Successfully Sending Emails to Your Customers and Prospects

Getting Your Emails and E-Newsletters Read

Marketers have long understood the challenge of getting a direct mail piece noticed and read, steps that necessarily precede any sales activity. The unique challenge of marketing through email and e-newsletters is less widely understood but recent case studies and surveys provide some insights that will make your e-marketing ventures more successful.

Many marketers include html images as part of emails they send. Using these images provides several advantages. They make an email look more visually interesting and allow you to connect with other branding your agency may do. Just as importantly, when the images are downloaded in the email, you are able to substantiate that the email was actually opened. An ‘open' doesn't guarantee that your email was read, of course, but it's a pretty good surrogate measure.

But there is a downside to using html images in emails. Many email clients, including the pervasive Outlook, will block images in emails but allow the user to permit them on a case by case basis. Unfortunately, spammers will also use html images in their emails. When a recipient downloads the image it validates the email address for the spam sender which results in …even more spam. For this reason, many people will accept images in emails only reluctantly.

A recent survey and a separate case study conducted by Marketing Sherpa point out another short coming of html images but also the path to more effective emails and e-newsletters. The survey distinguished between business email users and consumer email users. Business users likely rely on Outlook for their email client while home users probably get and send email via a web mail service like Yahoo, Google, AOL or Microsoft's Live.

Most Outlook users actually never open many emails instead viewing them through a preview pane as they scan through their inbox. Depending on whether the preview pane is a horizontal or vertical (user defined options) some of an email will be obscured and may never seen. Email real estate set aside for images not yet downloaded often push text out of the viewing area. The result: Your message doesn't get through.

The lesson for B to B communications is that you need to design emails, that's right - design, for both kinds of recipients: those that preview in horizontal panes and those that preview in vertical panes. The first few paragraphs need to be compelling enough to make a reader want to go further or click on links in the email because your key message will need to fit in the upper left corner of an email. In fact, just to be on the safe side and account for preview panes that are sized on the small side, you should make the first 2 to 4 sentences count because that's all that may get read.

The lesson in the B to C (business to consumer) e-communication arena, as it turns out, is the same one. Recent upgrades to web mail services at Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL make those free mail services feel and perform much more like a desk top application. And they include the ability to scan and preview emails in panes.

The Marketing Sherpa case study provided some results and tips from a company that achieved open/click through rates of over 70% for e-mail newsletter mailings to a house list. Here's some lessons they learned that you can apply right away:

• Provide a summary of your newsletter or the full email in 2 to 4 sentences with a link (for newsletters) to the full content.
  
  
• Make sure your content is compelling and concise. You may get click throughs once but if your content is not to the point busy recipients may not come back.
  
  
• Manage your frequency to once every one to two months. Respect your reader's time.
  
  
• 12 page Word document contains copy examples for email, post cards, stuffers, on hold script and traditional newsletter copy for several campaign themes.
  (Free download)
  
  
• 44 page Word document contains copy for 27 individual communication campaigns.
  (Free download until May 20)
  
  

Too Busy to Keep Up with News? Try RSS or a Newsletter Email Account

With the explosion of blogs and online publishing it seems harder than ever to keep up with all the news. If you aren’t taking advantage of RSS feeds to organize and bring the news you want to your desktop you may want to look into it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it allows you to subscribe to multiple news sources (blogs, online newspapers and magazines and just about anyone providing an RSS feed). Providers deliver headlines to an RSS reader on your desktop allowing you to scan and choose which articles or content you want to read. We were going to provide a more in-depth explanation of RSS and how to set up a reader but then we came across this 3:30 video that does a far better job of explanation than we can (and it’s entertaining in its humorous spin on PowerPoint): http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english.

You may also want to set up a separate email account for those newsletters that don’t provide an RSS feed. Sign up for a free email account using Yahoo Mail, Gmail or another free service and let the newsletter emails pile up there. It will keep your work in box clear of distracting clutter during the busy work day. Then, on Saturday morning, when you have poured your coffee and before the rest of the house wakes up, you can sift through the accumulated reading or dump it all to the trash bin.

Customers Who Don't Own Computers Are Often E-enabled

Some of us make the assumption that our customers don’t have computers at home and therefore don’t use email or the web. But what about computer and internet access at work? A 2003 (that’s a long time ago) survey by the US Department of Labor found 50% of the employed used a computer at work. For some income and age groups, that number ranges between 60% and 84%.

And consider this quote from a 2006 court case in New York, pitting an employer against an employee over personal use of employer provided internet access: "The internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for work." In the case the judge made the observation that the employer allowed employees to use the work phone for personal needs, making appointments, checking in at home, etc. As long as the employee was doing their job, the ruling found little to no distinction between using work internet access or phones for personal needs.

This underscores the simple reality that people surf the net and check personal email at work and will continue to do so. Assuming that customers that don’t have home computers or internet don’t use email or the web is an assumption that just doesn’t hold up.