Email blast marketing — tips for email list owners

February 10th, 2010 by stevehong

HTML email blast marketing has advantages over plain-text because HTML emails are brandable, measurable and more readable for the subscribers, but make sure to obey applicable laws. This is the first article in a three-part series on HTML email that was delivered by CrossComm’s Steve Hong to the Raleigh-Durham Web Design Group in February 2010. You can also download these email blast marketing tips in PDF. Check out MailChimp’s comprehensive how to HTML email marketing guide for a lot of great best practices. We’ve condensed and reorganized many of those HTML email tips to specifically address email list owners.

Prepare email carefully. Don’t be a spammer.

  • Avoid being reported as an email spammer because this could prevent your emails from reaching your subscribers. Give your subscribers every reason to open your email.
  • Follow the rules of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 which essentially tells you not to be deceptive and to let people unsubscribe from your list. You should also list your physical street address. Talk to a lawyer for legal counsel.
  • Send only to opt-in lists. Don’t buy lists. Follow the spirit more than the letter of opt-in rules. It’s spam if your subscribers think it is.
  • Use double opt-in: customer signs up on your website and receives a confirmation email with a link he or she must click to confirm subscription.
  • Provide example emails with your opt-in form to start familiarizing potential subscribers with your email brand and to let them know what to expect.
  • Ask people to whitelist your email address in their spam filters.
  • Send email regularly to avoid subscribers forgetting about you and marking your email as spam. Be consistent.
  • Don’t sell with your subject lines (“GREAT OFFER JUST FOR YOU. HUGE SALE!!!”), just describe.
  • Avoid spammy language like bright red text, excessive exclamation points!!!!, ALL-CAPS and spammy words (mortgage, Viagra, click here, limited time, etc.). Check your email’s spam score before you send it with Contactology’s email spam checker.
  • Set up abuse@yourdomain.com to accept complaints from ISPs when their members flag you as a spammer.
  • Host images on a server instead of sending them as attachments. Be prepared to host those images indefinitely because emails will be reopened well into the future.
  • Use an email sending service because you can’t send HTML email from your own desktop email program like Outlook or Apple Mail. It needs to be sent from a server that combines HTML and text versions of an email together. Email services also handle a lot of complicated issues around helping your email pass spam filters. Here are a few companies to consider:

Use email marketing strategically.

  • Consider creating multiple lists for different kinds of emails, different audiences and different send frequencies. Don’t send the same email to all 1000 people on your list. Send a different offer to recent customers or people interested in particular subjects.
  • Sign up on your own lists so you get your emails just like your subscribers and can see any potential problems.
  • Set the reply-to address to a separate account you can check at your leisure. Use a generic account that can be transferred to different employees. You don’t want to get everyone’s vacation away messages at your regular email account. Also check for challenge/response emails to manually get on a subscriber’s whitelist.
  • Check your email statistics but expect only about 20% or 30% of subscribers to open your email.
  • Test each aspect of your email: subject, links, day of the week, time of day, etc. Consider segmenting your list into test groups to test variations with each segment. Send to one group at 9AM and another at 12PM and see which group opens and clicks more. Test one factor at a time.
  • Watch your web analytics and see if your website traffic and conversions improve after emails.
  • Coordinate your team to handle traffic and inquiries resulting from emails. Be aware of time zone differences.

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HTML email design — tips for designers

February 10th, 2010 by stevehong

HTML email design elements should be simple, minimal and non-essential. This is the second article in a three-part series on HTML email. You can also download these HTML email design tips in PDF. Check out MailChimp’s comprehensive how to HTML email marketing guide for a lot of great best practices. We’ve condensed and reorganized many of those HTML email tips to specifically address designers.

Design HTML email for the unique medium.

  • Use simple static images because interactive elements like Flash, movies, and Javascript won’t work.
  • Use graphics minimally because image-heavy emails can look like spam.
  • Make your images non-essential because webmail programs will frequently turn off image-loading by default. Your email should communicate well even without the images.
  • Avoid using background images and tiling because some email programs, like Outlook, won’t show them. You can use them if they don’t matter.
  • Set your canvas to 500-600 pixels wide to fit smaller preview windows.
  • Design the recognizable brand to fit into the top leftmost 200×200 square because of tiny preview panes in some email programs. Give subscribers a reason to open the email in a full window.
  • Make the first line of text relevant and unique because it will show in Gmail and future programs that show a snippet of the first line along with subject lines.
  • Design plain-text formatting with headings, lists, links, dividers, etc.
  • Read SitePoint’s HTML email design principles.

Include essential elements.

  • From name should be recognizable.
  • Subject line shouldn’t look spammy.
  • To line should be personalized with a name, not just an email address.
  • One-click opt-out link should be easy to access, perhaps at the top.
  • Link to an archived web version just in case the template breaks.
  • Link to a privacy policy page.
  • Street address, phone number and other contact information adds legitimacy.
  • Reminder how the subscribers got on your list.

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How to code HTML email — tips for coders

February 10th, 2010 by stevehong

When exploring how to code HTML email, keep in mind that the code should be low-tech, long-hand and well-tested. This is the third article in a three-part series on HTML email. You can also download these tips on how to code HTML email in PDF. Check out MailChimp’s comprehensive how to HTML email marketing guide for a lot of great best practices. We’ve condensed and reorganized many of those HTML email tips to specifically address coders.

Code HTML email templates like it’s 1999.

  • Code HTML/CSS by hand rather than in a WYSIWYG editor to ensure the code is clean and only includes supported elements.
  • Use low-tech and simple table layouts without nesting or merging cells because CSS layouts with positioning don’t work.
  • Code only long-hand inline CSS styles instead of external or head stylesheets. CSS short-hand like “font” may not work, so write out individual properties like “font-size.” Try a tool like Premailer to make your styles inline.
  • Use CSS primarily for text styling. Put general text styles on parent td cells but don’t rely on style inheritance from parent table cells to children cells. Use inline CSS on heading and paragraph tags to overwrite inherited styles.
  • Avoid font tags because they don’t yield consistent font sizes.
  • Wrap everything in a master 100% width table for background colors and other body styles because head and body tags are stripped out by webmail.
  • Avoid conflicting with webmail CSS ID and class names by not using any or using unique names, like “clientname-footer”, rather than generic names, like “footer.”
  • Reference images with absolute instead of relative paths because they’re hosted on a web server.
  • Use alt text in a header image to ask people to “please turn on images” so that they know they’re missing out when their webmail turns off images.
  • Add CSS text styles to table cells even if they contain only images because alt text will be styled when images are turned off.
  • Take a look at MailChimp’s sample email templates to see code that works.
  • Check out CSS Tricks’ s HTML email screencast for a how-to video.

Test HTML email code everywhere.

  • Test with images and CSS turned off using the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar plugin.
  • Set up many webmail test addresses and install several desktop email programs for testing. For a fee, try MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector for final tests of your template.
  • Avoid spam filters in testing by avoiding the word “test” and dummy text like “lorem ipsum.” Make every aspect of the email production-ready before testing it.

Discover email program inconsistencies on your own, but start with these.

  • Gmail doesn’t honor background-repeat styles, so plan for backgrounds to repeat in all directions.
  • Gmail breaks when using single quotes around multi-word font names in font-family declarations. For example, don’t use “font-family:’Lucida Grande’,Verdana,sans-serif;” but rather “font-family:Lucida Grande,Verdana,sans-serif;”.
  • Gmail doesn’t like percentage values for CSS line-height. Outlook 2007 creates too much line-height when em sizes are used. Use pixel sizes.
  • Gmail and Hotmail don’t display background images declared with CSS, so use the background attribute of the table and td tags.
  • Hotmail seems to ignore margins when margin-top CSS is used. Try using padding instead.
  • Hotmail and AOL on Macs add extra line-height around images unless the line-height of the container is smaller than the font size. Try 70% of the font size like this: 12px font size, use 8px line height (12 x .7 = 8.4)
  • Yahoo uses non-standard align and valign default values on table cells, so set them explicitly.
  • Yahoo has styles that make cellspacing ineffective on tables. Use cellpadding instead.

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10 Ideas For Website Content

November 17th, 2009 by Michael Stalker

Let me give you ten fresh ideas for website content. We’ve talked about the importance of writing good, unique content for maximum search engine visibility. You need a strategy to build content for SEO. Plus, good content will improve your conversion rates. If you can grasp those ideas, you’re halfway there.

But some people get stuck at this point. You may look at your website and ask, “What else would I add? It seems like I’ve said everything that needs to be said.” Let me offer you some website content ideas.

  1. Expert reviews. You’re an expert on whatever your website is about. If you sell products, write some reviews about products you carry or on other products in your industry. Be careful, though–if someone gives you a product to review, you must write a disclaimer on your website.
  2. Social commentary. Is there anything going in current events that is relevant to your industry? Write some content about it. Write from your own unique angle.
  3. Event announcements. Tell about upcoming events in your company or industry. Keep in mind that people don’t just want to hear about you. Show them how the announcement is relevant to them or will benefit them.
  4. New products. Tell the world about your great new invention. Again, be sure to focus on how your product will help people. The goal is to talk about benefits, not features. There’s a place to talk about your services, but you need to make the explicit connection between your company and people’s needs.
  5. Solutions to problems. Are you trying to stop world hunger? Write about how you plan to do this. Do you sell a low-heat hairdryer? Write about how your product eliminates the problems high-heat hairdryers cause. Start with a problem people (or the world) have. Write about the solution.
  6. How-to articles. This is similar to #5. People are trying to do things. Give them a step-by-step guide. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found helpful information on a website like http://www.ehow.com. You can provide the same information for your niche. (You do have a niche you’re targeting, don’t you?)
  7. Start a blog. Be sure to keep it focused. Otherwise, this blogging poster will characterize you.
  8. History. Write about your company’s history. This helps people get to know you better. People like to do business with people, not cold companies. You could also write about the history of your industry or geographic location.
  9. Install a forum. This is particularly helpful if you want to increase your site visitors’ involvement on your site. It also provides a good way to help others.
  10. Create an expert Q&A section of your site. Answer real questions people have. It will help them, and you’ll increase your credibility.

As always, head on over to Robin Nobles’ Idea Motivator for more insights. Between her site and some of my ideas for website content, you should be well on your way to expanding your website. So, what are you waiting for?

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Online Conversion Rates and SEO

November 11th, 2009 by Michael Stalker

Or, Why SEO Is Not Enough

SEO, or search engine optimization, has been somewhat of a craze for awhile now. I believe this is an important part of developing an effective website. If no one can find your website, you will never sell, distribute information, or adequately promote your cause online. But you also need to focus on your online conversion rates.

SEO is not enough. Why not? It is only a means to an end, not an end in itself. Merely driving more relevant traffic to your website is insufficient to meet your site’s goals. It helps. It helps quite a bit. But having a lot of people visit your website is probably not why you developed a web presence. You probably want to tell the world about something. You may want to sell a product. You may want to persuade people.

SEO sets the stage for meeting these goals. But SEO success is never a good measure for how well you are meeting your website goals.

So what is needed? You need to be able to measure the actual online conversion rates of your website. Conversion rate is basically a measure of how well you meet your goals. It could be the percentage of people who buy your product, the percentage of people who sign up for your newsletter, or how long people stay on a page to read an article. If you can measure these things and take steps to improve them, you will be in a much better place than if you focus all your efforts on SEO.

Are you seeking to provide your site visitors with a positive experience? Are you helping them find what they need? Does your site have broken links? Is your web copy easy to understand? Are you giving your site visitors what they came to your site to find? (Do you even know why people are visiting your site?) Is your site’s design complementary to your site goals, or does the design undermine these goals? Start working on some of these things, and you’re bound to see your online conversion rates improve.

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HTML Title Tags and SEO

July 29th, 2009 by Michael Stalker

There are indicators on your page that a search engine looks for when it determines relevancy. The HTML title tag is one of these. If you look at your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.), the text you see at the top of the window is the title tag text. If you’re looking at your HTML code, the title tag is up near the top in the “head” area.

The search engines heavily weight your title tag when they determines relevancy. The theory is that if your webpage is about three-pronged widgets, you’ll probably include “three-pronged widgets” in your title tag. Think of the title tag as something like the title of a paper you write for school. If you’re writing a paper on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you wouldn’t write “America’s Greatest Hot Dog Eating Contest” as the title, would you? No. Why not? That’s not what your paper is about. Likewise, good title tags will accurately describe the web page.

The title tag is also what people see in the search engine results. A good title tag improves what’s called the click-through rate (CTR). CTR is the percentage of people who click on your link after they see it. Which page would you most likely click on: “Index of Three-Pronged Widgets” or “Three-Pronged Widgets Directory: Find Your Widgets Fast!”? Probably the second one. It is more compelling. It holds out a benefit to the searcher.

Did you notice that I put the words “Three-Pronged Widgets” first in the HTML title tag? It’s best to put your keywords right at the front. This is because search engines give more weight to words in the beginning of the title tag than words in the middle or end. The result? More traffic to your website!

One more thing. Come up with some unique content for each title. You don’t want a lot of duplicates on your website.

Want more information on writing good, compelling HTML title tags? Head on over to the Search Engine Workshops and read about title triggers.

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Unique Web Content Is Important For SEO

July 20th, 2009 by Michael Stalker

Good search-engine optimized content is unique web content. Awhile ago, I wrote about what makes a good website. This is partially a follow-up to that, with special consideration to the SEO value of writing articles that are different from anything else on the Internet.

Search engines follow links around the Web to find new pages. When a search engine finds a page, it compares that page to the other pages it has indexed. Why?

It is the search engine’s job to provide people with the most relevant results when they perform a search. There is no need to show two pages with nearly identical content in the search results. Think of it from the searcher’s perspective. Do you really want 5 out of the top 10 Google results to be the same content? Of course not. You’d get tired of clicking from one result to the next just to see the same stuff. Search engines do everything they can to keep that from happening.

If the wording on your page is nearly identical to someone else’s page, the search engine will have to decide which one to show when someone searches. It will probably not show both. Yes, I know—there are exceptions. But you risk keeping your page out of the search engines if your content is too close to someone else’s.

So, how do you come up with some ideas to write some unique pages? Here are some tips:

Here are ten more ideas for website content to get you going.

Here are some tools to measure the uniqueness of your page:

  • Similar Page Checker - compare the content on two pages. Just enter the URLs.
  • Duplicate Content Analysis - Like the Similar Page Checker, but a bit more advanced. Enter up to 10 URLs and check how unique the content is.
  • Yahoo! Uniqueness Test - Paste some text in a box and compare it with pages indexed in the Yahoo! search engine. This tool takes awhile to run.
  • Copyscape - See if anyone is plagiarizing your articles.

Visit the Idea Motivator blog for more ideas on how to write unique content for your website.

Spend the extra time to make sure your website articles are different from anyone else’s. The search engines will reward you.

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How Search Engines Work

June 9th, 2009 by Michael Stalker

Curious how search engines work? You should be. Much of your online success depends on understanding a few search engine basics.

The search engine’s job is to return the most relevant web pages for a person’s search query. (A search query is basically what the person types in the search box before he or she clicks, “Search.”) Here’s what happens:

  1. A person visits a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.
  2. They type something in the search box.
  3. They hit “Search.”
  4. The search engine runs the search query through some pretty advanced algorithms to determine the most relevant results to return. These results get pulled from a massive index of web pages the search engine has collected.
  5. A list of web pages gets displayed. These results are ordered by relevance.

Of course, you’re familiar with steps 1, 2, 3, and 5. But how does #4 work? No search engine is going to disclose their exact algorithm. However, there are things that every good search engine will look for to determine which pages are relevant to a person’s search query and which ones are not. Generally, these fall in two categories: on-page factors and off-page factors.

On-page factors are found in a web page’s HTML code. You have full control over these when you create a new page. They include things like the words you use in your article, your title tag, and what other pages you link to. We’ll go into more detail in a future post.

Off-page factors are found on other web pages besides the one in question. You have direct control over some of these, and little to no control over others. That’s right. Some factors that determine your relevance to a search query lie outside of your direct control. Put another way, how well you rank isn’t all up to you. “But that’s not fair!” you may cry. Fair or not, that’s the way search engines work. We have to play the hand we’ve been dealt. But take heart. Just because you have no direct control over some of these factors doesn’t mean you have no indirect control. Stay tuned and we’ll discuss some of those soon.

How search engines work can seem somewhat mysterious. Once you understand some of the off-page and off-page relevance factors, you can apply them to help boost your search engine rankings.

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Why Is Usability Important?

May 21st, 2009 by Michael Stalker

One oft-overlooked aspect of web design is called website “usability.” Put simply, usability is the ability for website visitors to do what they want to do quickly and easily. Many web designers often spend more time making a site look pretty. We’re not against good-looking websites! But a clean design is not enough to make a good website. Let me use an illustration.

Imagine you go to the store to buy a birthday gift for your friend. You walk in the store and the appearance of the store immediately impresses you. Everything is clean. There is nice music playing faintly in the background. There is a pleasant scent in the air. As you begin to browse the aisles, though, you notice something is amiss. You cannot find what you’re looking for. The aisles are not labeled well. They are also a bit narrow and you keep bumping into people. There are no store employees in sight to help you. What would you do? After a time of looking around in vain, you would leave the store and decide to shop somewhere else.

Website usability is like that. It’s much less tangible than an attractive web design. However, it’s far more important. It includes things like clearly labeling different parts of the website so visitors can easily find their way around. Important areas of the page are easy to spot. It’s simple to find contact information. A search feature is highly visible on the page.

Spend the extra time focusing on usable design. You will never regret it.

Read some more about why usability is important at Jakob Nielsen’s website. He has volumes of information on the topic that you may find helpful.

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What Makes A Good Website?

May 19th, 2009 by Michael Stalker

The short answer is: great content, great design, and great organization.

When you’re thinking about what makes a good website, you first need to examine your goals. Do you want to sell something? Then including a safe checkout system is a must. Do you want to help people find things to do in your city? Having a good way to search restaurants, events, and historical sites is necessary. Your goals will determine what kinds of things you need to include on your website to bring it from being mediocre to being great.

Without a clear focus and particular goals, your site will never reach its full potential. You must do more than examine your goals, however. Let’s assume that your goals and focus are in place. You need to work on your content, design, and organization to produce a good website.

Content

You need good, quality content. Chances are, you need an abundance of it. The amount of content you need on your site will vary. You will need more if your site is primarily informational. All content should be well-written. It should also be original. Either produce something unique, or offer a unique perspective on something that is not unique. You can even bring resources together in a unique way. But, by all means, offer your site visitors some unique web content. Say something original. Say something meaningful. Say something helpful. Say it well. You will never have a good website without this. Chances are, you’ll also see your online conversion rates increase.

Visual Design

Professional website design can make your site stand out from the crowd. There is a big difference between a clean design like The New York Times from The International Ghost Hunters Society. The ghost site is somewhat entertaining. It even brings back some memories from the 90s. But it’s not good design. It is not clean. It is difficult to find information. For instance, try finding the site navigation. (Hint: it’s near the bottom of the page.) Everything screams that this is an amateur site. On the contrary, take a look at the list of nice site designs. I don’t know about you, but I’m impressed.

Would you go into an interview without dressing up? Would you invite dinner guests over without cleaning up the house some? Of course not. Why treat your website any differently? You’re presenting yourself or your company to the public. Give a good visual impression.

Organization

The technical name for this is “information architecture.” It has to do with how you arrange all the content on your site. In most cases, I would argue that a hierarchical structure is best. This is the arrangement of site material into sections, subsections, and so on. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Will you arrange material by audience? By topic? By price? Spend some time thinking through this.

Let’s revisit the ghost site. Why is the membership link lumped in with the jewelry links? Why are links to local sites interspersed with links to voices and lunar cycles? They have nothing in common.

Good website organization is much less tangible than the visual design. However, helping your site visitors find what they’re looking for quickly and easily can be more even more important than having a site that looks nice. If you’ve spent the money to get a great visual design, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by creating a poorly-organized website.

Conclusion

So what makes a good website?

  • Great content.
  • Great design.
  • Great organization.

These certainly aren’t the only elements to a great site, but you need to start with these. You’ll never have a good website without them.

For more information, check out a good article on what makes a great website. It’s a bit more thorough than the information I presented here. I think you’ll find it helpful.

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