Email blasts off

interactive news

Email marketing is all the rage these days. On any given week, we probably receive about a good dozen legitimate campaigns via email, most of which we never requested. More and more of our clients (if not all of them) also want the ability to communicate with current and future customers this way. The reasons are obvious: It’s cheap. It’s immediate.

An email blast, if opened by the recipient, can effectively convey your message, but therein lies the crux of the problem — clicking the “read” button. How do you become the wheat and not the chaff?

It helps to have well-designed, interesting content. Compelling your audience to opt-in as a subscriber automatically ads value to your message, but properly crafting an email campaign is technically more difficult than a web site. For starters, the dearth of general email standards and the fear of viruses imposes much stricter rules upon the designer. Despite all the available technology out there, email has many limitations.

In the corporate environment, Microsoft Outlook reigns supreme. Unfortunately, Outlook also scores the lowest in its email rendering capabilities. As a result, it hamstrings the designer the greatest. (Read a comparison of all the clients here and see how yours rates.)

Other email design restrictions include:

No executable code. Email clients and most corporate email servers will not allow Flash or javascript through the gates because of the virus threat. This means no animations, rollovers, or anything dynamic that changes appearance in the page.

No forwards. Most email clients will not forward any graphics built into the design. Forwarding also breaks the layout. The blasting service does usually provide a “forward to a friend” tag to insert into your design.

No fonts other than web fonts. This applies as well to web pages.

No embedded video.

No video. Period.

You may link to your heart’s content to web pages that contain these things, but just don’t put them in the email itself.

Spam-a-not

Most independent web hosts will not allow you sent to more than 500 addresses at a time. You will likely get flagged as a spammer if you attempt this and risk having your email accounts locked up. No matter the number of recipients, we recommend using an email blasting service.

Keep in mind that most blasting services impose their own restrictions as part of the effort to control spam. They may require you to provide proof that you acquired your mailing list legitimately and then take a day or two to clear your list. Blasters also will not allow you to display URLs in the body and will require an “unsubscribe” link in the page somewhere.

Finally, if you’d like your campaign to be readable on mobile devices, make sure you tell the designer. Different phones use different browsers which -- even in the case of the iPhone -- are not as fully featured as their desktop counterparts. Special consideration is required for proper display on these devices.

Some tips

Because of the complexity involved in designing a good text-heavy page layout, it might seem a good idea to send out your campaign as a single graphic. In this form, you have an absolute guarantee that your design will look exactly the way you intended. The idea faulters when you consider that some email clients by default will not show graphics. GMail, for instance, will not show any graphic files from senders not already in your contact list unless the recipient specifically allows it. No graphic, no message. No impact.

Conventional wisdom has developed around this new marketing form as well. For instance, it seems that the best time to send your campaign is in the middle of Tuesday or Wednesday afternoons. By then, everyone’s caught up with their weekend and morning emails. And by the end of the week, most people have begun to plan for the weekend.

And it should go without saying, but send out information that has some value to your audience. Tell a story. Spread some wisdom. Give people a reason to actually look forward to your next campaign. Don’t simply hammer people with a sales pitch.