In an age of busy mailboxes, 'media saturation'  and semi-spam - the need to make your email catch the recipients eye is greater than ever.

So - how about an email that scrolls sideways? You don't see those everyday.

'There's a reason for that!' , cry the sceptics. Certainly, there is no need for every email to scroll sideways. However, if you look at this selection of examples compiled by Style Design, it is a novelty, a break from the norm that might lend itself to a particular campaign/product or service, there are even a few B2B examples. You can't say you wouldn't enjoy receiving this.

View entire showcase here

If you were to consider building and sending one of these however, it is important to test how it render in different email clients. Having a novelty that breaks is hardly worth having at all.

Images are now turned off by default in every email client. It is therefore important for marketers to account for this when designing and sending emails. Recipients need to be able to make clear sense of the email without downloading the images. Your call-to-action needs to be visible as soon as the email is delivered. This will not be possible when the button is one single image, as below:

The way to get around this is to cut up the image:

This allows for each of the separate images to be placed in a table in HTML code and for the same colour to be used as the back ground colour for the middle section. The text can also be edited easily and used over and over again and it. So the button above will display like this with image blockers on:


It is important then to make sure that your button's design does not contain a gradient colour like those shown below. As the above solution will not work because there is no one background colour. Examples of these below:

Its gone, its done. Be it through system failure or human error there will be times when an email goes out wrong. Whatever the mistake it leaves the email marketer with the same question, what to do next?

A great article on this is Chad White's 'Best Practices for Apology Emails' , I have summarised the key questions
Chad considers below:

1.  Is there a need to apologise?

A rule of thumb: If the mistake is not likely to result in lost revenue or cause significant brand damage then don't send an apology.

2.  Can you contain the problem?

Consider the alternatives to sending a mass apology email. Only apologise to those subscribers that you know were affected by your mistake, don't alert the remainder to your mistake. If the body of the email was the issue, apologise to recipients who opened the email. If an important link or landing page from the email was broken, apologise to recipients who clicked on that link and send them the right one.

3.  How best to apologise?

A few tips for a graceful recovery:

a. Send the apology email as soon as you can
b. Make it clear in the subject line that you're apologizing
c. Give them a reason to forgive you - perhaps include an incentive or reward in the apology email.
d. Know when to use humor and when to be serious - In a B2B context, the safest play in most cases for most brands is a straightforward, sincere apology that shows that you respect your subscribers' time.
e.  Don't make a mistake in the apology email.

Below are some good example apology emails, click to enlarge:

Permission Marketing is vintage jargon nowadays but - despite this - it still remains relevant for email marketing, perhaps more than ever. But what do we mean by permission and would your customer or prospect agree?

At the most basic level, there are legalities to consider in obtaining the right level of permission from individuals. The better job you make of this, the more flexibility you will have to target them with specific marketing campaigns. Here are five key things to consider to ensure that you are legally compliant, able to deliver a good user experience and increase your reach:-

1. Ensure you have the technical structure to capture permissions - both opt-ins and opt-outs - so you can segment data on this basis

2. Capture data with clear and explicit intention of use. Allow the individual to decide how their contact detail can be used and don't force them into opting into everything

3. Ask relevant questions to help you make sound judgements about what information may be relevant to them

4. Consider how you want to use individuals' email addresses and capture permission for relevant levels - do you want to send a regular email communication? Do you also want to be able to send ad hoc promotional emails?

5. Create a preference centre allowing users to manage their email use - format, frequency and favourites are key preferences that will help you create and retain engaged email recipients

What constitutes permission from senders' and what feels like a breach of privacy from users' perspectives can be worlds apart...

1. Forward to a friend

Why?
Promote promotion - Forward to a friend allows an email recipient to forward your email to others in a way that avoids formatting errors and promotes sign-ups. When the recipient clicks on the link Outlook creates a new outlook email that contains:

• A set subject line
• A link to the web page version of the email in the body
• A link to the registration form to subscribe to receive the forwarded email
   

How?
Here is the forward to a friend code. This code should be entered as a hyperlink:

<a href="

mailto:&subject=FW:SUBJECT LINE

&body=You have been forwarded this email by a friend.

%0D%0A

%0D%0A

View the newsletter here:%0D%0AURL TO WEB VERSION OF EMAIL

%0D%0A

%0D%0A

Register to receive this newsletter here:%0D%0AURL TO EMAIL SIGN-UP FORM"> forward this email to a friend</a>

When using forward to a friend, there are a few things to check/update:
1. Ensure that you do not track the links that appear in the forward to a friend email (signup form link, link to web page version of the email.)
2. Ensure that the paragraph break code is there (%0D%0A)
3. Ensure that the link to the web page version of this email is correct. You will need to update this on EVERY email


2. View as a webpage

Why?
Should there, for any reason, be a problem rendering your emails, it is best practice to offer your contacts the option of viewing your emails online as a webpage.

How?
1. Place the sentence 'view this email as a webpage' at the top of this email.
2. To host the email, add the HTML file to your image server. 
3. Hyperlink the 'a webpage' to links through to the HTML version of the email, hosted on your server.


3. Add us to your whitelist

Why?
An email whitelist (sometimes called a safelist) is a list of all the sender names/addresses who the recipient deems acceptable to receive email from. Mail sent from a whitelisted sender will be delivered to a recipient's inbox (never classed as spam or junk mail) and all the images that appear in that email will automatically be downloaded.

Whitelisting pacifies the email client spam filters and improves the deliverability of your communications - it's best to encourage it!

How?
Place the sentence 'To keep receiving this email, please add us to your safe / white list' at the top of the email. Hyperlink the words 'safe / white list' to a landing page that shows the recipient how to add your sender name/address to the whitelist in Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL amd other clients. Here is the link to ours here at Reed Business Information:
http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/whitelist/whitelist.html

What is AutoPreview?

When switched on in Microsoft Outlook, AutoPreview displays
text beneath an email in your inbox beyond sender, subject and time. This text is a sample of the message, usually the first 3-4 lines of information in the code.

Example of an email not optimised for AutoPreview:

Why optimise the AutoPreview?

First impressions matter, emails should lead with content the recipient is interested in as opposed to links and messy-looking URLs. Microsoft Outlook has AutoPreview but more-or-less every email service provider now has preview functionality, when switched-on this is the first thing a recipient will see of your email.
 
How to optimise your emails for AutoPreview:

To optimise the auto-preview you should insert a 1x1px transparent image at the beginning of your code before the furniture (web version/forward to a friend etc). To this image you can then assign a 45 word alt tag. It is this alt tag description which then appears in the AutoPreview. 

Below is an example of the HTML code for our own Caterersearch E-update where the alt tag is optimised to include the main news headlines:


 

Here is a great guide from Lyris on how to write compelling subject lines. The subject line is a huge factor behind a recipients decision to first open, then read and act on an email. As the whitepaper points out there is no sure-fire formula, you need to stand out yet remain familiar, it pays to spend time getting the 50 characters right.

View guide here >> Email Subject Lines: 15 Rules to Right Them Write

 

Article by Alexandra M D Gros (RBI-UK)

 

Forrester recently released their new email marketing review (EMR) methodology. It is a great tool for diagnosing where your email programs are performing well and where they might need improvement.

The best part of the review is the scorecard. A snippet of which is shown below. Begin at home and first score yourself on questions relating to the key dimensions of your business process; governance, strategy, analytics, process and data. Then score the user- facing elements of your messages and campaigns; subscription, value, presentation and trust.

As the review quite rightly states, email is still a 'fundamental part of the interactive marketing toolkit'. It is important for marketers to take the time to properly evaluate their email programs objectively. You should be striving for strong passes (+2) in every department.

So without further ado... new_email_marketing_review[1].pdf

It's 4.50pm, you've got to leave the office by 5.00 and you still have an email to send to your list!  Don't worry, you'll just about get the job done in the time allocated. 5pm, the email has been sent and you can go off and enjoy your evening...However, did you know that a massive percentage of all emails sent DO NOT actually make it to an intended recipients' in-box. Rather it is intercepted and banished to the JUNK box by whiter than white spam filters. So whilst you're out enjoying yourself, glad that you got the job done in 10 minutes - much of that effort could have been wasted!

Here's a useful list of the top 10 things that you should try to include to ensure that you're wonderfully crafted email is more or less guaranteed to be sent to the JUNK box. Whilst there are exceptions to every rule, follow these steps and watch your % delivered, open-rates and click-through rates DROP.

The top 10 ways to ensure your emails DON'T reach an inbox:

1. Embed flash and rich media images into your email
2. Construct image only messages or use large images and no text above the fold
3. Use a person's name in the FROM address
4. Write your subject lines in CAPITAL LETTERS
5. Don't limit the number of words in a subject line
6. Combine the overuse of punctuation with words like FREE and YOU
7. Include as many font sizes as you like in as many colours as you like
8. Include languages such as Javascript and ASP in your code
9. Don't use inline styling, use CSS instead
10. Ensure you use 'click here' to highlight links

To find out if more of your emails are ending-up in spam filters than in-boxes, Louise Colligan, RBI's Head of Email Marketing, provides some useful guidelines:

1. Check your open rate - 20-30% open rate is a guide. If the average suddenly drops then the email is likely to be in the junk folder. Also check for abnormally high bounce rates.

2. Understand how spam filters work. Spam filters operate by looking at a list of criteria and assign points to criteria such as spammy phrases: e.g. click here/buy now and poor coding. A campaign receives a "spam score". If it exceeds the threshold the email is sent to the junk folder. Thresholds vary and are set by the person who installed the spam software.  A general rule is to ensure your email is below 5. It is unlikely to be one element of an email that causes a score of 5, but different elements that make up the email. If you want to find out what score your email will receive then it's advisable to run your html code through a reliable spam checker or content checker prior to sending the email. 

3. The Spam criteria list is growing all the time. On web email services such as hotmail and yahoo people often use the 'junk' or this is spam button as a means of unsubscribing.  This information is collated and the email client builds a picture of the reputation of a sender and can often lead to the 'from address' being blacklisted.

4. Spam filters have both white and black lists of senders and keywords to look at. A white list ensures mail from the listed e-mail addresses, domains, and/or IP address will always be allowed and the opposite occurs for information on the blacklist.'

Go to our Useful Links page to find spam-checking tools and a helpful subject-line checker >>

 

View this article by Lawrence Mitchell (RBI-UK) at: http://blogs.rbi.co.uk/information-marketing/2010/04/the-10-key-ways-to-half-your-o.html