Marketing Amanda Freeman

Design Guidelines Set your width to pixels Avoid too many tables Flash, JavaScript, ActiveX and movies will not work in HTML

Anatomy of a good healthy HTML newsletter Insert your company name in the “From” – recipients should recognise who the is from instantly A relevant subject line, with your company or newsletter name in it. So they instantly know who the is from and what its about The “To” field of your should be personalised to the recipients name, not their address

Anatomy of a good healthy HTML newsletter Have an “opt out” link that removes people from your list immediately – its illegal not to have this option A link to your companies privacy policy should also be included in your Your valid, physical mailing address – the more contact information you provide the, the more reputable your will look Include some form of reminder text – “you are receiving this because you signed up at our website”

Newsletter Example

Designing a Plain Text Use a plain text editor like Notepad By default some applications start to wrap text at around 60 characters. People don’t read s they scan them, so make sure your information is easy to read. Perhaps use bullet points You cant code a clickable link with plain text . You just have to type out the entire URL.

Plain Text Example

Designing around SPAM SPAM filters – every time that they find something in a mail that looks “spammy” they assign a score to it. For example; “Click here” might get you 0.7 points Using bright red fonts might get you 2 points Using the word “mortgage” may get you 1 point whereas “Viagra” might get 5 points Once an reaches a certain threshold it is put into junk mail

Tactics for avoiding Spam Filters Avoid using bright red colours Yelling with lots of exclamation marks !!!!! YELLING BY USING ALL CAPS Using spammy words like ‘mortgage’, ‘viagra’ Bad HTML in general can get you spam filtered. Missing table tags, content below the closing tag, or empty tags will get your message thrown into the junk folder. Don’t get sloppy with that code! Note: the empty information is very common if you use WYSIWYGs. They throw that in by default, and expect that you go back and fill it in. Don’t forget to go back and give the document a title!

What is blacklisting? Blacklisting is a process of actively monitoring the Internet for reports of traffic from a variety of sources sending unsolicited commercial (SPAM) and then publicly listing that known information on Internet sites for others to reference as a measure to fight SPAM. Many ISP's and independent organizations then use these blacklist databases as a reference filter applied to their inbound mail servers to aid in preventing SPAM and to encourage internet security.

What is an whitelist? An whitelist is a list of contacts that the user deems are acceptable to receive from and should not be sent to the trash folder. SPAM filters that come with clients have both white and black lists of senders and keywords to look for in s. If a spam filter keeps a whitelist, mail from the listed addresses, domains, and/or IP addresses will always be allowed.

Marketing Basics & Best Practices What is Spam? If you get an unsolicited from someone is that Spam? Not necessarily. If you get an that is obviously sent to a whole list of people, is that Spam? Not necessarily. So what is Spam?

Marketing Basics & Best Practices Spam is when you send an unsolicited to a whole list of people. So lets say you bought a list of addresses from some local business. They are great prospects for your local business. And you want to send them an with a relevant offer they cant refuse.

Marketing Basics & Best Practices It is Spam if you upload that list to an service provider and send that list as unsolicited mail It is not Spam if you take that list, and write personal, one to one to each recipient, and the content is unique for each recipient.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 The US CAN-SPAM Act became law on Jan 1, According to their website, if you violate the law, you could be fined up to $16,000 for each offence (multiply $16,000 times the number of people on your recipient list). Some key points of the Act if your sending commercial

The CAN-SPAM Act of Never use deceptive headers, from- names, reply tos, or subject lines. 2. You must always provide an unsubscribe link 3. That unsubscribe link must work for at least 30 days after sending your 4. You must include your physical mailing address in the (PO Boxes wont do)

Double Opt-in Its highly recommended that you have a Double Opt-in option on your s e.g. 1. A customer signs up for your newsletter from your website 2. They receive an with a confirmation link 3. If they click the link they are added to your list

Measuring Performance Open Rates ◦ How many people opened your ? ◦ Around 20%-30% is considered average Click Rates ◦ How many people clicked links in your ? ◦ Which links did they click the most? ◦ Did they click on product links or research links?

Measuring Performance Unsubscribe Rate ◦ What is your unsubscribe rate after a campaign? ◦ Less than 1% is average Measure traffic to your website ◦ Does traffic pick up? ◦ Do orders increase?