Email Marketing Tips & Tricks

We are happy to draw on the Addemar team’s years of experience to provide you with email marketing tips that ensure your emails achieve their objectives.

Email Marketing Tip 1: Test, test & test

Never send out any campaign without testing it first.

• The best place to start, of course, is to send yourself a test email: check to make sure the texts make sense, the links are correct, the images come out properly and the sender is the right one. These are the basic steps you need to test
• It also makes good sense to send out test emails to a number of webmail addresses. Set yourself up with accounts at Livemail (Hotmail), Gmail and Yahoo and check that the emails arrive looking the way you had planned them to look. Tests to a Telenet or Skynet webmail (or any other two large ISP's in your area) can also be of value. If you can read your email properly at these 5 webmail destinations, then you can assume that your email is working as it should.
• For large mailings, you can also boost your results significantly by testing the content. Start by selecting five or so test groups of 50-100 recipients. Experiment with different senders, subjects, links, headings and texts and you will see that both the open rate and the click-through rate (CTR) can easily vary by a few percentage points. In a campaign sent out to 40,000 recipients, a few percentage points can make a world of difference.

Email Marketing Tip 2: Keep it simple

With Addemar, you send out HTML emails. In principle, HTML is standardised, yet unfortunately HTML is not always interpreted correctly by all email clients. There are also a number of HTML tags and codes that are not supported by all email programs (such as <div> and <form>). In particular, programs such as Outlook 2007 and Lotus Notes support very little HTML.
As an email designer, this means there is nothing else to do but keep the coding of emails simple. So restrict yourself to simple CSS without any special layout codes, because a significant proportion of recipients will not be able to view the layout properly. It’s also best to repeat the CSS three times: in the head, in the body and inline.

Email Marketing Tip 3: Keep it clean

HTML can be a treacherous layout language. A designer can achieve great results in HTML with ‘dirty code’. In email marketing, however, this is punished mercilessly: incorrect or contaminated code can result in changes and displacements to layout without warning with some recipients. So make sure that the HTML code is correct. One way of doing this is to check via http://validator.w3.org

Email Marketing Tip 4: Think about readability

A large number of the people who receive your emails will do so in less than ideal circumstances: emails are often only read in the display window and constantly appear without any illustrations. These are two challenges that you need to take into account when designing your email.
Make sure that the top left-hand corner is used to good effect: in both horizontal and vertical display windows, this corner is the first thing that recipients see, so it is vitally important. For the same reasons, you need to keep virtually all emails 600 pixels wide: many recipients don’t open up their emails fully and don’t scroll across, so the field you have to work with is limited.
The second challenge is image-blocking: at all costs avoid emails that consist of nothing but images. Also make sure that there is sufficient text for the recipient to get the core of the message. Finally, make sure that the alt tags on the images are filled in and avoid white or very light text.

Email Marketing Tip 5: Personalise

Various studies have shown that personalised emails generate higher open rates and click-through rates than unpersonalised emails. Addemar gives you the opportunity to personalise any database field you want: you should make good use of this opportunity. But personalisation goes much further than just the salutation: you can also personalise images or the subject so that each email has a greater chance of succeeding.

Email Marketing Tip 6: Segment

Make sure that you do not irritate or beg the recipient: choose the correct segmentation that ensures that you send relevant emails to the right people at a carefully chosen time. The database functions of Addemar enable you to divide your address groups up based on a wide range of criteria: so use this capability to set up a segmented campaign.

Email Marketing Tip 7: Be Interactive

Email is an interactive medium: also make sure that your emails are interactive. Try to avoid emails that consist purely of text and contain no links. Experience has shown Addemar that the more links there are in an email, the more people are likely to click-through. If the email is clearly interactive and contains lots of ‘calls to action’, recipients will get involved. By using the Evaluate menu in Addemar, you will then be able to monitor the level of interactivity you have created among recipients.

Email Marketing Tip 8: Automate

Addemar is built on an open structure so that the system can be integrated with external systems as simply as possible. For example, Addemar has already been linked to CMS, CRM and ERP systems. Addemar provides an API (full application programming interface) to create this link. This API enables you to link up automatically with Addemar so that you can install features such as subscription registration at a website that automatically ends up in Addemar. The API enables you to automate (part of) your email marketing.

Email Marketing Tip 9: Use landing pages and forms

Addemar offers you as standard the capability of adding landing pages and forms to your emails. A landing page is an online page with extra information that can only be accessed via an email and is ideal for using as an extension of the email. That way, you can keep the email short and powerful and a measurable click is generated into the bargain. In the same way, a form or a survey makes a good extension for an email.

Email Marketing Tip 10: Go Viral

With Addemar, emails can also be equipped as standard with a Send-to-Friend function. This makes it easy for recipients to forward the email to other contacts who can then also register on your list. This function makes viral marketing more straightforward and you can also monitor and analyse this form or distribution better.