Best practices in email marketing demand communications that go beyond advertising, respect the customer, and speak in a familiar one-on-one style. Email is “the most personal advertising medium in history,” says Seth Godin, whose book Permission Marketing set the rules that transformed email marketing into what it is today. “If your email isn’t personal, it’s broken.”

Smart marketers, recognizing that people’s aversion to spam destroyed the customer loyalty they worked so hard to build, had already begun to address the problem with best practices that focused on permission. Today, what’s best is often defined by the size of your company and the industry you’re in.

• Don’t waste your readers’ time – An email inbox is a busy place, you won’t get much attention.

• Permission matters — Not only do you need to have permission to email people, but it helps to remind them of how they gave you permission, as specifically as you can.

• Relevance trumps permission — Just having permission is not enough, the content you are sending must also be relevant.

• Make unsubscribing easy — There’s no point emailing people who are not interested.

• Image blocking is common — You can’t rely on people actually seeing your images.

• Bring back tables — Structural tables are still often necessary for creating columns.

• Add inline styles — Gmail removes anything else.

• Don’t forget your plain text version — You can make blocks of text more readable.

• Meet your legal obligations — For example, CAN-SPAM for US senders.

• Test, test, test — It’s the only way to be confident about your design working.

An email inbox is a very noisy environment, with calendars, notes and folders all competing with the actual emails for space. Given that a reader may only ever see your subject line before deciding whether to read your email, you can’t afford to waste time. Make sure that your emails show right away why they are worth reading. Consider starting with a succinct table of contents to help decide whether they should read on.

Email Marketing is a tricky matter. It is powerful, but easily abused. It is easy, but really difficult. May these tips, tricks and secrets make it easy and powerful to grow small businesses.

Acidgreen offers its easy-to-use, fully customisable email marketing software.
L2 / 107 Alexander St, Crows Nest, NSW 2065
contact@acidgreen.com.au