Once you've gotten your email into the recipient's inbox and he's opened it, how do you get him to read and process the marketing message?
Setting up all the technical details for optimal delivery is just the first step in building a successful email marketing program. The next move you make is critical, and it involves looking at the creative aspects of your messages, including content personalization and optimizing the design to offset the negative effects from image suppression.
This month, I will review the two key areas that every marketer should focus on to get the most out of their email marketing programs: personalization and relevancy. Additionally, I will spend some time reviewing certain design aspects that can help you deal with image suppression and other challenges. All of these topics will affect how your message is perceived by your customers, and whether they might mark it as spam. Following the advice here will help you avoid this as much as possible.
Personalization and relevancy
Before I discuss personalization and relevancy, it's important to fully understand the terms. Personalization does not just mean putting the recipient's name at the beginning of the message (ie. Dear Spencer). While this is a start, if you have more information about me in your database, you should use it.
Do you know that I am male, aged 30-45, a Florida State University graduate and resident of Georgia? If you have this information, the next question is if you're using it in your emails. Not just in the "subject" or "to" line, but in the graphics, in the offer, in the text explaining the offer. Make sure that everything you do in your email is tied to the information you have for your customers so you can demonstrate that you know who they are and what they find relevant.
Say, for example, you work for a clothing company and have a line of college logoed shirts and hats. Given my demographics, I would be more likely to respond to a picture of a shirt that Bobby Bowden is going to be wearing all season than I would to randomly selected items from various colleges, including the University of Miami. Presenting me with the Bobby Bowden shirt might also inspire me to click through to see more and potentially purchase other related merchandise. But you must first crawl before you can run.
Gathering the right information
Just gathering a customer's email address is not enough, you must try to collect more information to truly personalize the message. A great example of how you can use this data effectively is illustrated by a successful program I helped manage while I was at NASCAR.com.
By collecting relevant data on all of our users (who they were, where they lived and, most importantly, who their favorite driver was), we were able to personalize each individual message. In NASCAR, it is not about the sport, it is about the driver. If you can connect to the end user on that level, they are more likely to open, click and eventually buy from your email. At NASCAR.com, we extended the relevancy of our email to the subject line ("follow Tony Stewart this weekend at Daytona," in the case where the recipient favored Tony), and to the images, (a picture of Tony or his car), as well as a link to one of their many products that allowed the end user to follow Tony during the race.
So how do you collect this data from your users? How many questions are too many during the signup process? These questions go back to my first article around data capture. Without testing you will never know how many questions are too many, but the more you request from your customers the more you should offer in return. Make sure that it is worth their while if you go back to them at a later date for more information-ideally, you'll have already demonstrated how you have used the information that they supplied you in the past to their advantage.
The importance of email design
So now you know that personalization means a lot more than adding a first name. Next, you should consider how your message looks when sent to various ISPs. By not paying attention to how your message appears in various email clients, all the time you spent collecting personalized information might be for nothing. What happens to your email when your images are suppressed; does your email appear to be one blank message above the fold? If this is the case, what can you do to combat it?
First, make sure that you have some text behind your images. When images are suppressed, you want users to be able to see something in its place that gives them an idea of what to expect if they download images for your message. By doing this you are less likely to get marked as spam because users will at least get a sense of the basic message you are trying to provide them with.
Don't expect users to scroll down just to see if it is a legitimate email if they can't see anything above the fold in the first place. Testing is key when it comes to this aspect of dealing with your creative. Make sure that you use a campaign preview program so that you are able to test your changes and ensure optimal rendering within your top domains.
So remember, make sure to use the information that you collect from your users to give them truly personalized and relevant content, and test your creative to make sure you don't run into any rendering issues. Good luck and good sending.
Spencer Kollas is director of delivery services, StrongMail Systems. Read full bio.