feel to the website.
o The email should work with and without images in case the recipient has images turned off.
o Use clean HTML code
 Make sure the email renders properly in different browsers and email clients e.g. Hotmail,
Outlook, Yahoo, BT Connect, Googlemail etc.
 Avoid using pixel spacer gifs to force table widths as spammers use them.
 Avoid using cascading style sheets as it can get stripped out or render incorrectly.
 Avoid scripts such as javascript, background images and flash as these can cause rendering
problems in some browsers.
 Keep the email between 500 and 650 pixels wide to avoid recipients needing to scroll.
o Include linked text above the main email body outlining the main message so that it can be viewed
in the preview pane – used by about 60% of email users to decide which emails to open.
o Use a spam checker to increase the chance of your email landing in the inbox.
o Always include a text version of the email in case the HTML is blocked by the recipients.
o Include a category navigation bar in case the recipient isn’t interested in the email content but is
interested in visiting your website.
o Include a “forward to a friend” link and/or links to social network sites such as Linked In, Facebook
and Twitter to encourage viral marketing.
o Include legal requirements - an unsubscribe link and your company’s registered office address and
registration number for example.
Production
Deliverability Management
Manage your deliverability with good list hygiene. Clean your data on a regular basis, ideally after each campaign,
by removing hard bounces and unsubscribes.
Response Management
Be able to deal with customer responses, emails, phone calls, orders in a quick turnaround time. Ensure you can
meet and exceed recipients’ expectations.
Performance – measure, test and learn!
The great thing about email marketing is its measurability. Make sure you track each email campaign you send and
use the results to better future activity. Implement a testing plan, analyse results and implement changes to
improve future performance.
Metrics & Analysis
Measure the success of each campaign with metrics such as open rates, click through rates, conversions, ROI.
Compare results with your objectives to determine a campaign’s success and establish any future testing or
improvements.
Implement a Testing Plan
Different things work for different companies and different markets. To see what works best for you implement a
testing plan to ensure you’re getting the most out of your email marketing. You might decide to test subject lines,
calls to action, times/days of sends, frequency, offers, segmentation, and personalisation. Just remember not to
add too many variables to the mix in one campaign unless you know exactly how you are going to track what has
worked and what hasn’t. Learn from your results and implement any improvements. Keep testing over time to
ensure what worked for your market 6 months ago still applies today.
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01865 980 630
info@indiumonline.co.uk