Top 15 email marketing design & content tips

1. Keep it simple and short
2. Let users know what the email is about
3. Insert low resolution graphics to capture their attention
4. Have a call-to-action
5. Personalize it
6. Your corporate identity should drive the look and feel
7. Use the same font family for all the copy and limit the use of bolds and italics to headers and proper names
8. Underscore links and make them in a different color.
9. Avoid too many colors. They tend to fight each other.
10. Emphasize call-to-action so users will focus on it
11. Emphasize other content sparingly
12. Offer useful information
13. Make the content relevant to the user and the subject in your email
14. Use the same newsletter design template for at least 4 months at a time to benefit from brand familiarity
15. Target your best leads, email to a select few to get a better response

BONUS 16. For a better response, connect your content to events and mailings that are taking place.

Email Marketing Best Practices

Just found this. Thought it would be helpful to everyone. Become an email marketing communications expert! It offers design, compliance, delivery, tracking, strategy, list management tips. Check out http://www.emaillabs.com/best-practices/

Get more bang for your buck with email marketing

Namaro’s topic for the March blog is email marketing. We have done countless hours of research about on-line email marketing software and we narrowed down our final choice to verticalresponse.com.

1. The interface is user-friendly and intuitive
2. They offer design templates free of charge
3. You can create your own custom email design or modify their templates
4. You can personalize each email
5. You can work in code mode
6. One click content insertion
7. Preview everything in browser
8. Easily upload your database
9. Your database is reviewed for anti-spam approval
10. Your campaign is tested before you send it out
11. You set-up the launch date and time
12. One click to launch it
13. Once launched, you can monitor all sorts of stats like how many opened the email and what links they opened.
14. After the launch, you can edit your list and export it back to your computer.
15. You can sign up for free and they give you 25 free email credits
Send 25 email newsletters for free and see how it works for you
16. The cost per email is 1.5 cents!
17. For small companies, charging per email is cost effective

Let’s do some math:
At Namaro, not counting the research and strategic planning, it took us 1 day to gather the content for the subject of the newsletter, ½ day to apply our brand identity and custom create our newsletter template, a ½ day to layout the first newsletter, edit the content and finalize it, a few hours to check the list, test the newsletter and get approval to launch. We sent out 500 emails for $7.80 not including the email credits. This month we save on time since we can re-use the template we created for the first email campaign.

So with 4 days and $7.80 dollars we contacted 500 individuals—only two opted out. How cool is that?