By Elmer on October 28, 2009

As we are firm believers of email marketing as an effective marketing channel — when performed the right way — we continue to act as advocates and provide best practice email marketing.

In addition to our previous tips, we are hereby presenting another set of EDM tips, tricks and ideas that will help you successfully launch your marketing initiatives.

Limit your “From” character length
From an AWeber study, keeping your name length (the “From” field) within the limit of 20 characters, it is easier to recognize you and readers are more likely to read than ignore your message.

Use a valid email on your “From” field
Sometimes visitors reply to emails they receive. So it pays to make sure they get their message across. It projects a bad impression to subscribers when they realize messages sent to them come from machines and not humans.

Get personal
Because email marketing allows you to do so. Addressing recipients by first name (or Ms/Mr surname) sounds more personal. Thus, it helps if you build mailing list with name and email address combination.

Don’t send campaigns during holidays
Be sensitive, and spare your recipients from more burden by the time Christmas holidays is over by not sending them messages during the holiday season. December, January, July and August fall into this category so if it can be avoided, minimize sending emails during these months.

Validate email addresses by asking subscribers to type them again
In your email subscription form, ask subscribers to retype email addresses to ensure that they enter the correct one. Any mistyped email address means one opt-in subscriber opportunity lost.

Never try to fix obviously misspelled email addresses
No matter how tempting it appears (hotmail.com appears as hotamil.com or yahoo.com appears as yaho.com) never attempt to fix that address. You may try to include that in the campaign and when it (obviously) bounces, just remove it. Email addresses are private and entry should be voluntary. Who knows it was a deliberate attempt to test you; your message could get marked spam later.

Include a call to action
Every email message has a purpose, to notify, to invite, and so on. Be specific of your objective and make sure recipients notice them. If you are inviting participants to join a seminar, create big buttons that say “register now”. If you are selling products, provide “buy now” links to the shopping cart page. To add urgency to calls to action, you can use deadlines to encourage participation: “Register before 21st of December and get a pair of free movie tickets”.

Add an archive of past newsletters
For new subscribers who want to make the most learning experience, it will be good to share with them relevant newsletters in the past.

Don’t ask too much questions in the subscription form
It turns off potential subscribers if we ask too many questions when they fill up the form. They think it’s not relevant, they fear extra information will be used for other purposes, and it simply takes them more time to subscribe.

Subject lines should be concise and short
Don’t try to exceed beyond 6 words or 50 characters. Otherwise, they will be cut short when displayed on recipient’s email client.

Beware of wide layouts and very long newsletters
Wide layouts are fine with wide monitors but can be a terrible experience for small screen configuration since they encourage horizontal scrolling. Play safe and assume everyone’s got a small monitor; for ones who have over 20 inches, email still looks good. Also, don’t bore your recipients with too much content and long vertical scrolls.

Test your message
Don’t forget to test your message for spam, deliverability, browser compatibility, spelling, broken links and more. Once it is sent out to recipients, there’s no way a mistake can be fixed. Resending emails is an absolute no no.

Photo credit: Syris Studios

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