Madisonville Design, LLC

Email marketing is one of the least expensive and most popular ways of reaching out to your customers.  However, a poorly designed campaign can do more damage than good.

Once you have compiled your list of interested customers, it is imperative to create a usable format.  Planning an effective design starts with determining the purpose of the email.  A newsletter will probably consist of two or three topics and may have a two column layout.  The balance between images and text will probably lean toward the text with just enough pictures to break up the black and white space.  On the other hand, a sales flyer will probably have a higher image percentage, with just a few lines of description with the price of the item.

Whatever the purpose of your email, you should start the design with a “Top Down” approach.  Consider the steps your recipient takes to get to your message.

1. The “From” name – An obscure name will be likely to result in an immediate deletion.  Very few people open emails from senders they don’t recognize.  If your normal email address doesn’t reflect your business or easily identify you, this is the time to create a new one designed to handle your email campaigns.
2. The “Subject” line – The subject line is your second chance to keep your message from being deleted before it is read.  Keep it short and pertinent.  If it is to long it won’t all show and, if it is misleading, your recipient will likely be annoyed and may report you as a spammer.
3. The “preview pane” -  Outlook and many other email handling programs allow the user to see what’s in the email without actually opening it.  The preview shows only the first few lines.  Once more the “top-down” approach is vital.  Those first few lines may be all your reader ever sees unless they are attention grabbers.  It’s also a good idea to design yourself a small, recognizable logo to decorate the top corner of the page and add a level of easy identification for your message.
4. The “message” – It’s a sad fact that most people will not scroll down to read your whole message.  The portion that is “above the fold,” that part that shows on the screen when the email is first opened, will frequently be all they see.  Follow newspaper guidelines by making sure all the important information is at the top of your story.  Get the important facts and your “call to action” into the first couple of sentences.
5. Graphics – A picture may be “worth a thousand words,” but it will only work if your recipient can see it.  Many email handlers do not display pictures automatically.  If your make your whole document a jpeg, your reader will see nothing but a red x and your hard work will probably go straight into the Recycle Bin.  Even pictures embedded in text should have alternative descriptions and captions that will show up before the graphic is displayed.

To achieve a successful email marketing campaign, you must get your recipient to open and read your message.  All the hype and flash in the world won’t help if your work goes straight into the Recycle Bin or gets blocked as spam.

New customers are a great thing, but the real money comes from repeat business. Building your business usually means building a customer base of regulars. Email marketing is an inexpensive and effective way of reaching out to your customers and keeping your company on their front pages.

There are many email marketing services available, such as Constant Contact or Vertical Response and they will generally cost you little more than a newspaper ad.  Most of them also have free trial offers that allow you to experiment with their software.  The better services have user friendly applications with a low learning curve that will have you up and running as quickly as you can get your data entered.

Fees are usually based on the number of customers in your contact list and the good ones limit those contacts to real world customers.  Using scrapers or buying lists can quickly get you and everyone one else on your mail server relegated to the junk mail folders.  Plus, many lists are outdated and filling your data base with invalid email addresses will increase your expenses with no chance of an effective “Return on Investment” (ROI).

To build your lists in a legitimate way, start with current customers.  Ask everyone you deal with to sign up for your newsletter or weekly/monthly ad.  Offer a small free gift for signing up.  Put the signup address on every printed flyer you send out.  Add a signup button to your website and include a link on your Facebook page.  Include a paragraph, with the signup link, describing your newsletter or ad as a post script on all your emails.

If you have a brick and mortar store, post signs advertising your website and newsletter/ad email service.  Have printed forms available for in store signups and print the web address on your register receipts for people to sign up online at their convenience.