Once you get beyond the inbox and your email has been opened, your job at this point is to read your consumers mind, anticipating exactly they need.
- Provide a way for your subscribers to opt- out of receiving future emails: You are required to remove anyone who unsubscribes from your email list permanently within ten days of the unsubscribe request, and you can't add that person back without explicit permission.
- Make sure to include From and Subject lines in your email header that get noticed: Creating an effective email begins with placing familiar and motivating information into every email header. The header is the portion of the email that contains the following:
From Line: this is the line of text that tells the recipient of an email whom the email if from.
From Address: the is the line of text that contains the physical address of the email sender
Email Server's From Address: A server address, popularly known as IP address is used by most of the ISPs (internet service providers) to determine if your email server is a sender of legitimate commercial email or whether your server has been reported as sending unsolicited e-mails.
Send your emails in three consecutive rows to the recipients: Always keep in mind that your email subscriber doesn't not necessarily read all your e mails, there may be personal or professional reasons for that, so to make your recipient view your content atleast once, you need to send a key message in three emails in a row.
Branding your e-mails to enhance your image: All your business communications and multiple email formats should contain consistent branding elements that gives your audience confidence and makes your business more memorable. Even the big names like coca-cola wouldn't dare to change the branding on its bottles and cans too rapidly. Marketing experts use a concept known as just-noticeable difference to change brand identities over a period of time. Following are some of the ways that can add branding elements to your emails:
- Include your logo in your emails
- Use colors from your logo and website in your emails
- Match your website offers and print communications with your e-mails
- Use fonts that match your brand in your emails
- Make sure that the writing in your emails should match up your business personality.
- ABCs of Email Layout: Email marketing experts must know that which parts of emails grab the maximum attention of consumers. For this they can use heat map, which is an image generated by special device that tracks the eye movement when someone looks at an email. See several examples of heat maps on http://www.eyetools.com/. A good way is to mentally divide your email into quadrants and then start placing the content and visual according to the order in which consumers tend to focus their attention on each quadrant. Majority of consumers begin reading in the upper left, which shows that important content should be placed in the upper left.
- Copy in your Email might not work: Make sure that your email copy must include the search phrases or the phrases people associate with your brand, as in the absence of this your email copy might not work no matter how poetic and rhythmic it is. E.g. when IBM first launched the laptops, though it decided to call them "ThinkPads", but did all the marketing with the term IBM laptop computers rather than the "ThinkPad", as outside the IBM walls people were searching for the laptops, either on the web or on the IBM site by simply typing the word "laptops".
- Including Images in Your Email: Images can enhance the look and feel of your emails. Proper positioning of images make your emails inviting and more readable, but at the same time embedding images can make your emails slow to download, so to get rid of this you need to follow some extra steps.
- Choosing a file format for your images: The three best file formats to use in email browsers are JPG or JPEG (joint picture expert group), GIF (graphic interchange format) and PNG (portable network graphics). If your image is not in one of these formats, use image editor to save the image in JPG format (which is the standard format for e-mail images).
- Check your file size: Images you want to use in your e-mails should be less than 50K to download quickly, you can reduce the file size in a graphic design or image editing application either by reducing the dimensions of the image or by reducing the image resolution to 72 dpi (this is enough resolution for image to display properly on the computer screen).
Don't embed - Referencing Your Images: Instead of embedding or attaching the images in your emails, use image references that point to the path where the image is uploaded on your website or located in a public folder on a remote server. Here is an example of HTML referencing tag : <img src=http://www.yourwebsite.com/public/imagefolder/imagename.jpg>.
Including Text in Your Emails: Text is mandatory in email marketing messages as with the help of text you can explain your services and offers to the consumer in a better way, but at the same time too much plain text and too much design elements can make your e-mails difficult to read and understand, so to come out of this you should use HTML design elements and the plain text correctly in a balanced way, different fonts and text styles (headlines, paragraph text and links) can create a mood in your emails and change the tone of the words that you use.
- Consumers may not buy your products and services in one go: Always begin with the assumption that before your email arrived, your recipient may have been influenced by other media pertaining to that particular product or service, whether online, or via search or mobile. Also assume that once they read your email, they are not going to buy right away and will go to the Web to search for customer reviews, competitive products, and more. Now use this assumption to take your email program up another notch by including customer reviews, ways your products and services are better than the others & more in your e-mails.
