I am currently in an undertaking to reform our email marketing program after 2 years of trial and mostly error.
It is a long but rewarding road. I have been scouring the web for articles, resources and experts. I have found a ton. Some that I like and some that have just been a time sucker. I will share them in other upcoming posts.
What sticks out to me right now is this -
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!
I’m not sure how else to say it….
Here are a couple of tools to help you know your audience and tailor your email marketing plan to them.
Check these guys out. They are doing great work trying to test out the different clients and see what flys with each. In particular see their page on the acid test. The test was done in ’07 but go to their Facebook Fan Page and join the discussion about getting the ’09 test underway.
Speaking of email clients, do you wonder what email clients your subscribers are using? This service, fingerprint, gives you a piece of code to put in your emails and it will tell you which email clients your subscribers are using. I just signed up and can’t wait to see which ones are being used.
Email testing isn’t a new concept but some people still aren’t doing it. You can sign up for every email client out there and send to each account or you can use services like litmus or Pivotal Veracity. These guys have their act together and give you fast reliable results.
These are just a couple of things I found in the last couple of days. This is the intro to a more in depth look at email testing and optimization. I want to give you the tools to create an effective and in most cases a low cost email marketing program.
Stay tuned!
Thanks to derrickkwa for the email pic and the my friends over at email standards project, fingerprint, litmus & Pivotal Veracity.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Email marketing is powerful. It’s certainly got potentially strong ROI. It’s a shame then, that designing for email is such a HUGE hassle. It’s nothing like designing a web page. In email, you need to account not only for the recipient’s email provider (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, etc.), but also for their email client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird), their browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) and their operating system. An email sent to a Gmail user on Firefox on Windows will look entirely different than an email sent to a Yahoo! user on Safari on a Mac.
I can’t even begin to describe what a humongous pain this is. How is it possible, that in 2010, we STILL don’t have any sort of standards for this kind of thing? The Email Standards project has taken it upon themselves to call out email providers, but even the ESP isn’t officially recognized.
Great post though Neil. Thanks for the links.
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Neil Minetto Reply:
February 5th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
I couldn’t agree more Ryan. It is crazy that MSFT keeps changing how they render their emails, thus messing with our templates. We’ll get it soon though, I hope. Good to hear from you.
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