Online Marketing Business Blog

Tip For The Day: Define a HTML Newsletter Standard

Designers out there occasionally gripe about the lack of creative expression in template based designs. However, from a functional point of view, its important to maintain a "standard" by properly templating your HTML newsletter.

Subscribers recognize and know what to expect

Its important for each issue to always standardize where the feature story is, the tips column, latest news headlines, and whatever else you've got going in your HTML newsletters. Recipients know what to expect and can comfortably go through each issue with ease.

A tried and tested template is less prone to display errors

The biggest thorn in the designer's side is developing compliant HTML newsletters. Once you've got one down pat, stick with it. It helps prevent any unforeseen errors and time consuming testing through all the various online and offline email clients again.

Writers know exactly how much to write

With a standard template, the content writers for the newsletter can summarize their article accordingly and estimate how much word length and space they've got to play with. This prevents unnecessary tweaks to the design should Joe the journalist gets ink-happy and start pushing a 300 word feature article for you to squeeze and publish in the coming month's HTML newsletter.

7 Ideas For Creating More Effective And Creative Email Newsletters

Sick of your run-of-the-mill, standard newsletter templates? Even if your client's offerings aren't of the "WOW" variety, your designs can still offer a little something extra that makes it more enjoyable to read. Think "magazine" as opposed to "newspaper". Adding some fun into your email newsletter designs will help increase your recurring click-open rate. If your client's recipients like it, they're likely to be eagerly anticipating the next release.

Note that the ideas below are not limited to the designer laying out the email newsletter, but to the entire email marketing team.

Tip For The Day: Style Your ALT Tags

We've stressed many times the importance of ALT tags in HTML email. Unfortunately for us designers (and those good folks who place a strong emphasis on usability and accessibility), here's another thing to note on your ALT tags: Remember to style your ALT tags when necessary. They may be illegible on a background color

Blink Campaign's Guide For New Users

Recently, we've had some request from our agency users for a quick "How-to" guide to get their own clients started on using Blink Campaign themselves.

Well, we've slowly consolidated all the information from our support section and compiled them in a simple word document which you can then edit, brand and re-send to your own clients.

Blink Campaign was always meant to be a white-label solution for agencies to leverage upon and sell their online marketing services while we concentrate on the technical nitty gritty, deliverability, and all the other stuff which you really shouldn't be bothered with.

If you're interested to learn more about Blink Campaign or sign-up for a free account, do drop us an email as we're working on getting our website and online registration up.

Download the Blink Campaign New User Guide (Word Doc, 250kb)

Tip For The Day: Don't Use "Click Here", And Other Seemingly Harmless Words

You may be taken by surprise to find out that the word "click here" is actually being filtered by a number of spam filters. We use it all the time (in our websites) that we seldom think twice about using it for our email campaigns. For the lack of putting any further thoughts into our hyperlink labels, this "spammy" phrase can actually throw your campaign into your recipient's junk folder. Thank the unimaginative spammers for putting "click here" on the spam filters' radar.

Along with the other obvious "spammy" words (most of which consists of some medical term for performance enhancing drugs, and the tons of creative slang words that makes a man, well, a man), here are a few other things to look out for which may not be as obvious:

• Special Promotion
• Important
• 50% off (or any other numeral)
• Free
• Bonus
• Discount
• Prizes

Other things to keep a lookout for is ALL CAPS, aLtErNaTiNg caps, large font sizes, and special characters such as exclamation marks, dollar signs and percentages.

Keep these phrases at the top of your head and try to tweak your copy accordingly around the body content area, and especially so in your subject header. Do leave your comments here if you've got others (I'm sure there's tons out there) that I haven't covered.

Getting Creative With Images Blocking

Most email clients, both online and offline, block images by default. The age old practise of web accessibility becomes ever more important in instances such as HTML email design.

Usage of ALT tags should be mandatory. But I don't just mean putting in ALT tags just to explain what's behind the image. Go one up and get your recipients to download the images and entice them to update their preferences in their email client so that future images from your campaign will be automatically downloaded. Gmail offers a similar function:

Newsletters: How Often And When?

There's no real hard and fast rule (you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?) when it comes to the frequency of email newsletters. Depending on your client's profile, each would have their own unique demands and requirements, and so would their recipients.

Your best gauge on frequency for each of your clients would have to be from the horse's mouth. You'll know that its too often, or not often enough when you see the unsubscribes climbing.

Not often enough

As a rough aggregate, anything less than once a month is not often enough. Your client's recipients will start to forget about you. When they suddenly receive a surprise newsletter 3 months after they've first signed up, don't be surprised if they unsubscribe, or even worse, forgot that they actually signed up and simply marked you as spam.

Too often

Anything more than once a week is too often. Unless your client's subscribers have specifically signed up for more frequent mailings. Or they've signed up for multiple topics, each handled by a different department. As with daily spam, recipients will start to tire and get cheesed off by the frequency of your mailings. Again, don't be surprised if you're starting to get marked as spam.

Right, so based on the above, you've got to find your magic number by testing, testing, testing.

Ok, so when is the best time?

I"ll simply break it down into 2 types of newsletters

Professional interests

These are newsletters which recipients have signed up for out of interest or benefit to their professional knowledge. They're usually read briefly during office hours or tea breaks at work. Monday's are bad as everyone's just settling in and scoping out what they have to do for the rest of the week. Busy, busy, busy. I advise you to send these sort of newsletters mid-week, on Wednesdays or Thursdays where recipients are more settled in at work and would probably not have that many things on their mind.

Personal interests

These newsletters usually for into the category of the recipient's personal interests such as entertainment, hobbies, home improvement or any other topics or extra curricular activities which a relevant to the recipient's interest. For this sort of leisurely read at home, it is best to send them on a Saturday night or Sunday morning where it'll be waiting in the recipient's inbox by the time they check through their mail on Sunday.

Tip For The Day: Helping Your Clients Gather Email Addresses

I was just catching up with a few of my customers today on how they've been doing in their online marketing venture. From the ground, it seems that everyone's keen and is fully aware of the benefits of email marketing. However, the greatest stumbling block always seems to be:

My client is keen to get on with email marketing. But they don't have a database of subscribers.

At Blink Campaign, we frown upon bought or rented lists. Not only is it unethical and intrusive, it could get us into a lot of trouble with ISPs around the world. Not to mention cause all our customers great inconvenience.

So how can I grow my list legally?

We always start with the website. Either you are most likely collecting the email addresses of site visitors on your webpages, or need to do something to that tune. Not to get into anything too technical, your client's website should have a simple means for users to leave their email address to join your client's mailing list. Don't forget to remind the users the benefits of them signing up.

You'll be glad to know that Blink Campaign will also be releasing a simple API soon to allow you to copy and paste the code into your client's website, thus allowing new signups to be directly updated into your client's Blink Campaign master list.

Besides your client's website, there are multiple ways to collect email addresses offline at every possible point of customer contact:

• Request for people to sign your guestbook at corporate functions and events (product launches, showcases, etc)
• Ask for an email address whenever there is a customer service or support call
• Leave a field for email address in invoices, brochures, customer surveys and feedback forms
• Put a fishbowl for business cards at retail outlets, booths and other trade fares and events.

Lastly, ask your client to have a "Join Our Mailing List" call-to-action type button in their email signature. The mechanics of this can be as simple as a mailto with something like "Sign me up" in the subject line.

Tip For The Day: The Power of Personalisation

When we receive a mass email campaign, we all know that its a bulk mail campaign. Sometimes, we also feel like we're just an email address in a database and nothing more.

However, when greeted with my name, I"m more likely to read what's in the campaign, and maybe even click or link or two.

Therefore, based on this psychology, try addressing your recipients with their names in your campaigns. If you're using Blink Campaign, this can be easily achieved by adding the ##FirstName##, ##LastName## tag or both in your HTML, as well as your subject line.

Use the recipients names appropriately. A professional, or more formal correspondence might call for the First and Last name while something casual might simply require just the First Name.

Try it for yourself and see. Measure your campaigns with and without personalization, experimenting with various subject lines and check back on your reports to compare the results. You might be pleasantly surprised on how a little personalisation can go a long way!

Tip For The Day: Schedule All Your Campaigns For Later

Here's something very useful from one of our agency clients. In fact, its so obvious, we started wondering why we didn't think of it ourselves.

Schedule your campaigns for later.

Ever had the experience when your clients says "All go!" and you login to your client's campaigns, select the "Launch Now" option and hit the "Save & Close", only to have your client call you five minutes later requesting for some last minute changes, or an update to the sender list? We have. Too many times.

When dealing with clients. you'll always have last minute changes.

Its simple enough. Let's say you've just finished creating your email campaign for your client. You've sent the regular test mails to them and yourself. Everything's good and ready to go. BUT always schedule it for later. You can set it to 10 or 30 minutes from now. Just don't LAUNCH NOW. Because after you click the submit button, your client will inevitably think of something they've forgotten to add. Or some URL had to be changed. When dealing with clients. you'll always have last minute changes. Scheduling for later gives you some time to jump back in and edit. Once the buffer time frame is up, the campaign will simply send itself off without you having to worry about it again!