Keep-InTouch.com

Email Marketing Tips and Tricks: About HTML and Email Services

Not every Email service provider is your friend. But you can find ways to work around this. Each one has their own way of handling incoming emails and some, like gmail, may remove all styles altogether, making your carefully designed emails look bad. To ensure that you are getting there almost intact, you must design your HTML to ‘degrade’ gracefully.

• Don’t rely on background images. Outlook2007, gmail, Lotus and others, give no background image support at all, so any information you have placed there will be lost. Some clients (gmail, yahoo, windows live) support images applied to tables, but not to the body; however, outlook 2007 does the exact opposite so you have to plan accordingly.

• Tables are ‘in’ again. Although only for email marketing, tables are a great way to structure your HTML emails and get them to work on as many email clients as possible. Use nested tables instead of divs to place your content to get better results. Set all available attributes of the tables where possible.

• Make sure your text is readable. Again, remember you may not have the support of a background image to ‘contrast’ colors in your content. For example, using white text because your background image is dark will not work. Once the client renders your HTML, if the image is removed your recipient will not be able to read the white text on a white background.

• Provide a link to view the email in a web browser. Keep-InTouch® does this for you automatically! All of your emails are hosted on a web page that your recipients can link to by clicking a small header link we include on all outgoing messages.

• Use ‘alt’ tags on images. Remember that there is no real way of making sure your contacts are watching your images, so a nice, descriptive ALT tag on each image is your best chance to get them to download or enable your images. Always make sure to put these tags on the most important images, you don’t have to place them on filler images.

• Be careful with styles. Some popular email clients ignore code inside head tags. Use inline styles when coding your CSS and do this frequently, as parent styles might not work down to all of its children. Links will also be rendered differently unless you specifically and carefully apply detailed inline styles to them. Use spans for distributing your space vertically.

• Don’t exceed 600px width. This ensures that recipients with even small resolutions (pocket PCs, laptops, etc,) will be able to read your emails without much scrolling. Design for small spaces.

• Keep it light. Remember that your recipients get tons of other emails so keep yours to a max of 20kb. Attachments add a heavy burden to marketing emails so make sure to keep them to a minimum or, better yet, to none.

Optimizing your HTML Email Marketing

HTML Email marketing can be a tricky business. We’ve created a quick guideline of tips you can use to optimize your designs and to get your point across to your clients and contacts as best as possible.

About Content:
1. Be Direct and Truthful. Avoid “mysterious” email subjects, try to be clear with your contacts about what they will be finding inside. This is very important in building trust and getting them to open your emails, and not sending them straight to trash.

2. Be sure to have their permission and meet your legal obligations. Remind them the reason why they are on your mailing list, and always make it easy for them to unsubscribe. Keep-InTouch® automatically adds an unsubscribe link and sender information to all outgoing email in compliance with the CAN-SPAM laws (US).

3. Keep it Relevant. Make sure to keep your content relevant to the interest of your clients.

4. Test Before sending. Make sure to check your email before it goes to your contacts. Keep-InTouch® makes this easy by providing you with a Preview button that shows you exactly what you are building or uploading. If you can, we also suggest running a quick test by sending the email to yourself before using it.

Keep-InTouch Anti-Spam Policy

Keep-InTouch is designed and may only to be used for permission-based email marketing.  We abide and are in compliance with the United States Anti-Spam Act .

Why do I need permission?
The Federal Trade Commission has ruled that sending people unsolicited email is against the law.

What are the definitions of “Permission-based” contacts
Contacts who have signed up or “opted in” through your web site to receive more information from you, whether by form or check box.
Contacts who gave you their business card and asked to receive correspondence.
Contacts who have made purchases from you within the past 2 years.

Who is off limits?
Lists or email addresses received from a third party provider.  This includes lists bought or rented or received through membership.
Addresses you collected from the Internet (via copy/paste) or through an automated “bot”.
Addresses you haven’t emailed in the last 2 years

Import Your Contact Database From Other Programs – ACT!

To import contacts into Keep-InTouch, first you must export your contacts from ACT! Data to Microsoft Excel.  The Export to Excel option is available from the Contact List, Group List, Company List or Opportunity List views.

Requirements:

If you are using ACT! 2005, ACT! 2006 or ACT! 2007, you must have Microsoft Excel versions 2000, 2002, or 2003 installed.
If you are using ACT! by Sage 2008 or later, you must have Microsoft Excel Versions 2002, 2003, or 2007 installed.

Before you export to Excel, you can customize the columns on the list views. The columns and data displayed on the ACT! list view are exported to Excel columns in the same order.

• To reorder the columns in a list view: Right-click within the list view, and then click Customize Columns from the shortcut menu.
• To export the data of only one Contact record: Right-click that record in the list view, and then click Look Up Selected Contacts (or Create Lookup) from the shortcut menu.
• To Export only one Group or Company to Excel, you must perform a Lookup on that specific Group or Company (so only that Group or Company is displayed in the list view) before clicking the Export to Excel option.

To export the Contact records that are members of a Group or Company, follow these steps:
1. From the desired Group or Company Detail view, ensure that the Contacts tab is displayed.
2. Right-click in the body of the Contacts tab, and then click Create Look-up from the shortcut menu. The Contact List view appears with the Group or Company members displayed.

Once you have exported your contact database to Excel, simply rename the header row to the following fields:

Planning Action Is The First Step To Keeping In Touch

When implementing any Marketing, ALWAYS consider the following before taking action:

What is my desired End Result?
Am I selling a product?
Do I want to simply generate interest?
Am I providing information to educate folks on what I offer?
Am I looking for leads?
Am I asking for referrals?

Who am I communicating with? My target audience.
Gatekeeper?
Clients?
Prospects?

What Action do am I taking?
Email
A Thank You card
A phone call follow up?

What Is My Message?
Let’s get together
Here’s what I do
100.How can I be of Service?

How do I create the message?
Here are my answers to the previous 5 questions when people start with Keep-in Touch and want to reconnect.
Reconnect with Contacts and build immediate Rapport again.
Everyone in my database I haven’t connected with in 1 month or more.
Send out a simple 4 step Action Plan to 3 emails and a phone call
I’m sorry I have lost touch but I recently put a system in place to support my ability to create mutual value.
Message is created in Action Plan.