According to a trustworthy online marketing website -http://www.webdesignerdepot.com – email marketing remains the number one tool for brands wanting to convey a message, en masse. Perhaps this is because, apart from social media connectivity, email is the go to medium for adults when communicating online. So it makes sense, seeing that many of us office jockeys and smartphone holders, access to our inbox is usually a 24/7 affair, to stick to a tried and trusted standard when sending a message out electronically.
Over the past few months, we at WildWeb have been thinking long and hard about our newsletter systems and how to improve them. From newsletter design creation to the technical arts of what makes more people open newsletters and ultimately respond to your message by clicking a link, or picking up the phone, depending on your newsletter’s call to action. After much reading up on the most recent stats and trends, and testing some theories, we thought we would share some of the accepted best practices out there with this blog post.
Before we get to the tips and tricks, in point form below, it is a good idea to decide on what genre you fit into. Our clients’ newsletters range from infrequent commercial news blurbs to regular fun and newsy mail shoots. Depending on which part of the field they are covering, their newsletter strategies are tweaked slightly.
1. Content and reputation are king
Reputation can be the single most important factor on how effective your newsletters are. As they say in media, ‘content is king’ and the quality of your subject and message determines your reputation.
One of the biggest influences on your reputation is the genesis of your mailing list.
If you have gathered a committed and growing subscriber based on an opt-in process, people are picking up what you are putting down. They like what you are about. Your mailing list is primed and therefore your audience will be more inclined to respond to your newsletters. You will be able to send out newsletters frequently, with a good response in open and click-through rates.
On the other side of the equation, if you have (legally) solicited your mailing list from your corporate database, or by some other (un-opted in) means you can bet that your audience is not going to be waiting on baited breath for you next news shoot. Your message and content falls into the ‘company news’ bracket. Your rep is therefore always going to fall into a more diluted category than the former, through the cold and realistic fact that your messages will be seen more as an obligation than a bonus to read. Therefore, when sending out newsletters, you certainly should be more tentative as to what makes people respond positively to your news.
This means :
- NOT sending out your newsletters too frequently,
- using a smart subject line, with a sender name
- and formatting your newsletters with clean, appealing design. More about this below…
2. Send out a variety of versions of your newsletter.
The debate goes on to what newsletters are more effective; HTML or Text-only based emails. HTML offers you the ability to design a newsletter with images and content all laid out with some topographical pillars, and therefore pleasing to the eye. It also presents the opportunity to emphasise your call to action through designing around your message (Something we will cover under “best design practices” below.)
Text-based newsletters, on the other hand, are less inclined to have formatting issues, which can be expected with HTML-based email newsletters being viewed on a multitude of different email applications that present (or break) your newsletter’s design.
So which is better? The no-frills text-based newsletter or the sophistication of HTML? The answer is both! Most newsletter service providers out there have the technology to send an HTML and text-based version together. They may also go one step further and offer a browser viewable version, therefore allowing your subscribers to click ‘view this in a browser’ and navigate to an unhindered design of your newsletter.
3. Use smart subject lines and delivery techniques
According to the latest numbers, a realistic achievement rate to aim for is a 95% delivery rate, a 20% open rate and a 5% click-through rate on your mailing list.
Although a small percentage of delivery errors can be attributed to underlying server errors and corporate firewalls, the biggest hindrance to having your audience not open your newsletter is when you do not include a clear sender name along with the sender email address. It is understood that number one reason why people do not open, trash, or worse report your newsletter as spam is because they do not know who sent the newsletter.
If you have included a clear identity in your senders email, the next step is to entice your audience to actually open your newsletter with the use of a clear, clever subject line, something that will tell them that this is a special newsletter but will not sound like sales speak. That is about as much advice as we can give. When you figure out the ideal copy recipe please let us know.
4. Design simple, smart newsletter layouts.
A whole subject can be devoted to newsletter design. There is a real art to designing effective newsletters, like playing sport. Sports have rules and penalties for those who breach them. But playing to the boundaries of those rules wins games. The same goes with designing appealing newsletters.
Popular web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and to a lesser extent Internet Explorer have become sophisticated graphic presenters. These days, websites are meticulously designed with some sophisticated graphics. This makes them interactive and appealing. Most clients ask us to do the same when designing their newsletters for them. But we have to insist that when it comes to email applications, things are different.
Email apps like Outlook are more word processors than graphical interfaces. Although they have come a long way, in recent years, they are still far behind the presenting abilities of your typical web browser. This means having to dumb down your newsletter designs in order to have them display properly on an email application like Outlook. Although you can always expect some of your mailing list to be on a age old computers and ancient email application, you can still have movement when designing an attractive newsletter using colours, layout options and images.
- Think skinny: One of the main tips in newsletter design is to design a newsletter narrow. Although most screen resolution, today, average around 1280 pixels (and bigger) most people view their emails in a cramped preview plane. This means that if you design to today’s common screen resolution, and try and maximize your newsletter design according to width, your content can and will be cut off when viewed in preview mode. Although it sounds narrow, 520 pixels is a respectable width setting the canvas size of your newsletter design. It also looks great when viewed on a mobile device.
- Use old-school design methods: Most CSS code will be disregarded in email applications. So it is a good idea to go with the old-school table structure when designing the layout of a newsletter. Using tables may not give you the raz-mataz of CSS3, but it still allows for some reliable column layout and versatile image placements.
- Images – do’s and don’t’s: Images are another hot subject of contention when it comes to newsletters and appropriate design. They say that a picture says a thousand words, and although this is absolutely correct, when using in a newsletter design you need to stick to some hard and fast rules.
Firstly, do not rely on images to be the focus of your newsletter. And never, never, expect images with text to be the crux of your newsletter – its call to action, section headings or text body. This is because a percentage of your mailing list will have their email application set to image viewing off. And by default, most email applications have images viewable on ‘click to download’ only. This means that even if you have the option of embedding images directly into your newsletters, there can me some layout issues or maximum mail size limit that can hinder your newsletter’s success.
With this in mind your newsletter design should look good and legible without the use of images. You should only consider images to be your frosting. The more your mailing list respects your reputation, the more you can expect them to download your images.
One finally tip is to never use background images. Most email applications simply ignore any code that tells it to insert a background image. So, basically, they just won’t be necessary unless you have a browser viewable newsletter option.
- Do not use Rich Media: Will keep this short. One of the biggest no no’s is using rich media in your newsletters – like a video or a sign up form. This is one way street to most email spam filters. Don’t go there.
- Keep your words to a minimum: Finally, and probably one of the most important aspects of your design is to keep your message as brief and precise as possible.
Reading on the tangible, pleasing feel of paper can sometimes be a chore. Reading on a web browser can be even more so. Therefore, it is not outlandish to compare reading long swathes of text in an email to sticking needles in your eyeballs. A good word of advice is to keep your newsletter as brief and hitting as possible. We admit that copyrighting is a dark art, and something to be mastered, but focus on a minimum word count, deliver a great call to action and you will not be disappointed. A simple tip is to have one clear, simple call to action with a text focus on scalability.
In concluding, there are some hard rules that should be stuck to when sending out news to your mailing list. These can be as simple, yet crucial, such as using a clear sender identity. There are tips that will help the effectiveness of your open rate, like a clever subject line. There are also some soft rules when it comes to design, like using a narrower, rather than wider plane in your newsletter layout. In the end, reputation is the most important factor. If you have an audience that respects your brand and the content you are offering, they will be more likely to interact with your e-marketing campaigns.