Time to go back to basics

Marketers today have a host of advanced eMarketing tools at their disposal and many are looking to automate, integrate and implement behavioural life-cycle strategies in their online marketing environments.

However, if they are to make the best of these tools, technologies and strategies, marketers need to ensure that they have the basics covered. Let's take a step backwards and look at some basic rules that many email marketers have forgotten about.

Databases/Mailing Lists

Make sure all of the recipients on your mailing list have opted in. This is basic best practice, even if the ECT Act doesn't insist on it.

How old are your mailing lists?

Have you been emailing the same list for months and months, or even years, without performing data updates? If you send email to invalid email addresses frequently, you will be blacklisted. Email addresses go stale much quicker than telephone numbers or postal/physical addresses. If you have this type of customer information, make use of it. Relevant incentives are always a good way to motivate customers to update their details.

Best practice would be to use a web form to allow your customers to update personal information and preferences 24X7. Even if you have web forms where customers can update their details, you will still be receiving incorrect email addresses if you do not have data validation on the web form.

Do you know what your bounce rates are?

You could have a mailing list of 100,000 with only 65,000 mailable addresses and 35,000 that have bounced. To avoid your bounce numbers increasing to that level, perform bounce recovery frequently. Each email address is important. Your mailing list is probably your most important marketing asset.

Are you aware what the industry standard is for bounce rates?

Best practice would be to find out what the industry standard is for your sector and be sure your bounce rates are less or on par. View DoubleClick's latest report on email metrics. http:///www.doubleclick.com

Email Communication

Do you quality control the email copy and subject lines?

Bear in mind that many recipients will see your copy through a preview first and then decide whether to open or delete the message. Make the top of the copy as interesting as possible and try to place a link in this window that will guide the user to the correct destination.

The subject line should be no longer than 40 characters or "folding" problems may occur. Avoid using punctuation in your subject lines. It is easier for somebody else to pick up mistakes in your copy so read your copy yourself and ask someone else to look at it, too. This way you are more certain of avoiding mistakes.

Do you include the basic best practice requirements?

An unsubscribe mechanism must be included

A link to your Privacy Policy must be included

Your Physical postal address must be included

Do you stick to best practices when coding HTML?

Designers love to create impressive and flash graphics. This is not always best practice when it comes to email deliverability. Use graphics sparingly and keep them small.

Avoid using style sheets and JavaScript. They can be rendered differently in many browsers and using straight HTML coding will ensure the greatest number of HTML recipients will see the best version of your email.

Avoid using tools that create code for you. Often strange characters that are rendered differently are added to the code.

Do you stick to best practices when creating Text Emails?
We tend to focus a great deal of time on making sure our HTML emails are correct - what about the text version?

The text content should be created in Notepad, EditPad or WordPad. If the content is created in these applications, you will not have to worry about font size or type, special formatting, and unique characters. If the text is created in Word or email, there may be hidden or unsuitable characters in the content and your service providers may bill you for additional work on the content to fix these problems.

Use a font size of 10 or 12 points (the most common font size used to display text in popular email clients).

Keep the width of the message to 70 characters or less. Use hard returns to format to this maximum length.

Make sure to insert a complete URL so that the URL is live within the message.

Do you proof both Text and HTML version of the emails in various email clients?
Why go to all the effort of creating a strategy, copy and creative if you do not test the results? Testing in-house and testing on various email clients is of critical importance.

You need to check the copy, subject lines and if the email arrives in your inbox or junk mail folder. Send the email communication to an internal list for proofing. Once all recipients on the internal list have approved the email, send a proof to a seed list that contains email addresses from various email clients. View the emails in the various email clients to see if the emails are delivered into the inbox and what the email looks like. Many email tools provide a feature to check the content of your emails and seed lists. Even if your email tool does not provide this feature, do not skip this step as it is most important. Only once you have completed this checklist should you send your message out.

Basics are where marketing began. Don't forget to get them right if you want to use email marketing as an effective channel.