Efectos sobre la juventud

The final best practice for auto responders is to not forget to audit and update your content occasionally. Because your auto responder program is always running in the background and isn’t usually topical and, in fact, is such a popular marketing tool because it’s low maintenance, you may forget to check in and “freshen up” content or images. What’s the best way to avoid this? Take the time to actually schedule a day every six months or even once a quarter to review your current auto responder copy. Whether you use Outlook calendar reminders, project management software, or a smart phone app to send you task reminders, make sure something tells you that it’s time to check in on your auto responder content and make sure that it’s all still accurate and compelling.

The great thing about auto responders is that, after you initially set them up, they require very little work while still offering a great return on investment. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t apply some basic thought and best practices to developing them. If you do, you’ll have a completely optimized email marketing auto responder program that can deliver results even when you’re not working!

SECTION 5.21

10 Best Practices for Designing Your Email

1. Design for the Top 600 Pixels by Three Inches

Your email will most likely need to sell itself within an email preview pane no matter what email service provider it’s sent to. You’ll have about 600 pixels of length across and about three inches of depth. You need to make sure that your value proposition, your call-to-action, and any key information that will compel users to keep reading is in that space. Avoid heavy use of graphics that may not load when designing the email preview pane section of an email template.

2. Make Links Look Like Links

If you want the best click-through possible, you’ll want to make your links not only look like links but also stand out. At a minimum, links in your email should always be underlined. Ideally, links will be formatted in a blue font and will also be bolded. If your style guidelines prohibit links from being bold or blue, make sure that they are underlined. Do not ever use images or buttons to denote a link or, if you do, make sure that there is a corresponding text link nearby.

3. Minimize the Use of Images

While images do have unquestionable visually compelling results, always remember that in the vast majority of your subscribers email service providers inboxes images will not load. The more you use images, the more that the vast majority of your email subscribers will see blank white space. While you certainly want to include some images for those who can see them, don’t rely on images alone to sell your product or convey your message. Be sure that any information that it is critical that your subscriber knows is not trapped in an image. Always use alt and title text behind images to ensure that there is still copy appearing even when your images do not load.

4. Minimize Copy and Text

Obviously, your email must contain copy and text. That’s the core of any email. However, you never want to include so much text that you may risk going into a spam folder or junk folder, and you don’t want to overwhelm users with more text than they can read. User shorter text blocks that link back to full articles or product pages on your website or to landing pages.

In This Section: This has been a long section of this book with many important points contained within it. You’ve now completed the entire section and should be proud of all of the information that you’ve learned and can now apply to creating and designing your email template, the email content, and even its landing pages. You may be looking for a short list, however. If you want a quick summary of the ten most important best practices to consider when designing and email template, then here you go!

5. Be CAN-SPAM Complaint

While this is a best practice, it’s also the law. You’ll need to ensure that your physical mailing address is in the email, that users can unsubscribe from your email with either a single click or by replying to the email, and that the email in some way conveys that it is an advertisement. If you’re confused about CAN- SPAM, you may want to revisit the section in this book dedicated to it.

6. Make it Easy to Unsubscribe

While this may seem counterintuitive, the risk of making it difficult for users to find a way to unsubscribe from your email is that they will instead mark your email as spam. This will impact your sender reputation and deliverability in the future. Make it easy and simple for users to find a way to unsubscribe from your email so that they don’t hit the always easy-to-find “spam” button!

7. Personalize Subject Lines and Email Content

With very few exceptions, emails will perform better when you use a personalization field such as first name or user name in the subject line and body of the email. The one exception is if your industry deals in private or personal information where your users may feel uncomfortable seeing their name or user name in the subject line or body of the email. Be sure to find an email marketing platform such as Comm100 that supports personalization features. Then use them to increase both your open rate and your click-through rate.

8. Avoid Using CSS

As “old school” as it sounds, your email template design is unlikely to translate across multiple email service providers if you code it using CSS. Many email service providers, and Gmail in particular, strip CSS from the <body> and <head> sections of your email template. If you must use CSS to code, make it inline CSS. However, using <font> and <p> tags within your email template will produce a far more consistent design and display.

9. Minimize the Use of Spam Words

As you will see in the next section of this book, it will most likely be impossible for you to completely avoid using any word that has been identified as a potential spam trigger word. However, be aware when creating copy that spam filters look for particular words and will assign your email a spam score based on them. The best thing that you can do is to use those words in moderation and write copy that avoids using them at all when possible.

10. Always Test!

While we think that it’s important for you to test various email designs against each other, what we’re referring to here is that you test send your emails to a smaller seed list of recipients prior to sending them to your entire list. This will ensure that you get a chance not only to make sure that your design displays appropriately across multiple email service providers but also to make sure that you’re going into the inbox instead of the spam or junk folder. You can then make adjustments so that when you do you send

to your main list, your email is optimized for the best results possible. Ten minutes of testing can save hours of crisis management!

Section Summary

In this section, you learned all of the key information that you’ll need in order to design effective email templates and content, including:

 You got advice on how to determine what the goal of your email template is and therefore how to decide what makes an email template successful

 You explored sending and HTML email versus a text-only email and what you should consider before making that decision

 You learned the legal requirements that must be adhered to in an email template

 You learned the benefits of using (and sometimes not using) personalization fields in an email

 You learned about using images in email templates and why it’s often best to minimize use

 You learned how much text to use, how to format it, and how to avoid words that will send you into the spam or junk folder.

 You learned the basics of email template format, including the ideal height and width

as well as the options between using a one- column or two-column format.

 You got detailed information on the best way to phrase and code links for an optimized click-through response.

 You got important information on how to code an email template in order to ensure that it displays properly across all of the popular email service providers.

 You learned how to best integrate social media, email forward and unsubscribe information into your email templates.

 You learned how to optimize a call-to-action.

 You learned the tips and tricks of writing effective subject lines and from-addresses.

 You also got a comprehensive list of best practices, including: sales and conversion emails, win-back and retention emails, driving click-through rate, creating content, landing pages, auto responders and an overall top ten best email template practices. In the Next Section…

In the next section, we’ll cover one of the often trickiest parts of email marketing: understanding spam and how to make sure that your emails stay out of the spam or junk folder and go into the inbox.

SECTION 6: How to Get Into the Inbox Every Time

In This Section: One of the greatest challenges of email marketing or sending email newsletters is getting into your recipient’s email inbox. It may seem as though once you send an email, it should clearly go into the inbox. However, anybody who has ever sent, received, or even glanced in passing at an email account knows that spammers aggressively send unwanted email in even greater quantities than they do junk mail to your postal inbox. In this section, we’ll learn about what spam is, how email service providers determine if your email is spam or not, and what you can do to ensure that your marketing email lands in the inbox every single time.

Section 6.1