We get plenty of email marketing questions from our customers, some of whom are still treading gingerly into a weird, and sometimes wacky online world.  So we’ve put together our “Email Marketing Basics” Q&A series, to lend direction to email marketers who are just starting out.  We’ll be adding to this section as we go along, and you can keep up with us by subscribing to our RSS feed and newsletter.  (We’re doing some online self-marketing here as we speak.)

Apart from inviting visitors to sign up on my web site, how else can I build my mailing list?

• Use your offline resources.  If you have a physical store, get your staff to check with customers if they would like to receive email updates, and place a sign-up book at the checkout counter.  If you’re making calls to existing customers, take the opportunity to pop the email question.  At a business meeting, seminar or networking event, mention your email newsletter and collect business cards from interested parties (or have a sign-up sheet ready).  After which, drop them an email and direct them to your subscription form, or simply get them to reply to your email if they want to be added to your list.  But remember to keep those replies, because you never know when you will need them as proof of subscription.
• Sweeten the deal with a gift.  You can offer tangible incentives such as discounts or freebies in return for signing up, or highlight your ability to provide valuable information (e.g. tips and tricks, contributions by industry experts).  You can also package your content in the form of crash courses that are relevant to your audience, and deliver the material over a series of emails.  Or, try the fun approach – think lucky dips, contests or games that require participants to sign up beforehand.
• Be an active member in relevant discussion boards, and let other members know how they might benefit from information in your web site or email updates (but before you do, check that this isn’t against the rules).
• Rope in existing subscribers to spread the word.  Marketers often do this by attaching a “send to friend” or “tell a friend” link at the end of their web or email features.

More to come soon.

If you’ve been wondering when to send out your newsletter, you’re not alone.

Back in ’04, at least two prominent studies concluded that a Monday morning (6-10am) mail-out would get you the highest open rates, and apparently, if you couldn’t make Monday, Tuesday wasn’t half bad either.  The result? Email marketers fell over themselves and worked weekends to deliver a Monday morning newsflash, only to discover a year later that emails sent on Wednesdays through Fridays were enjoying the most clicks.

After that, it seemed no-one could agree.  Some argued that end-of-the-workweek or even weekend mailers were potentially more effective because of the lack of competing emails coupled with the relaxed mindset of readers, others claimed Tuesdays to Thursdays gave the best results, while the rest returned to their Monday delivery schedule.

As for time of sending, the assumption was that your email is likelier to get read at 9am, 12pm and 4pm, because those confined to work desks are either a) still settling in; b) getting ready for lunch; or c) winding down for the day. An electronics retailer tested these timings early this year and found 9am to be the clear winner.  The results were posted by MarketingSherpa, and it remains to be seen if this statistic will hold up after online marketers scurry to implement the 9am send.

Our advice?  Forget the research and conduct your own investigations.

Here’s how:

#1 View your last five sent campaigns’ open-and-click rates, and note the day and time these campaigns were sent.  Or find out what time your mail was read and the links clicked on, and whittle it down to the most popular timings, taking into account time zone differences.

#2 Carry out an A/B Split Test – set two different send schedules for your test group of readers (say Monday 9am for Group A, and Friday 4pm for Group B), and compare your campaign’s open-and-click rates. (For best results, ensure that recipients in your test groups are in the same time zone or location.)

#3 Know your audience – use eConnect Email reporting functions to see a breakdown of your audience by location; find out about typical working hours and national holidays, and adjust your send dates and times accordingly.

Marketers have also suggested looking at each subscriber’s sign-up or view-and-click time and customizing delivery times to match, although the strategy has been criticized as reading too much into a single random event.  To me, this is just plain ridiculous.

Once you’ve obtained your results, make a decision on your send times and stick with it until you feel compelled to conduct a round of tests again.  It’s probably better to focus your energies on producing a newsletter that subscribers will want to read, not whether it lands in their mailboxes at midday or midnight.

Creating an e-mail newsletter isn’t rocket science, or at least, it shouldn’t be.  In fact, we’ve found that keeping it simple often gets the best results, and by simple, we mean fewer words, less graphics, and going easy on the sales pitch.  Read on for more ideas on how to turn your e-mail newsletter into a crowd pleaser:

#1 Give, And Keep Giving
Save the company updates for your web site – the self-indulgent newsletter belongs in the trash, and that’s where it often winds up.  If you want your newsletter to be read, give your readers useful information.  For example, if you’re a travel agent, you can offer travel tips and highlight trendy destinations, while including links to your holiday packages for interested readers.

#2 Say It With Words
It’s estimated that almost 60% of readers block images in their e-mails, so your newsletter should have more text than images.  More importantly, don’t put vital information in the images, but rather, have it in text format.  And when you include images in your newsletter, use enticing ALT text (e.g. “Checklist For Success!”) coupled with a “View/Download image” link to get the hit.

#3 Subjects Matter
If your reader can’t get past your subject line, it’s practically game over for you and your newsletter.  To be effective, the subject line should contain the title of your newsletter and the topic of the week/month in a nutshell.  Once you’ve got a catchy liner, run it by a few friends – would they open your mail?

#4 View From The Top
Most of your readers at work will be viewing your mail through their preview pane – even if they’re not impressed with your subject line, they may give your newsletter a chance, depending on what shows up on their screen.  It’s reason enough to think twice before you stick that ad banner or instructions on how to unsubscribe at the top of your page.

#5 Every Second Counts
You’ve got 51 seconds to grab your average reader’s attention, or so says the Nielsen Norman Group.  If you’re writing an editorial note or summary, highlight issues that your readers are interested in.  You may also want to feature a hyperlinked table of contents at the top of your page; research shows that bottom-listed articles are rarely read.

#6 What’s Next?
Sure, your newsletter should be a good read, but what happens after?  Chances are, you’d like to direct traffic to your web site or your store, and to do that, you’ll need to tell your readers how to take action.  This can be anything from printing out a newsletter coupon to qualify for a store discount, or clicking on a link to your product promo page.

#7 Write It Yourself
Outsourcing writing is the rage these days, but when it comes to understanding your company, no-one does it better than you.  So don’t be afraid to give writing a shot, just keep these pointers in mind:

• Be Conversational: Write as if you were talking to your reader; avoid jargon, corporate-speak, and anything else you wouldn’t say to a customer.
• Don’t Waste Words: Keep a lid on your word count by weeding out redundancy (e.g. don’t write “close proximity” when “proximity” already means nearness) and words that dilute your message (e.g. don’t say something is “very/quite/sort of breathtaking,” when “breathtaking” alone will do the job, and with greater impact).
• Avoid Clichés: It’s tempting to reach for a cliché or catchphrase, but an over-reliance on common phrases makes your writing look tired.  The same goes for rehashing material that can be found elsewhere.  The best way to beat this: coin a phrase of your own and provide an original viewpoint as often as you can.

Once you’ve prepared a draft, consider hiring someone to edit or proofread your work.  This way, you’ll produce copy with passion and polish.

#8 The Ultimate Test
Before you unleash your newsletter on the public, test it on different e-mail clients (including web-based e-mail services) and operating platforms to make sure it shows up as intended.  eConnect Email allows you to send up to 10 test emails – that’s enough to test your campaign on all the well-known web-based e-mail services – so please use them.  After spending so much effort on a great campaign, the last thing you need is to realize the images aren’t in the right place or haven’t been linked properly.  And don’t just test the visuals, remember to click on your links to see what happens – are they pointing to the right URL, or are your links even working?

#9 Know Your Holidays
If you’re out of ideas for newsletter content, try checking your calendar – it’s easy to link products and services to common holidays like Christmas.  However,  avoid sending out your newsletter close to (or during) the holidays, because readers tend to take a break from their computers as well.

#10 Same Time, Same Channel
Decide on a date, time, and frequency for sending out your newsletter, and stick to it so your readers know when they can expect to hear from you.  As a rule, anything more than once a week is too much unless you’re in the horoscopes business, and anything less than once in two months is too little for readers to remember your newsletter.

Your campaigns won’t become a smash hit overnight, but the only way to get there is to start improving on what you have.  Enjoy sending your campaigns and remember this: Always respect your subscribers.

One of the most common reasons our customers get in touch with our support team has got to do with problems in using images in their campaigns. In this blog, I highlight some of the common pitfalls (and questions) about using images and show how you can avoid them.

What is a good file name to use?

To ensure all your images can be viewed correctly across different email clients and web-based email clients, you must be careful of how you name your image files.  All files should be named without any empty spaces or non-ASCII characters.  This means “my image.gif” is out, and “my_image.gif” or “my-image.gif” should be used instead.

In eConnect Email, we now automatically replace all spaces with underscores “_” in your image filename when you upload via the built-in file manager, so you don’t have to worry about spaces in your filenames anymore.  However, you should still take note to avoid using non-ASCII characters (such as accented characters like “á” and “ë”) in your filenames to ensure compatibility across platforms.

Always remember to check your campaigns before sending them out.  Make use of the built-in test sending function in eConnect Email to email yourselves to see how your campaigns render in different email clients.  After all, it’s free and you can send as many times as you want, until you are satisfied with the results.

What about the supported image formats?
Do not use other image formats other than GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPG (developed by Joint Photographic Experts Group).  PNG might work on your browser but it is not supported on email clients so never use PNG format for your newsletters.

What is the acceptable file size for my image?
This really depends on the number of images you have in your newsletter.  If you are only using one image in your newsletter, you might get away with 25KB in file size.  But if you have more images, you must remember that all of them contribute to the overall size of your newsletter, and this could pose a problem.  As much as possible, keep the number of images used to a minimum, and make sure each image is optimized to the lowest file size possible (without sacrificing too much on the quality of the image, of course.)

What’s a good rule of thumb?  If your image contains a line drawing (such as in the case of illustrations) or text or big blocks of single colors, the best format to use is the GIF format.  Images using the GIF format can be saved in a maximum of 256 colors but the best compromise would be 128 colors where you will get reasonably low file size with good image quality.  If the image contains only one solid color for the image file, 64 colors would be good enough.  You may not see much difference in file size between 128 and 64 colors but since every kilobyte counts, your newsletter will be less bloated and your subscribers will thank you for it.

Saved in GIF format. File size: 2.78 KB

Saved in JPG format. File size: 17.1 KB

For photographs and images with gradient effects, you should save them in JPG format.  Using this format, images are compressed in terms of percentages.  The recommended compression percentage is 60%, but feel free to experiment with compression percentages as far as 80%, because your mileage may vary depending on the actual content of your image.

Saved in JPG format with 60% compression. File size 20.2 KB

Saved in GIF format with 128 colors. File size 29 KB

Finally, this is the tricky part for most of you.  If you have a photograph with text on top of it, what is the best format to use?  I would recommend using JPG format and experiment with the compression percentage.  Do note that lower compression percentages will usually cause bubble-like artifacts to appear around the text, so do opt for the lowest compression percentage that you can go before these artifacts start showing up.

If you are planing to use animation, the only format you can use is the GIF format.  Do not try to create an animation in Flash (.swf – even though Flash animation gives you smaller file size comparing to GIF format animation) and embed them in your newsletter.  It will most likely get blocked and will not reach your intended recipients.  Finally, unless you are sending your newsletter for printing, always work on a 72 dpi resolutions and not 150 dpi or higher.  If you are sending your newsletter for printing, consider creating a web version of your newsletter just dedicated for this instead, and still use only lower resolution images for your actual newsletter.