Terminology & Best Practices to email marketing

• What is a Newsletter?

• What is a Mailing List ?

• What is email marketing?

• The Basics of a Successful E-Mail Marketing Effort

• Getting text emails displayed as intended

What is a Newsletter ?

What is a Mailing List ?

A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list".

At least two quite different types of mailing lists can be defined: the first one is closer to the literal sense, where a "mailing list" of people is used as a recipient for newsletters, periodicals or advertising. Traditionally this was done through the postal system, but with the rise of e-mail, the electronic mailing list became popular.

When similar or identical material is sent out to all subscribers on a mailing-list, it is often referred to as a mailshot or blast. A list for such use can also be referred to as a distribution list.

In legitimate (non-spam) mailing lists, the individual can subscribe or unsubscribe themselves.

What is a email marketing ?

Email marketing is, as the name suggests, the use of email in marketing communications.

What sort of email?

In its broadest sense, the term covers every email you ever send to a customer, potential customer or public venue. In general, though, it's used to refer to:

• Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again

• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship

• Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people
   

Give me an analogy...

You can think of these three main forms of email marketing as the electronic equivalent of:

• Direct mail

• Sending people a print newsletter

• Placing advertisements in subscription magazines and newspapers

• There is, however, one extremely important difference - the issue of permission (see later).

Why is email marketing so popular?

Email marketing is so popular because:

• sending email is much cheaper than most other forms of communication
  email lets you deliver your message to the people (unlike a website, where the people have to come to your message)

• email marketing has proven very successful for those who do it right

Let's briefly review the three types of email marketing:

• Direct email
  Direct email involves sending a promotional message in the form of an email. It might be an announcement of a special offer, for example. Just as you might have a list of customer or prospect postal addresses to send your promotions too, so you can collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses.
  
  You can also rent lists of email addresses from service companies. They'll let you send your message to their own address lists. These services can usually let you target your message according to, for example, the interests or geographical location of the owners of the email address.

• Retention email
  Instead of promotional email designed only to encourage the recipient to take action (buy something, sign-up for something, etc.), you might send out retention emails.
  
  These usually take the form of regular emails known as newsletters. A newsletter may carry promotional messages or advertisements, but will aim at developing a long-term impact on the readers. It should provide the readers with value, which means more than just sales messages. It should contain information which informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.

• Advertising in other people's emails
  Instead of producing your own newsletter, you can find newsletters published by others and pay them to put your advertisement in the emails they send their subscribers. Indeed, there are many email newsletters that are created for just this purpose - to sell advertising space to others.

Where's the catch?

This all sounds great of course. Imagine how much cheaper it is to send a message to thousands of email addresses, rather than thousands of postal addresses!

It's not that simple, unfortunately. Quite apart from the complexities of designing and delivering email messages to the right people, getting them to actually read and respond to your message, and measuring and analysing the results, there is the issue of permission.

What's "permission"?
Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission. This is a complex issue and the subject of intense debate in the marketing community.

Essentially, you need an email address owner's permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don't have this permission, then the recipients of your mail may well regard your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email.

You do not want to send spam !

If you are accused of sending spam, then you may find your email accounts closed down, your website shut off, and your reputation in tatters. In some parts of the world, you may even be breaking the law.

Quite apart from these practical considerations, there is also a strong argument which says that long-term successful email marketing relationships with customers and others can only work anyway if they're permission based.

The big question, of course, is what constitutes permission...and that is the main subject of debate. It's important to remember that it's not your views, or even the views of the majority, that count, but the views of those receiving your emails and those responsible for administering the infrastructure of the Internet.

An example of permission is when your customer buys something from your online store and also ticks a box marked "please send me news about product updates via email". You now have "permission" to send that person product updates by email, provided you also give them the opportunity to rescind that permission at any time.

Educate yourself

It's important to stress that anyone considering email marketing must read up on the subject of permission and spam. If you don't understand the importance of permission and the risks of ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.

Don't panic, though. It's actually relatively easy to ensure that the address lists you use or build yourself are permission-based.

OK, now that you're armed with some brief background information, browse the rest of this site to find the resources you need to develop a better understanding of how email marketing can work for you and your (potential) customers. Or to speed tings up, try some of these

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The Basics of a Successful E-Mail Marketing Effort

The most common question I get as an e-mail marketing consultant is along the lines of, "Can you get me a list of e-mail addresses of real estate agencies in the Cleveland area?"

In almost every case, this is the wrong question to ask.

Success in e-mail marketing does not come from renting the right list and blasting out an ad to everyone on it. The basis of successful e-mail marketing is the development of your own house e- mail list or lists. A "rented" e-mail list only benefits you one time. Your own e-mail list allows you to develop a long-term relationship with your online audience -- to communicate with and market to them over and over.

In building your own e-mail list, you'll need to cover these bases:

• Decide what audience you're trying to reach and what you have to offer them.

• What kind of relationship do you want with the recipients of your e-mailings?

• Determine what format your e-mailings will take -- ads, newsletter, deals and specials, company announcements and press releases, discussion list?

• Will you offer HTML e-mail, or just text?

• Who will handle the creative aspects of your mailings -- writing, copywriting, editing? Will you need to outsource this or other functions?

• Set goals and make a specific plan: How often do you plan to mail? How long will your messages be? How many addresses do you want on your list in six months? A year? Two years?

• How will you collect e-mail addresses -- from Web forms, registration or subscription forms, trade shows, during telephone contacts or sales calls?

• Use outside lists to build your in-house list. To recruit list members, rent an opt-in list to send out an announcement, or take out an ad in an e-mail newsletter or discussion list.

• Make sure that all your lists are opt-in -- that all recipients have explicitly given you permission to mail to them. Make it easy for list members to unsubscribe.

• What will be your technical requirements, given the volume of e- mail you'll be sending over the long run? Consider bandwidth, e-mail server software, list management software, hardware requirements, management of bad addresses and similar factors.

In e-mail marketing, trust is the key element. Never abuse your relationship with your list members. Make sure that the e-mail you send them is relevant and offers value.

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Getting text emails displayed as intended

There are a few practical tricks you can use to ensure that the outcome is as close as possible to your original.

The four biggest problems with the display of text-only newsletters are:

• line lengths

• links

• characters

• justification

Line lengths

Email software has a nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear like this:

Email software has a nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient
places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear like this.

The solution is to keep lines short and add hard returns at the end of each one. The consensus is that restricting each line to 65 characters offers the greatest protection from jagged formatting problems.

When editing and formatting a text newsletter, set your editing software to a width of 65 characters with automatic hard returns.

If your software can't do this, you can simply adjust the margins of your text editor so the lines wrap at 65 characters. Then when you're done, run the cursor or mouse down the side of the page and hit the enter button at the start of every line not already preceded by a hard return.

Links

Often a newsletter will keep to a 65 character line length, only to include a URL which far exceeds this length. This is often the case when displaying third-party advertisements, which may include peculiarly long URLs for tracking purposes.

Long URLs, just like long lines of text, may be broken into two lines by an email client, so they might look like this:

http://www.adtracker2036.com/cam/nova/serv45/1234AD
FG.3456hgrts.html

This often makes the URL unclickable, or only the first line is clickable (and takes you to the wrong address). A big email no no.

Clearly, you want all URLs listed in a newsletter to be clickable. In other words, they should be written such that the greatest possible proportion of email clients and setups correctly interpret the URL as a link, and make it clickable.

To ensure this, make sure:

• all URLs are written in full, for example http://www.keepingthekey.com/ and not www.keepingthekey.com

• there is a space immediately before and after the URL.

This can mean unusual punctuation if you put a URL in brackets or at the end of a sentence:

( http://www.keepingthekey.com/ )
Visit http://www.keepingthekey.com .

Normally it should be possible to rephrase the text so that this kind of odd punctuation is not required.

Now, most of you are probably wondering how such a URL can ever not appear clickable.

Well, some email clients fail to recognize URLs with non-conventional endings, such as .exe. And we still haven't solved the problem of the overly-long URL.

Redirects can solve the latter two problems. You create a page at your website with a shorter URL. When someone follows this short link and reaches the web page, they are automatically redirected to the actual destination URL. For example:

The URL http://www.keepingthekey.com/KTK/

...perhaps takes you to a page containing the following HTML code (all on one line):

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.adtracker2036.com/campaigns/nov/server 45/1234ADFG.3456hgrts.html">

This would send the visitor straight on to the adtracker2036 website.

As well as ensuring the clickability of links, the redirect approach can also smarten up a newsletter by giving all the outbound links a consistent look. In addition, you can use your website's visitor statistics to see how many readers clicked on the link.

In fact, the redirect approach is often used with all links, even the inherently clickable ones, to exploit these advantages.

If you don't want to set up redirect pages yourself, there's commercial software available which will do a similar job for you .

There is a downside to redirects though. Some people can get confused if you point to a third-party website, but the link appears to go to your own website. Some readers will question why the end destination URL is not revealed in the newsletter and assume some dark motive.

They might assume the newsletter is using a redirect to mask the fact that the link has been paid for, or involves some other financial connection between the newsletter and the end destination.

Odd characters

Another problem with the display of text-only newsletters is how email clients handle "odd" characters, which is anything outside the standard ASCII character set.

Despite the myriad of modern word processing tools available, it therefore pays to create and edit text-only newsletters using a simple text editor. Email clients will then faithfully reproduce any character you can create.

More advanced word processing software often inserts "odd" characters, such as the trailing dot character or smart quotes, which can cause display problems in some email software.

My recommended editing tool is NoteTab, which includes spell checking and various other tools. In fact, I'm so comfortable with it that I first write all my documents (including this report) in it, and transfer to Word etc. only for final editing and formatting.

Justification

Our final problem is justification, i.e. the alignment of text on the page. Many email clients display text messages using a fixed-space font (Courier).

This means every space and character takes up the same amount of width. Knowing this, you can center and right justify text using the space bar. In this example, hitting the space bar ten times before the text centers the message between the dividers:

*********************************
         Text centered
*********************************

The fixed-space trick also lets people use ASCII characters to create special text effects and graphics (so-called ASCII art), for example:

  / __\___   ___ | |
 / /  / _ / _ | |
/ /__| (_) | (_) | |
\____/\___/ \___/|_|

The problem is that some email clients are set up to view text in a different font, one without fixed spaces. Look what happens to our centered text and "cool" graphic in the Verdana font:

*********************************
         Text centered
*********************************

  / __\___   ___ | |
 / /  / _ / _ | |
/ /__| (_) | (_) | |
\____/\___/ \___/|_|

The solution is to avoid ASCII art in your text newsletter and justify your text so that it still looks passable in other fonts. Be particularly careful when centering or right-justifying text using the space bar.