James O’Sullivan’s Blog

Simply put email marketing is crucial for an online business. Get it wrong and it can affect almost every aspect of your business. email marketing has been around for a long time so there’s plenty of article out there to help you on your way. Apart from emailing the right customer list, personalisation, copy and email type (newsletter, transactional…) the following points should be followed.

Technical stuff.

• Close Tags
• Check that it’s W3C compliant
• Use ASCII
• Avoid CSS
• Width 500-600
• No Javascript
• No background images
• Don’t embed images, host them on a webserver
• Don’t embed forms

Typography and colour

• Use Ariel or any other sans serif font that is largely supported
• Use “Cool” colours: Blue, Purple and Green work well with both male and female users
• Don’t use a white font.
• Best practices
• Create a web version
• Test on various email clients
• Place important content on the top left
• Include add email to safe list
• Blocked images affect open rate so use images sparingly
• More links increase click rate
• Hyperlink all images
• Don’t SPAM
• Have a personality. Style, tone humour, emotion, attitude
• Have a clear call to action
• Use white space
• Forward to friend link
• RSS feed subscription link

Must have

• Unsubscribe link
• Company name and address

Test test and test

• Subject line
• Layout, colours, format – heat maps
• Offers
• Buttons, call to action
• Landing page
• Frequency