By Elmer on June 3, 2009

We reckon that email marketing has been around for quite a while. Dragged into annoyance of unsolicited mails, and rendered irrelevant by people who choose to mark email messages as spam instead of unsubscribing to newsletters, and apparently outshined by its younger peers named SEO and social media, EDM continues to be among the easiest and cheapest way to communicate to our target audience.

However, we notice that many emails are sent just for the sake of sending. We still see many emails consisting of just big JPG file; I can only imagine marketers doing so think that sending emails is similar to outdoor advertising, only viewed indoors. We still see multiple instances where unsubscribe forms don’t work.  If such things continue to prevail, effectiveness of marketing through EDM will continue to be curtailed.

So we try to provide tips to those who continue to send emails in hopes to improve business leads and achieve objectives:

1 Don’t use large graphic images or try to embed Flash animations in the email. Images won’t be displayed by default and animations will be blocked. Instead use a link subscribers can click into a landing page. Don’t embed JavaScript and videos as they won’t be displayed as well.

2 Design email layout that it will not exceed 600 pixels so that readers who preview them will see a significant amount of content without the need to scroll to see the content.

3 Use absolute instead of relative path when referring to images. This is because images are all hosted in your server. So to ensure that images are displayed no matter where they are accessed, these images will always load.

4 It’s not only unfair not to include a working unsubscribe link on every email, it’s also illegal. So make sure we include an opt-out link for our recipients to click in case they no longer want to receive our emails.

5 Don’t buy mailing lists. Probably, every recipient in that list don’t want to receive your message and will unsubscribe soon. Build a list by adding a subscription form in your website. Don’t add emails extracted from business cards of people you meet in conferences, trade organizations and other networking events. They may want to talk to you but it doesn’t mean they want to receive promotion emails. Some subscription forms even use double opt-in methods that require a subscriber to click a confirmation link once his email address is submitted. That’s how important to get targeted email audience.

6 Don’t use excessive CAPS or red font colors. They provide hints to spam filters and that could send emails to spam folders. Even an unsuspecting “click here” text could land you in trouble. Including “Viagra” or excessive use of yelling messages (”Special Offer!!!!!”) text in the message could certainly trigger alarm to spam filters.

Photo credit: Ben Heine

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