Articles by: Holly Gross

Chances are that you have acquired subscribers into your email list from a variety of different sources. Whether they came to you from search, display ads, social media or direct load, each is unique and should be treated and talked to differently. Based on the complexity and features of your website, some customers will require more education of the benefits and some will need very little. In the end, your goal is to on-board new subscribers so that they can fully interact with your website.

One way to introduce new subscribers to the value of being in your email list is to create a queued email series. You can send a group of emails over a period of time that will give your customers all of the information they need to know to successfully interact and engage with your brand. Before you begin designing a strategy on how to email new-to-file customers, determine what your overall goals are and how to determine whether your campaign is successful or not. Are you trying to sell something to the customer? Are you trying to give them a wealth of information about your website? Or are you trying to get more information from them?

To get started, divide your customers into similar groups based on their source and/or any other qualifying attribute. Some common other factors would be gender, geographic location and purchase behavior. Once you have separated your customers into segments, decide on a timing strategy. One obvious best practice would be to have a welcome email triggered immediately upon sign up. In this email, be sure to use creative that is precise and informational. The tone of the copy should match the tone of your website and use as much personalized information that you have for your customer. The content should reinforce the reason why the subscriber has been added to your email list and set the expectation for email frequency.

After the initial welcome email has been triggered, decide when to send the next email in your series. You can send follow up emails anywhere from one day to a week later, based on your normal email sends. For each consecutive email that you decide to send, ensure that each has a unique concept – or lesson – for your subscribers. There should be a distinct feature or benefit explained as well as a desired action that you want your customer to take. For example, have your customers fill out their brand and category preferences so that you can send them customized sale or clearance emails. Whatever the action is, be sure to carry it through as a theme and reason for why you are sending the email series.

If at all possible, try to suppress those customers who are in a welcome series from your regular emails until the email queue is complete. Keeping these customers ‘pure’ while they are being introduced to your brand, will ensure that they have been fully prepared – and possibly even excited – for your future emails. You may also choose to have another email queue available for those subscribers who have taken your desired action, and move them over once complete. Customers who have previously received a welcome series should probably also be suppressed from receiving any future welcome emails. They should already be familiar with your brand, and may find the series redundant.

If you use an Email Service Provider (ESP) to send your bulk emails, there are several available that can help make a queued email series simpler to create. Strongmail and Responsys both offer a program that uses visual flow charts that help you build out complex email lifecycle series as a flow chart. They make it easy to put rules, conditions and waiting periods between emails using visuals that any level marketer can handle.

It is important to keep a close eye on the email metrics of your welcome queued series. The open and click statistics indicate suggest that subscribers are interested in your email message, so the higher the better! Test subject lines and call to actions (CTAs) to keep the subscribers in your email list active and engaged. Also keep watch for fluctuations in your unsubscribe and complaint rates. Since the users who would be receiving your welcome series are new to your email list, be sure to honor their requests to opt out should they choose to do so. CAN-SPAM regulations give marketers a full 10 days to remove a subscriber from their email list. If you have the emails in your welcome series lined up in a tight frequency, it is in your best interest to have any unsubscribes processed in real time so you can avoid sending further emails to them. This will help reduce complaints and improve the overall delivery of your emails.

After a subscriber has received your entire email welcome series, you can expect them to be knowledgeable about your company or brand. Hopefully, they will have been excited enough about your email content to engage with the email and take the actions you needed them to. This should enhance their experience with your brand and will ultimately lead to an email list full of active, profitable customers.

Chances are that you have acquired subscribers into your email list from a variety of different sources. Whether they came to you from search, display ads, social media or direct load, each is unique and should be treated and talked to differently. Based on the complexity and features of your website, some customers will require more education of the benefits and some will need very little. In the end, your goal is to onboard new subscribers so that they can fully interact with your website.

One way to introduce new subscribers to the value of being in your email list is to create a queued email series. You can send a group of emails over a period of time that will give your customers all of the information they need to know to successfully interact and engage with your brand. Before you begin designing a strategy on how to email new-to-file customers, determine what your overall goals are and how to determine whether your campaign is successful or not. Are you trying to sell something to the customer? Are you trying to give them a wealth of information about your website? Or are you trying to get more information from them?

To get started, divide your customers into similar groups based on their source and/or any other qualifying attribute. Some common other factors would be gender, geographic location and purchase behavior. Once you have separated your customers into segments, decide on a timing strategy. One obvious best practice would be to have a welcome email triggered immediately upon sign up. In this email, be sure to use creative that is precise and informational. The tone of the copy should match the tone of your website and use as much personalized information that you have for your customer. The content should reinforce the reason why the subscriber has been added to your email list and set the expectation for email frequency.

After the initial welcome email has been triggered, decide when to send the next email in your series. You can send follow up emails anywhere from one day to a week later, based on your normal email sends. For each consecutive email that you decide to send, ensure that each has a unique concept – or lesson – for your subscribers. There should be a distinct feature or benefit explained as well as a desired action that you want your customer to take. For example, have your customers fill out their brand and category preferences so that you can send them customized sale or clearance emails. Whatever the action is, be sure to carry it through as a theme and reason for why you are sending the email series.

If at all possible, try to suppress those customers who are in a welcome series from your regular emails until the email queue is complete. Keeping these customers ‘pure’ while they are being introduced to your brand, will ensure that they have been fully prepared – and possibly even excited – for your future emails. You may also choose to have another email queue available for those subscribers who have taken your desired action, and move them over once complete. Customers who have previously received a welcome series should probably also be suppressed from receiving any future welcome emails. They should already be familiar with your brand, and may find the series redundant.

If you use an Email Service Provider (ESP) to send your bulk emails, there are several available that can help make a queued email series simpler to create. Strongmail and Responsys both offer a program that uses visual flow charts that help you build out complex email lifecycle series as a flow chart. They make it easy to put rules, conditions and waiting periods between emails using visuals that any level marketer can handle.

It is important to keep a close eye on the email metrics of your welcome queued series. The open and click statistics indicate suggest that subscribers are interested in your email message, so the higher the better! Test subject lines and call to actions (CTAs) to keep the subscribers in your email list active and engaged. Also keep watch for fluctuations in your unsubscribe and complaint rates. Since the users who would be receiving your welcome series are new to your email list, be sure to honor their requests to opt out should they choose to do so. CAN-SPAM regulations give email marketers a full 10 days to remove a subscriber from their email list. If you have the emails in your welcome series lined up in a tight frequency, it is in your best interest to have any unsubscribes processed in real time so you can avoid sending further emails to them. This will help reduce complaints and improve the overall delivery of your emails.

After a subscriber has received your entire email welcome series, you can expect them to be knowledgeable about your company or brand. Hopefully, they will have been excited enough about your email content to engage with the email and take the actions you needed them to. This should enhance their experience with your brand and will ultimately lead to an email list full of active, profitable customers.

I once heard that by the year 2014, almost all Americans would view their emails on their mobile phone instead of on a computer. With the recent uptick in smartphones and network speeds, it seems as if that was a gross overestimate. It is now only 2012 and a quick Google search indicates that approximately 50% of all U.S. consumers owns a smartphone. A Return Path study claims that by the end of this year, more people will view emails on their mobile phone instead of on a desktop computer or webmail. So with those statistics in mind, along with knowing that mobile phone ownership and usage will only get bigger, the time to implement your mobile email strategy is now.

In the world of direct mail, it is assumed that you have approximately 15 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they toss your marketing message in the trash. Similarly, emails only get a fraction of your subscribers’ attentions. Perhaps they have a better chance of reaching through though because checking email on your mobile phone can be done anytime, anywhere. The same Return Path study shows that Americans spend just 25 minutes of all their time on the internet checking emails. This may seem like a long time, but with all of the other marketing messages to compete against, it can end up being just seconds spent on each email.

So with all of that being said, where do you start when creating an email marketing strategy that aligns to both desktop and mobile users in your email list? The first, although probably not easiest, step would be to ensure that your emails are rendering on common mobile devices. Since a majority of users are likely to balk upon opening an improperly formatted email, it’s important to make sure that you at least cover iPhone, iPad and Android.

With computer monitors getting larger and with better resolution, we’ve taken the liberty of expanding our email creatives to 700 pixels and beyond. At this width, your emails may look fine on your computer, but will most likely be completely misshaped when viewed on a mobile phone. iPhones and iPads will simply take the email that was sent and shrink it proportionately to fit within the screen size. Android phones are much less predictable when it comes to rendering emails. They will either show the text version of the email or display the full HTML that is not reduced to fit the screen size, forcing users to scroll horizontally. Android also does not display images by default, so users will only see the email text and alt tags unless enabled.

To optimize your emails for mobile viewing, try reducing the overall email width to 600-650 pixels. You may also consider reducing (or completely removing) copy and making buttons larger to avoid fat-fingering. It may take a few tries to find a size that works for both your email creative and renders properly across smartphones. There are also several tools available that can help you with your render testing. Email on Acid, Return Path’s Campaign Preview and Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer all have the technology that can preview your emails on several different mobile devices so you can be sure that your emails display properly.

If you do not have resources available to resize your emails, one very simple solution would be to host a text version of your email. Then include a link to this text version in your email header so that mobile users can easily click on it instead of trying to view a distorted creative.

Once you’ve got your emails displaying across all devices, it might be helpful to dig deeper into your mobile email list and learn about their email usage habits. For example, knowing exactly which devices they are viewing emails on, what time of day subscribers are viewing emails and what links are being clicked on. Google Analytics and Return Path’s Campaign Insight can help you gather and consolidate the information from your email list so that you can analyze and optimize your emails for the best open and click rates possible.

Your email list may not be composed of many mobile users, but surveys and statistics are supporting the growth of smartphones and tablets – and this trend is not one to be taken lightly. Even if you don’t have an entire mobile email strategy in place yet, it’s a good idea to get started on the basics. Implementing whatever you can to aid customers in using mobile devices will be noticed by customers and should translate into increased revenue streams for your marketing business.

The most difficult part of being involved in email marketing is actually getting your emails delivered into your customers’ inboxes. All ISPs – Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, among many others – each have their own rules and filters for what email they allow through to the users. Since this element that is completely out of your control, it can be both confusing and frustrating trying to get your emails through.

The good news is that there are a handful of tips that really can help emails bypass the spam filters on most ISPs. While there is no special sauce to guaranteeing your emails make it to the inbox, these tips are simple and are some things to keep in mind when creating messages for your email list.

1. Text to Image Ratio – Basically, you want your emails to contain a high ratio of text compared to the number of images. Back in the day, spam filters started scanning email content to determine whether the email should be passed on to the user. Spammers noticed this and tried used to hide their messages within images since the spam filters couldn’t ‘read’ them. Based on this practice, many ISPs starting looking at email content to have both text and images to determine whether your email was considered spam.

The difficult part of including text in your emails is when it comes to styling and image branding. There are only about five fonts that will render perfectly in email, and they are very basic. So if you must use a stylized font, try incorporating text by using an email-safe font for sub-headers, captions, buttons, text links or teaser copy.

2. Spam Words – Some ISPs still actually sift through your email content – subject line included – to see if you include words that are commonly used by spammers. Depending on their own internal thresholds, if they find one or more, they are likely to move your emails to the spam box. This is usually done on a case-by-case – or email-by-email – basis, but there’s always the possibility that your move to the junk folder can be permanent.

So to get your emails into the inbox, be sure to avoid including spam words in your text content. There are any number of words that can qualify as spam, but some common ones are: ‘click,’ ‘free’ and ‘here.’ For reference, this website compiles a great list of spam words you should avoid using. In addition to the actual words being used, some spam filters take the formatting of text into account. Using all capital letters, or yelling, is not encouraged and can be deemed as spam. Using $ and % symbols can also trigger some spam filters, so use with caution.

3. Relevant Content and Subject Lines – Sending a creative to your email list that does not match with their expectations is the quickest way to land your emails in the spam folder. In most ISPs, once a person marks your email as junk or spam, they no longer let any future emails through to the inbox. One quick way to remedy this is to make sure that the content you send to your email list matches what they expect to get. Bombarding subscribers with third party offers or sending emails full of ads will make it easy for users to complain about your email. If this is something your marketing strategy dictates that you must do, be sure to place a visible unsubscribe link in the header of your email. This location is closest to the complaint button and gives them the option to unsubscribe instead.

4. User Engagement – Gmail is notorious for using user engagement as a factor to determining whether your email should go into the spam folder or inbox. Other ISPs are jumping onboard, but now is the time to make sure your email list is actively opening and clicking your emails. An email list hygiene is most likely going to be necessary so that you can remove those email addresses that are no longer or have ever engaged with your brand. To determine your list hygiene strategy, you will probably want to consider both those customers that have recently opened or clicked on your email or that have recently been added to your email list. It’s recommended to give subscribers a tight window to engage with you – so starting with a three to six month engagement window should give favorable results. Removing those that are labeled inactive will be looked at favorably by the ISPs, and you are likely to experience better inbox delivery.

These four tips should come at no surprise to anyone who has been working in email marketing. The issue is that most people become so involved in advanced features and metrics that they tend to lose sight of the fundamentals. Email ISPs are only filtering emails in their customers’ best interests, and any viable email marketer should want to comply with their standards or else remove the user from their list.

Nowadays, businesses of every size can benefit from email marketing. Since Email Service Providers (ESPs) simplify the process for even the smallest of marketing teams, there is essentially no reason to not engage the customers who sign up for your email list. Each of the Email Service Providers discussed are designed to start with email lists of any size and expand along with the growth of your business. There are many different Email Service Providers available in the market today; the trick is finding the right one for you.

Probably most well known because of its premium pricing model, MailChimp offers service levels for any size budget. There are several different plans available, but one that could be valuable to those who are new to email marketing is the Monthly option. With this plan, you are charged based on the number of subscribers you have in your email list rather than how many emails you send each month. With plans starting at $9, MailChimp is one ESP that is an excellent choice for entry-level email marketers.

If you have never sent an email before, MailChimp comes with many pre-designed HTML templates that can be easily updated to include your business creatives and assets. You can also design or use your own HTML and text emails if you prefer. MailChimp also offers basic features such as A/B testing, segmentation, dynamic content and reporting.

Another ESP with similar service offerings is Constant Contact. This email service provider has pricing models that start at $15 per month and offer a free 60-day trial for an email list that is less than 100 subscribers. They also have several pre-built HTML email templates available, as well as render testing and social media sharing tools.

One nice feature that makes Constant Contact stand out is the email inbox delivery assistance service. This ESP has teams available to help ensure that your emails are delivered in a timely manner and actually hit your customers’ inboxes. Additionally, reporting statistics are captured in real time, so you can track your emails immediately after they are sent. Constant Contact also offers industry benchmarks to compare the performance of your campaigns against.

If you know that your email list is small and want to get started in email marketing immediately, one ESP to try is AWeber. This ESP can easily manage subscriber lists of up to 25,000 subscribers and monthly pricing plans start at $10. AWeber has a unique autoresponder feature that triggers a transactional email to all new subscribers that join your email list. This email can be fully customized with your brand’s logo and styles and can be set to launch immediately upon sign up, or scheduled for a pre-determined day and/or time.

AWeber also offers email revenue tracking statistics in addition to other basic key performance indicators. They allow you easily add and remove customers from your email list, and have segmentation tools available.

iContact is another email service provider that is designed to help entry-level businesses break into the email marketing space. Pricing starts at $14 a month, with an option for a free 30-day trial. They offer image hosting for those that have email templates created, but do not have a server available or fully customizable email templates. iContact also has spam checkers for all email templates and inbox delivery services available among other features such as split testing and email tracking and reporting.

One unique feature that iContact has is an email website sign up form. This form can be placed on your website or on your social media outlets (ex. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, etc.) to instantly add new users to your email list, and can be customized to use your business’s fonts, colors and specifications.

Another email service provider that entry-level to mid-size level email marketers should consider is Silverpop. This ESP strives to make email marketing simple for any level of client and is built on a scalable platform that can accommodate a growing business. They offer many different levels of account management and services that can assist you in your email marketing efforts or simply handle them for you. Silverpop allows their customers to have several different IP addresses for each of their different email streams as well.

If your marketing strategy calls for transactional emails (ex. order confirmations, shipping notifications, welcome emails, etc.) in combination with regular marketing messages, Silverpop is a good solution since they are able to integrate the two email streams together. Silverpop also offers other unique features that can enhance your email marketing strategy, such as survey creation, social media integration and email list segmentation.

Similar to Silverpop, Bronto is another ESP that can handle the email list subscriber counts and monthly email volume of an entry- to mid-level email marketing client. Although a little pricier than some of the other options, Bronto has many extra features that your business may find incredibly useful. In addition to A/B testing, email list segmentation and reporting, Bronto has a platform that can easily allow users to create email lifecycle marketing strategies through a drag-and-drop tool.

If you have multiple brands under your business that need to have different email marketing streams, email templates or email lists, Bronto is easily able to combine them into a single user interface. You can also report on each brand separately or look at email statistics across all brands. Bronto also offers a tool that can help integrate SMS (text) messaging into your email marketing stream.

All of the ESPs discussed here should have many different levels of service available. Depending on your business’s resources, strategy and budget choose one that most closely fits your needs. If your email marketing efforts expand greatly and your email list size becomes too large for your ESP to handle, it is always a possibility to either add another ESP or move to one that can handle enterprise level clients.

Forrester Research recently released a report that evaluated top email service providers (ESPs). They first qualified the ESPs by a number of factors that basically indicated which type of client they provided services for. Both email marketers and the ESPs themselves were interviewed in the study for a full understanding of the product. In the end, it was determined that six email service providers qualified for the study – Epsilon, ExactTarget, Experian CheetahMail, Responsys, StrongMail, and Yesmail Interactive.

Epsilon fell into the middle of the group of ESPs. Because of its global capabilities, Epsilon is an excellent email vendor if your marketing strategy involves emailing out of the United States. Specifically, they provide international support at 14 different office locations and the platform can be translated into five different languages. Some features, such as mobile marketing and social media, don’t appear to be a focus of the company and were ranked on the low end of the scale. Additionally, their testing and reporting functionalities fall a bit below the mark when compared to the other email service providers in the study.

ExactTarget was found to be one of the leaders in the email vendor space. Thanks to its strong platform, ExactTarget easily facilitates the segmentation of an email list, the sending of dynamic content and multivariate testing functionalities. It also had advanced reporting features that could easily handle large volumes of complex email messages. ExactTarget’s weakest rankings were on the mobile marketing and social media features. They have acknowledged this aspect of their business and have developed a tool named the Interactive Marketing Hub that helps you organize and aggregate data from many different sources including Facebook, Twitter, email and mobile.

Experian CheetahMail, another leading email service provider, is the largest vendor that was evaluated in the Forrester study. CheetahMail excels in its services provided to clients including professional service teams and account management. If your company does not have resources available to engage in email marketing, CheetahMail is a good partner since it scored near-perfectly in customer satisfaction. CheetahMail was also the only ESP to have a perfect score on their mobile and social media capabilities. The lowest score came in for reporting which is tends to be less flexible than the other email service providers.

Responsys was also ranked as a top email service provider. Its data model allows users to create and manipulate advanced segments and has a user-friendly interface that uses visual graphics that let email marketers set and change email lifecycle flows instantly. Responsys also offers aggressive testing and advanced reporting capabilities. It seems that Responsys’ only downfall were average scores in social media and mobile marketing, since neither of these are a core focus of the business.

StrongMail was the ESP with the highest retention rate among all other vendors. Since its installable platform is housed client-side, users have complete control over their data and IP addresses it uses. StrongMail scores highly in scalability for high-volume clients and for its multivariate testing features. On the other hand, StrongMail struggles with providing many cutting edge services to its clients. The reporting lacks advanced features, there are few to no tools to help with social media and mobile and the account management is sub-par for self-service clients.

Yesmail Interactive was ranked similarly to StrongMail in the sense that they are both basic email service providers. The email service provider earned perfect scores in its reporting and analytics capabilities, as well as scoring highly in account services and social media features. Yesmail does fall short on dynamic content, integration and data storage – all simple functions that every client needs. Overall, Yesmail seems to be lacking in corporate direction which has made their service offering suffer.

Although the rankings indicate that the above ESPs are all leaders in their field, it’s definitely possible that they may or may not be the provider for you. Based on your individual needs and goals, there are several other factors to consider when choosing what company will be responsible for sending messages to your email list.

• Cost – Based on the features desired, the cost could fluctuate greatly. Evaluate what capabilities are required vs. those that are nice to have to find the ESP that can fulfill them at a price you are able and willing to pay.
• Sending Throttles and Data Size Limitations – If you have a very large email list, you may need to consider an ESP that can accommodate unique sending strategies. Make sure they can provide you with the number of IP addresses you need to get your email messages delivered in a timely manner. They will also need adequate data storage space to house all of the email statistics for your campaigns.
• Transactional Mailing Capabilities – Simply put, some ESPs are able to handle transactional emails better than others. Depending on whether your email marketing strategy revolves around a few or hundreds of transactional emails, choose one that can easily support the types of mailings you need to send.
• Dynamic Content – Segmentation and dynamic content are the email marketing buzzwords of the day. If you aren’t already doing so, you probably will be in the future…and will need an ESP that can handle the data and reporting of such emails.
• Deliverability Management – Getting your emails delivered is an exceedingly difficult task, and you will need your ESP’s full cooperation since they are usually the ones managing your IP addresses. Ensure that the vendor you choose has developed relationships with all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so when delivery issues arise, they can intervene on your behalf.

All things considered, take the time necessary to evaluate each email vendor to find the one that suits your needs. Don’t expect one email service provider to fit the bill perfectly, but most will work with you to create custom solutions to fulfill all of your email marketing requirements.

Source:
The Forrester WaveTM: Email Marketing Vendors, Q1 2012, January 20, 2012
by Shar VanBoskirk

If the world of email marketing was a utopia, we would all have 100% delivery, open, click and conversion rates across the board…and we’d also be really bored. Since the subscribers in our email list did everything we told them to – clicked here, shopped now or viewed more – there would be no dealing with Internet Service Providers, feedback loops, testing or merchandising. Obviously this is not the case, and probably never will be. So we need to continue on the path of optimizing emails until our statistics are as close to perfect as we can get them to be. How? Start with a deep analysis of your subscriber list.

Who? Do you know who the customers are in your email list? Do you know the demographic information of a typical customer? The most important question is…are you targeting your emails to them? With today’s technology and information available, there is no longer a need to send mass emails to your entire database hoping for broad appeal. Instead, take the time to fully analyze your list composition and decide on an email strategy best suited to their needs. Even if you don’t collect much information on your subscriber, you can still use other indicators to make generalizations. For example, the domain of their email address can indicate an age generation while the IP address they signed up with can suggest a geographic location. It’s very likely that you will find that any targeting is better than none, and your email statistics will support your business objectives.

Why? Take a quick moment and remind yourself why they signed up to be on your email list in the first place. Did you offer an incentive? Do you have exclusive online only sales? Did they order something and were defaulted into the list? Whatever the reason, they are on your email list now and it should be your main goal to keep them there and active.

If your subscribers are not interacting with your email, it is in your best interest to send frequent re-engagement campaigns to get them to become active, or else remove them from your email list. By doing this, you will not only experience improved delivery and email statistics, but you will save on email sending costs. More importantly, you will only be concentrating on those customers who want to be in your list and will find your email marketing efforts valuable.

What? Once you know who your customer is and why they are in your email list, it is up to you to deliver email content that they both want and need. Although potentially time consuming, it is incredibly easy to create different versions of your email that can cater specifically to the demographic they are in. Most ESPs have a built-in testing functionality that can easily help you deploy several versions of emails all at the same time.

If you have the capability to do so, one sure-fire way to ensure that your customer interacts with your email is to simply ask them what they would like to receive from you. This can be easily accomplished through an email preference center. Once you know this type of information, you should incorporate it into emails with dynamic content. Whether it is a subject line, a portion of the email or the entire creative, utilize what you know about your customer to create a completely unique email based solely on their selections.

Where? Do you know how your customers are viewing your emails? If not, query your list to find out what percentages are using each of the major ISPs – Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and Outlook. By knowing this breakdown, you can make sure that your emails render perfectly across your major ISPs. You are more equipped to deal with delivery issues since you can focus your time on building relationships with ISPs that comprise a majority of your list.

In addition to knowing which ISPs make up your list, you should also know what type(s) of devices your emails are being viewed on. If your email list skews towards a younger demographic, it’s likely that they are viewing your emails on both their mobile phones and a desktop or laptop computer. If so, be sure that your emails contain a link to a mobile version or are tested to render properly across the major mobile platforms.

When? When are you sending emails? Do you know which day of the week performs best for the email statistics that are important to your business? For some companies, Fridays and weekends are not the best performers for email. But if you have brick and mortar stores, these days can be very important since the emails can drive foot traffic to the physical location.

What time of day works best for your audience? If your email list is comprised mainly of Generation Xers, you probably want to make sure your emails arrive in the inbox early in the morning since most people will be checking their emails at work. Most ISPs offer a tool that can help you localize your send time, so that you can ensure emails are received at the same time across different time zones.

Overall, there are a million different questions that you can ask about the subscribers in your email list. These are all just simple examples of ideas to consider so that you can learn more about your customers and what makes them tick. Remember that your customers are always changing, so it is a good idea to revisit these questions often to make sure that your assumptions are still true. By doing so, you will ensure that you are on the same wavelength as your customer and will end up being more successful in your email strategy.

There’s no doubt about it…getting your emails to render properly across all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is the bane of every email marketer’s existence. With all of the tables and rows, perfect rendering in one email client, and not in another, it’s no wonder that most of us just give up and send emails composed only of images. Now, we all know that a good text to image ratio in emails certainly helps with deliverability, but sometimes we can just get to that point where we are willing to sacrifice some inbox just to get the email done!

I have worked in email marketing for quite a few years now and confess that I just recently learned how to fully code HTML. Previously, I could make small changes to links and whatnot, but never quite had the ability to take a mock up and translate it into a fully coded piece of HTML. A couple of months ago I took an XHTML class at a local business center which turned out to be less-than-helpful since it mostly taught CSS styles. A short while later, I (thankfully) started working with an amazing graphic artist who taught me the ways.

The trickiest part about email rendering is that each ISP processes the HTML differently than the other. This makes for a very time consuming process of testing, fixing an error, testing again only to create another error, fixing, repeat. So the best way to avoid this maddening situation is to code your emails to solve for all potential issues.

So without further ado, here are some tips that I’ve picked up from her. Hopefully they will help you too!

Put together an email coding strategy before you get started.There are only a handful of fonts that will render perfectly in email clients (ex. Arial, Courier, Times, etc.), so plan ahead for the parts of the email that will be text and which will be images. Once you know this, you can easily slice the images you need for the email. You should also plan ahead for how many columns you will need to create the email. Remember, you will be building a large grid comprised of many smaller grids that come in the form of tables.

Build tables within tables to allow for independent spacing between cells.If you have a portion of your email that doesn’t perfectly align with the piece above it, simply create a new table. The spacing in the new table will then be independent of the pieces around it. Just remember to adjust the spacing using colspans if you intend to combine more than one column.

Get images to line up properly by using style=“display: block;”.Sometimes you get an unwanted thin line between your image slices. Adding this style to every image tag will have the images sit directly on top or next to each other without any padding. If your images are floating around within their cells, you can try aligning them using the valign or align attribute. Additionally, check the size of your overall table and make sure that all of the cells within that table add up to the total size. Being just a few pixels over or under the total table size can cause your grid to become misaligned.

Create spacing by using blank table cells instead of padding. If you need to indent an image ten pixels above the bottom margin, simply add an extra cell that looks like the below:

<td height=”10” style=”height:10px, line-height:10px; font-size:1px;">&amp;nbsp;</td>

Gmail will not read the height of an empty cell, but will read line-height, while Outlook is the other way around. So using blank table cells will create a ten pixel high white box that looks the same as padding, but renders properly in all email clients.

Create borders by using blank cells with background-color styles. Gmail is notorious for ignoring and cutting off border styles. So instead of using them, build an extra column on each side of your email similar to the cell above, just adding in another style that sets the background color. Since you want to define the width and have it extend the entire length of your email, use something such as this:

<td width=”3” style=”width: 3px; line-height:1px; font-size:1px; background-color: #ff0000;">&amp;nbsp;</td>

This will create a three pixel wide red border along the side of your email, and will render properly across all ISPs. Then connect the side borders with a cell that expands across the entire email on the top and bottom and build additional tables inside for the main email content.

Check that you are not using deprecated HTML tags. Some ISPs will still recognize deprecated HTML tags, but others won’t, thus causing rendering issues in different email clients. Some common tags that might still be in use are:

 <font> (replace with <span>), <u> </u>(replace with style=”text-decoration: underline;”) and <center> </center> (replace with style=”text-align: center;”)

Check W3Schools.com for reference of more deprecated tags.

Make sure that all cell, row and table tags are properly closed. Leaving just one tag open can have horrible consequences on email rendering. Some ISPs will ignore unclosed tags, while others completely misconstrue the entire email. So for sanity’s sake, add a closing tag underneath every new tag you open and enter all other content between. A free Firefox add in called Firebug is very useful if you need help finding unclosed tags. It can inspect and monitor your HTML in real time, which can help you find rendering issues before they even happen.

Test your emails in all major email clients. Set up test accounts in Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and Outlook and send live emails to each one to see exactly where rendering issues are. This way you can easily see how your email looks in each one instead of relying on a browser to render your HTML (which is more than likely going to look different than in the ISP).

These tips are just some basic starting concepts, but are all things that need to be considered in order to create a successful HTML email. The best way to learn HTML for email is to completely be immersed in it, and to keep testing out different solutions to errors. Eventually, coding emails becomes like second nature and the rendering issues become almost non-existent!

The amount of information email marketers collect on their customers and their habits is ever growing. Simply sending a blanket email to the customers in our email list is no longer valid. The challenge now is to use email as a medium in which to build and grow a relationship with our customers. We want to nurture and educate them so that they are highly responsive and generate revenues on a consistent and ongoing basis. To do this, design email series that speaks to each subscriber while they are on the journey of your email marketing strategy.

Below is an example of an email lifecycle strategy for New Subscribers to your email list. Obviously, the timing, sequence and content will need to be adjusted to your individual business goals. You can always first try testing different series on small test segments to fully optimize your strategy.

Since the example series is very informational and provides a lot of content to your customers, you may consider adding all new email addresses to a suppression file once they’ve completed the series. Additionally, you may consider suppressing anyone who is in your welcome series from being pulled into your regular email stream.

Remember, the first interaction you have with your customers is the welcome email. This email serves as both an introduction to your company, but also establishes the pace, tone and value of being in your email stream. The opportunities to educate your new customers are endless, so start each new subscriber off with a welcome series of emails that explains everything they should need to know to get started. If your website needs instructions or you have a lot of content to offer your subscribers, design your welcome email strategy to send several emails in a short period of time starting immediately after sign up.

Another situation where using a series of emails is beneficial is when you are looking to re-engage lapsed customers. Most customers have a tendency to the most active immediately after they signed up for your email list. For those customers who have stopped engaging with your emails or your website, one strategy to try is a We Miss You or Winback campaign.

The purpose of a Win Back or We Miss You campaign is try to entice a user to come back and take an action that they previously have done before. Regardless of what the action was – an email open, an article viewed on the website, an item added to their shopping cart – certain customers are no longer doing it and you want them to start up again.

To get started, you might want to think about the different reasons why a customer in your email list would not continue engaging with you. Do you have delivery issues that would prevent them from ever receiving your email in the first place? Has your content or template become stale so they are longer interested? Were they incentivized to join your list and were never fully interested in receiving your emails? You will need to consider all options before laying out your strategy since each can result in a different series of emails. One other thing to consider while deciding upon your strategy is whether you want to offer an incentive to the user to re-engage. The incentive can be anything from a discount to a sweepstakes entry to a free gift with purchase. If you do decide on an incentive, keep in mind that customers are smart and can easily learn to take advantage of the system so suppress them from regular mailings while they are in a Win Back/We Miss You series.

The above example is just a simple representation of the steps to take in a Win Back/We Miss You campaign. There are an infinite number of emails, content and sequences you can incorporate during this type of email series, but remember the end goal – get users to re-engage.

If, at any time during the series, they open or click, feel free to add them back into your main mailing stream. If you get no response at all, move the inactives into a group that is not normally included in your regular emails. Instead, you can choose to include them only for major mailings, lower their frequency (ex. from a weekly email to monthly) or not email them at all. You can then repeat the Win Back/We Miss You series quarterly or as often as you deem fit.

All in all, using series of multiple emails to engage your customers is effective and can definitely increase both your email KPIs and revenue. Additionally, you can use series to hygiene your email list and remove those that would rather not be there. The number of situations where you can use a series of emails is endless; just remember to keep the subscribers out of your regular mailing streams to avoid confusion.