9 Steps to Smart(phone)er Email Marketing.

According to the latest comScore survey, around 20% of users are reading their email on their Smartphones.  If your target market is the professional business user or the youth market, the numbers are skewed higher.  Email marketing to this demographic requires additional thought. Follow these 9 steps, and your email has a much better chance of being read.    

1.  Include a plain text version of every message. It may not be pretty like HTML but it is at least clickable on some platforms and if that causes even one more conversion, it's worth it.

2.  Don't overcrowd links, this will help them stand out from one another.  With the size of the screen being so small, crowded links become lost links.

3.  Don't use large images as links.  On some devices, by the time that image has downloaded, the user has already moved on.

4.  Use a good subject line to catch people’s attention. Battle of the inboxes happens on mobile too.

5.  Use the right alt tags for your images. Some phones, while having the ability to display HTML, won't render images.  When this happens, you want "alt" text to show -- giving the user some indication of what your message is.

6.  Have a clear call to action. While this is important in all email messages, it's especially important on a mobile device where the screen real estate is limited.

7.  Test mobile emails on different smartphones. While action alerts or appeals may look great on the IPhone it could look screwy on a Blackberry. Will HTML5 save the day? Maybe, but until then, test.  Then test again.  And one more time.

8.  Include a mobile style sheet.  This will help to increase the number of mobile devices capable of viewing your message.

9.  Write good content.  This isn't exactly mobile specific.

Timing is Everything: When to Launch Your Email Campaign

The day and time you decide to launch your campaign can have an impact on the overall results of your email campaign. This detail may not be as important as the audience you select, the subject line, or the list you are using, but it is a factor. But if you are working to get the maximum results and put everything in your favor then these are commonly accepted as the BEST times to launch your campaign.

The best days (in no particular order):

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays

What’s wrong with the rest of the days?

Chances are, your readers are most likely to be away from their email on Saturday and Sunday.

On Monday, your recipients are recovering from the weekend and will not be in business mode yet. They may have a number of things to do on this day and are not quite interested in offers or solicitations.

On Friday, they are interested in wrapping things up. If someone starts something on a Friday, it may be forgotten over the weekend.

So we are left with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as the best days.

You will want to avoid holidays or any major vacation times.


Does Time of Day Matter?

You want your message to reach your audience at a time when they are going to be most receptive. Research shows that time of day can play a major role.

It's most important for your message to pop up while the recipient is at their computer. The typical email notification generally elicits a Pavlovian response in most to see what the message is. Recipients are immediately engaged and ready to see who is trying to contact them. This timing is ideal.

The key is to try to ensure that email is not just sitting stagnate in the recipient’s inbox first thing in the morning, especially after a holiday. The reason is simple. People tend to have a morning ritual of "cleaning" their inbox from any spam that arrived overnight. You don’t want them to see your message when they are in a deleting frenzy, trying to find anything they can "clean up."

Rather, you want your message to pop up while they are in the middle of a workday. This increases the chances that the recipient will stop and take a moment to read it.


What Are the Best Times to Send Email?

10:00 – 10:30 a.m.

and

1:00 – 1:30 p.m.

Please don't place too much emphasis on this area. It’s often very difficult to ensure the precise time your message goes out. And even if the message is launched at precisely 10 a.m. in one time zone, there are other time zones to consider.

Does Time of Year Matter?

You don’t want to catch someone just after a vacation when they have 200 waiting messages and are looking for stuff they can delete quickly. Most people seem to vacation during the summer months, especially July and August. Try to avoid that time.

Putting it in Perspective

Don’t wait for the perfect time or you will never launch your email campaign. As you’ve probably experienced there are times during the week, month or year when you are extremely busy and not as receptive to offers or messages. Do your best to pick a time when your clients will be most likely to act, but don’t obsess about the launch time.

Checklist: Your First Email Campaign

Decide how many lists you want. For example, you might want a “News- letters” list, but also a separate “Press & Media Relations” list. Some people set up “Weekly Specials” lists and “Internal Employee Newsletter” lists. The basic idea is that you don’t want to send your weekly specials to someone on your list who might have just been expecting an occasional newsletter.

Decide on your content and frequency. Will you send email newsletters every single month? Do you truly have the time to do that? What will the newsletter be about? Why would anybody want to subscribe to it? What will recipients gain from it?

Get permission. Ask the customers in your database for permission to send them email newsletters, offers and promotions.

Get your privacy policy in order. In particular, issues like “tracking personally identifiable information” or “marketing to children under 13.”

Set up email addresses that you can use as the “Reply-to:” for your campaigns. You might use sales@ or email@. Whatever. Just be sure it works, and be sure a human checks that account. If you use jenny@yourcompany.com, what happens when Jenny leaves the company? You’ll need to change names to the new guy, but spam filters will have already been trained to receive emails from Jenny.

Set up an abuse@ email account. No matter how clean you keep your list, you’ll always get complaints. It’s inevitable.

Set up test email accounts with Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL.

Design your HTML email template. If you’re sending different kinds of communications (sales promotions vs. monthly newsletters vs. how-to’s and tips), you might set up multiple templates for each occasion.

Insert real content into your test campaigns. Don’t just use “lorem ipsum dummy text” when you test campaigns. It’s not accurate, plus spam filters often throw away emails with garbled, nonsensical words in them. Build your plain-text alternative email. Plain-text email has its own pecu- liarities, so you’ll want to get a template for it refined from the beginning. Don’t let plain-text be an afterthought.

Test your templates. And we mean really test them like you’ve never tested before. Send them to friends, family and colleagues. Try the templates in as many different email applications you can. Open your own emails, and click them like crazy. Now go check your reports. Make sure all the tracking works like it should. Click reply and see if you get replies to your account. You want to uncover any embarrassing mistakes before sending to your real customers.

Set up a test list. If you’re like most people, you probably have about three or four email addresses. Why not set up a test list, and send your full campaign to that list?

Make sure you’re subscribed to your own list. Seems obvious, but people often forget. Prepare your website and landing pages for delivery. Before you send, get everything in order. Did you create a copy/archive of the email for your website? Make sure that’s all in place.

Deliver the campaign. Finally!

View stats after sending. You can virtually watch the opens and clicks as they happen. It’s always shock- ing to see how many people open and click in the first few minutes after you send. Then it trails off, but you’ll still get opens and clicks weeks after.

Review performance. After a few days, go back and analyze your reports. How many opens? How many clicks? Compare it to your web traffic logs, and most importantly, to sales. Did the email generate leads or sales? What was the ROI on that campaign?

Plan the next campaign. Use your campaign reports to understand what people clicked and what they didn’t. That should serve as the founda- tion for your next campaign. Maybe you’ll split up your list and segment next time around, or test different subject lines or delivery schedules. Get scientific.