Now that we've explored the importance of sending permission-based email, let's take a closer look at some of the techniques and practices that the most experienced email marketers use. These best practices can make the difference between rapidly growing your list through word of mouth, increasing your sales, and building strong relationships and losing subscribers to list attrition, aggravating customers, and getting your messages blocked before they even reach your recipients.
From Names & Subject Lines
For most people, a majority of emails received are junk email. As a result, each of us has developed a little ritual we follow when checking our email. Initially, most people looked first at the subject lines to determine whether to read a message. Today, however, studies have shown that recipients glance at the "From" field to see if they recognize the sender's name or email address. Then, only if they recognize the From Name do they look at the "Subject" field to see if it's of interest to them. This is why we recommend using a From Name that is either your organization's name or a well-known person within your organization-and to keep that name consistent with every mailing.
Regarding subject lines, we have found a good strategy to be having one part of the subject line be consistent, and the other be variable. This way recipients can recognize your newsletter when it comes in as well as get a small taste as to what type of information might be featured for that issue.
Some examples of bad subject lines are:
The Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly for September, 1 2005 from IntelliContact Pro
This subject line is simply too long. We recommend keeping subject lines between 20 and 50 characters whenever possible. This 80 character subject line is likely to get cut off in most email clients and could cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked by a content-based spam filter.
[FNAME]'S ENTREPRENEURS CHRONICLE FOR SEPTEMBER
This subject line is in all caps, which will increase the change the message will get blocked by content-based spam filters.
garden Tips
This subject line doesn't provide any information as to what the message is about. We would recommend adding at least what month the message is for.
Oxy-Powder Special - Save $10 Today Only Buy Now!!!!
This subject line includes both a dollar sign and multiple exclamation points. Both of these things would cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked by a content-based spam filter.
Here's is a revised version of each of these subject lines:
1. Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly for September
2. [fname]'s Entrepreneuers' Chronicle for March
3. garden Tips Monthly - Are Year Round Orchids Possible?
4. Oxy-Powder Special: 15% Off
By following these tips on From Names and Subject Lines you can maximize the chance of your message being opened by your end recipients.
HTML or Plain Text, or Both?
In the early days of the Internet, say 1998 and before, when most surfers were using Internet Service Providers such as Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe, all email messages that were sent were plain text emails.
Then, with AOL 5.0 came the ability to send Rich Text messages that allowed you to bold or italicize text, insert pictures, and add links. Still, however, most email clients (the software tools that allow you to view your email, such as Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, Hotmail, etc.) did not have the ability to display full HTML messages.
Today, almost all email clients have the ability to display HTML messages. While some organizations still send their emails as plain text, there are a number of advantages of sending your message as an HTML message, especially with the easy to use WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML editors that are available. The difficulty is, even today around 5% of emai
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