Rich email campaigns . week three
April 30, 2010 at 3:30 am
filed under research and study questions, tips
Tagged email coding, web marketing
1. Explain the major considerations of designing a rich email campaign.
When designing a rich email campaign the focus is typically first on marketing techniques to express the intended message to the audience, to reel them in. However, there are also major legal considerations and user-friendly features to email campaigns. Jack Roberts’ ‘Email Campaign Best Practices,’ an article on suite101.com, sums up the most important considerations in email campaigns. When sending out mass emails for marketing purposes, you should consider the return emails and replies. To handle the influx of replies, it is best to set up an email dedicated to the campaign replies and to have someone frequently check and respond to the replies. Sending out a mass marketing email and then never responding to the users will negate any marketing efforts in sending out the email. Also, these replies might contain some helpful feedback from your users about your efforts. In order to filter out the bounce back, automated message responses, set up a system that reads the subject line of the response and deletes the ones that read ‘out of the office’ or ‘mailbox full.’
Roberts notes the legal considerations as well. An ‘unsubscribe’ option must be available on all email campaigns so the user can choose to opt out. Whether it is providing a link that sends a message or detailing the option to reply with ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ in the subject link, an option to no longer receive emails must be present and must be obliged. Also, when collecting subscriptions to email notices, make users feel secure providing their email without the threat of being spammed, provide a link to a privacy policy and information about how frequent the emails will be. It is best to hold the contact information in a database with all of the email contacts and information so that all of the replies and unsubscribe requests can be maintained through an efficient system.
Following these best practices will enhance your marketing efforts and provide a good user experience.
2. How might you send a rich email campaign and track the results?
It is very important to maintain email campaign data in a safe and secure spot (away from spammer hackers) and to keep up with the user requests to subscribe or unsubscribe. In order to easily maintain data, send and track an email campaign, there are mailing list management systems that can assist in the task. These systems not only handle large data lists, but also track important information, including email opens, clicks inside the email, bounce rate, etc., that help judge the effectiveness of the email campaign. Three of the main mailing list systems that can help keep you and your team organized and help track results are: MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact. If you have the time and the resources, you can also create your own management system and track results with Google Analytics.
3. How is HTML and CSS for an email campaign coded differently than for browser display?
HTML and CSS coding for an email campaign and for browser display have their own unique elements. Mark Wyner’s article ‘CSS and Email Kissing in a Tree’ on A List Apart details the interesting techniques for coding email campaigns. Styling email campaigns can be a headache. Many email clients will shorten the header section removing the linked style sheets, while other email clients will reject linked style sheets altogether. Wyner has done some heavy-duty testing with different methods to use styling and certain layout options while still keeping the code compliant with web standards. He suggests to use inline styles and using a ‘div’ container to maintain the layout and styling. Although it is not optimal to use inline styling, most of the typical browser code rules do not apply or work with email code. Another ‘code of conduct’ that flies by the wayside when coding for email campaigns is the use of tables. As stated in Tim Slavin’s ‘How to Code HTML Email Newsletters’ on SitePoint.com, HTML tables and inline CSS are the safest way to preserve styles and layout based on the email clients’ lack of CSS support.
According to Slavin, email layouts contain a header, body column (can be divided into two columns), and footer. All of these elements can be contained in tables. Slavin’s article also includes great resources for email templates, layout options, and standard code tweaks.
A very similar aspect between browser and email coding is the need to test, test, test. One of Slavin’s tips is to test HTML emails with the images turned off in the email client to make sure the content is still clear and available.
Additional resources on how to best code for email campaigns can be found in various email management system documentation. Below are links to these resources.
Resources:
‘Top HTML Email Coding Mistakes’ on MailChimp.com
‘Guide to CSS support in email clients’ on campaignmonitor.com
1 comment
RSS /
Comments are closed.
sheree ciappa
Nice work! why don’t you just teach tomorrow (lol!)