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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.

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 .

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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.

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Holidays are a great way to reconnect

Holidays are a great way for you to reconnect with family. It is also a great way to reconnect with friends and clients. I use my “E-Plan” and name it Holiday so that I can assign all my clients and prospects to it quickly and easily. It has a couple of elements that may be of interest to you:

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Creating Customer Loyalty with 7 Simple Steps

Customer loyalty has to be earned, too often there is no value left for them and so they leave. Creating loyalty means creating value for them and this is important to your business.

Loyal customers will help you bring in repeat business and referrals, so they cannot be overlooked. When business™ apply the 80/20 Rule, they discover that 80% of the business comes from 20% of their loyal customers. Let’s explore some methods to keep those current customers loyal and have them become advocates for your company. If you don’t yet have a specific plan for customer loyalty, these tips will help:

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