Getting the Mailing List

Before you start any email marketing campaigns and start sending out newsletters, you first need a user base. In order to get the user base, you need a sign-up form. Now this is the first stage where you can either hit or miss big time.

The sign-up form needs to be quick and easy. Don’t make it some incredibly lengthy process because, chances are, the user will get annoyed at how long it’s taking to fill out the form and just leave. Also, never ask for more information than is actually needed. There are very few occasions where you should ask for extra information, such as when you can provide location driven content or asked a question on the sign-up form about additional interests and can provide content based on that.

Other than those few exceptions, always keep your sign-up form as short as possible.

Drawing Attention to the Sign-Up Form

Placement of your sign up form is incredibly important and also depends heavily on how much information you’re actually asking for in the form.

If you’re asking for very little information, for instance just the email address, then you could probably include it on the home page, in a callout box, or have it on every page with static placement. It all depends on how important the sign-up form is.

If you plan on asking for a lot of information, then it might be a good idea to have two versions of the sign-up form. Maybe have a short one on the home page or in another area that’s seen quite often and include a link to the long version of the form.

Another way to entice users to sign up is by telling them what they can expect in each newsletter. Make sure this is truthful and you do include this information in every newsletter, otherwise, you’ll lose subscribers quickly.

Never Make Newsletters Too Long

The main reason this rule comes into play is not because you can get in trouble for it, but if an email newsletter is too long the user probably won’t bother reading the whole thing. Worse yet, the user may see it’s so long and skip it altogether.

Ways to Get Knocked Into the Spam Filter

• USING ALL CAPS is a very quick and easy way to get your newsletter thrown into the spam filter.
• Abusing the ‘!’ is another way that spam filters can catch your newsletter!!!!!
• Putting discount or coupon information in the subject line, such as 20% off, will also throw your newsletter into the spam folder.

Designing for Emails is Tricky Business

Another good practice for sending out email newsletters is to always include an HTML page alternative just in case the email doesn’t display properly in the user’s mailbox. Every mailbox system is different. One of the hardest things to do is to actually get the email to display properly in every mailbox and that actually almost never happens.

You might be asking why it’s so hard to design for emails. This is because the only way to design and style an email is with inline styling and using tables for structuring a page. Now I know this goes against most everything you’ve learned, but sadly, it’s the only way. This means that you cannot use internal or external stylesheets for styling. When I say everything must be done with inline styling, I mean that quite seriously.

If you plan to include imagery, everything must be referenced via absolute URLs. Don’t overload on imagery too much because then the email will take too much time to open and you could potentially lose users that way.

Don’t Get Sued

Also, in order to prevent getting in trouble with the law, you must adhere to the CAN-SPAM Act. It requires you to include a very obvious way for email recipients to opt-out of the newsletter. You must also include information about your organization’s actual physical address.