The main way to get people to open your email are recognition, reputation and subject line.

One thing to keep in mind is how do you get your emails opened as it is easy to hit the “Delete” key.

Below are common characteristics all great subject lines share:

1. It needs to have something that is relevant to the subscribers
2. It needs to be something that is important to the subscriber
3. It needs to have an expiration or urgency factor so the subscriber is motivated
4. It needs to be something the subscriber can act upon

Create subject lines that incorporate these characteristics and you’re bound to boost your open rates.

As we move to less and less personal forms of communication (from handwriting to emails) we gain more exposure but face the danger of becoming disconnected from our clients.

Characters and words to avoid putting into your subject line:

1. Avoid use of + and ?
2. Avoid using exclamation points (!)
3. Avoid using your email address again in the Subject line
4. Avoid using the same word twice in a Subject line
5. Avoid using similar words together (eg “offer” and “sale”)

It is important to send the email to the person responsible so it is about something they know, so instil a sense of urgency and have something in the email that they can act upon immediately.

Remember that it is past behaviour and receiving relevant and useful emails that drives future success so think carefully about what you send.

Here are our top tips for newsletter success:

1. Keep It Relevant: Ensure your newsletters contain ‘news’ or content that is highly relevant to your subscribers. We recommend mailing list segmentation to achieve targeted marketing. Your newsletter communication can contain your special deals, new products services – as long as the information is relevant to your subscribers.
2. Short and Frequent: Email newsletters can be just a few paragraphs yet highly effective - we suggest you keep your newsletters short and frequent to win your subscribers respect, interest and trust.
3. Share and Receive: Share your expertise and receive a healthy open rate from your subscribers. Providing a regular helpful tip in your newsletters can be the factor or ‘tipping point’ that results in your newsletters being opened and read. If your newsletters are known to provide relevant, helpful information they are more likely to be viewed by your subscribers every time.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen listed email newsletters as “probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence.”

A missed opportunity - increase your mailing list registrations. Many businesses are missing out on growing their mailing lists daily. A proven method of getting more people on your email mailing list is to put your registration information boldly on your homepage. Either present an animated banner that clicks through to a dedicated registration page or present the ’subscription form’ on your homepage. Make it easy for your website visitors to join up to receive your email marketing information.

Subject Lines - invite the recipient to open your email. Subject Lines are often overlooked or an afterthought however they can greatly impact on your open rate. Choose a subject line that has a value proposition or call to action to improve your open rate.

Targeted Message Content - give your recipients relevant information. Provide your recipients with information that they want and can use and this will increase the click rate. We say “get to the Inbox to drive visits to your Website”. Providing relevant information in your email message that delivers a value proposition will improve your click statistics.

Message Presentation - enhance the reader experience. Carefully consider the visual impact of your email message ‘when images have not been downloaded’. Many marketers overly rely on images in their email messages yet a high percentage of recipients never download images. Ensure you have ample relevant information that can entice the click without the reliance on images to tell the story.

Message Templates - level the playing field with an eye catching professional email template. Get the appropriate branding presentation with a custom designed template for your email messages. Ensure there are valid links to your website and the branding is consistent with your website presentation. First impressions count so start out with a top class template.

It will not be a surprise to learn that the number one way to get people to open your email is to send email to people that know  you.  An Email Consumer Survey conducted by Return Path in December 2006 also revealed that 51 percent of people surveyed opened email when they had thought they had opened that email previously and believed it contained useful information.  The Subject Line was another key reason for consumers opening email.  If the subject line suggested the email was important or offered relevant information then the consumer would read the email message.

Regular email (but not too regular) gets attention as long as it is relevant to the recipient and the suggestion of a discount on offer will capture the attention of readers.  Surveys provide us with valuable feedback and suggest to us that forming relationships and trust with the people we are emailing is key to getting a good open rate.  With email marketing in particular we need to get into the habit of sending relevant newsworthy emails that are personalised (Dear Sue etc) and written in first person.  Respect and trust needs to be built between you and your mailing list (readers).  Ensuring your email communication is compliant with Spam Laws is essential and also key to getting a good open rate.

Analyse the feedback you received from the statistics captured from your email campaign to learn of your readers choices.  The saying ‘seek to understand, then to be understood ‘ is probably the most fundamental requirement for getting a much improved email message open rate.

An interesting report on how fonts can create a perception in the subscribers mind on the author and the email content. The study showed a number of interesting facts but unless you get really excited reading scientific documents full of big words and math just read the summary below.

“Summary: This study investigated the effect that a font has on the reader’s perception of an email. Based on a previous study by Shaikh, Chaparro, and Fox (2006), a sample email message was presented in three fonts (Calibri, Comic Sans, and Gigi). The three chosen fonts represented a high, medium, and low level of congruency for email messages. The least congruent typeface (Gigi) resulted in different perceptions of the email document and its author. However, no significant differences were found between the moderately and highly congruent fonts. ”

We also recommend using the following “Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” which seem to work quite well for most email content.

Here is the link to the report if you feel reading the 8 pages - I tried but the summary had the best bits.

As a bonus here is another report by the same authors which I have to admit not reading yet but the title sounds good “Perception of Fonts: Perceived Personality Traits and Uses”. Click here to read.

Well well. many times we at Mobilize Mail have yelled at the top of our voices that the KISS principle should be applied to email templates. How many times do we need to say “Inline CSS and tables” is what provides the most consistency for email templates.

Here is a link to an article on a web designers/developers web site where the techies are complaining about the new Microsoft Outlook version – 2007 and how the support for CSS has gone back 5 years in history in regards to CSS support. A lot of the fancy “gee whiz” CSS is not supported in the new Outlook application which currently commands a 75-85% market share of the email application market for business.

Some within the Sitepoint forums are stating that we should just tell our subscribers to swap email applications!! I am not sure of the experience and age of some of these people but with my 10 years experience in IT I can almost be certain that the subscribers will not appreciate that comment.

Gmail empowers its users to download email from other accounts into their gmail account which means more and more emails are ending up viewed in gmail.

Which means you need to give more attention to Gmail’s display eccentricities when it comes to email. More information on these developments here.

Apple’s new version of their webmail service looks great but unfortunately it seems to kill your CSS! Have a read of this review and also read the comments as a possible solution is provided.

Click here

There maybe some relief on the horizon for the poor battered email marketer who spends half their life rigorously following opt-in best practices.

We also know about the menace of the “this is spam” button provided by many large ISPs including AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail.  We have also seen the studies and gasped at the amount of subscribers who use the button to “unsubscribe” from a list.

There is a new Internet standard in town that helps good marketers avoid this pitfall.

The “list-Unsubscribe” header can be embedded into the email message and facilitates the automated or semi-automated unsubscribe processes.  What will happen is when a subscriber clicks on the “list is spam” button with an email that contains the new header the ISP will send an unsubscribe request to the sender on behalf of the recipient.

MSN/Hotmail has announced their intention to support the new header and I hope more ISPs follow. One thing that bugs me and I need to read the RFC is how it deals with spammers who would love to have more unsubscribe requests sent their way to confirm an email address is valid.

Click here to read the technical spec…

If you like to create your email message content in Microsoft Word please read on as you may have some of your subscribers contacting you about funny characters in your message.

It seems that Microsoft Word automatically changes straight quotation marks to curly (smart or typographer’s) quotes as you type. This is fine if you are only authoring your works for non-email media.

When the smart quotes are converted to HTML, the quotes are converted to non-standard characters which end up littering your document with question mark symbols, squares and/or other garbage code.

For example have a look at the two images below.. The first image shows you the email message content in Microsoft Word and the second image shows you how the message actually looks in a text version of the email when read within Gmail. This is not to say HTML is immune from this issue. It really depends on your email client as to how the HTML is interpreted with non-standard characters but I think you will agree with me that the text version of the email message is just as important as the HTML message for your brand.

Figure 1 - Text Created in Word

Figure 2 - The results of HTML created in MS Word - note the squares

So how do you fix this issue?

You need to disable Microsoft Word’s Smart Quotes. Follow the steps below.

1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.

2. Under Replace as you type, select or clear the “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes” check box.

Alternatively, you can copy your entire MS Word document over to a non Microsoft text editor (EditPlus, UltraEdit, TextPad, etc) and do a simple search and replace. Search and replace the smart quotes into standard quotes, apostrophe’s, dashes and dots if applicable.

Caution for authors creating HTML code for their email messages in MS Word:

Unless you have smart quotes disabled, it should be noted that smart quotes are not valid HTML code. Therefore, don’t even consider using MS Word to do HTML code unless you have the smart quotes feature disabled.