In this webinar “5 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing“, you will learn how to focus on 5 critical elements to improve your email marketing:

• optimize & test subject lines
• make email content relevant
• build landing pages that convert
• use design and rendering best practices
• manage deliverability

Element #1. Optimize & Test Subject Lines

Test Subject Lines
Prior to launching your email campaign, A/B test subject lines on 5% of your audience and then send the mailing to the rest of your subscribers with the winning subject line. With this approach you will be amazed what improvement you could achieve.

What to Test

• Personalize your subject line – Andrea, Executive Superstars Needed $150K+
• Drive urgency – LAST DAY FOR 75% off.
• Negative vs. positive subject lines: We are sorry to see you go vs. Renew your subscription and save 10%

Follow best practices to avoid spam filters

Use of “Free” in a subject line. It’s acceptable to use “Free” in subject line but with a few caveats:
- don’t make “Free” a first word in your subject line
- don’t ever use “Free” in conjunction with an exclamation mark. NOTE: exclamation marks are not recommended to be used in subject lines at all as they could get marked as a spam.
- don’t ever spell “Free” all in capital letters

Element #2. Make Email Content Relevant

Provide value with relevant, customized messages and offers.

Element #3. Build Landing Pages That Convert

After you have crafted your subject line and email, the next step is to create a landing page. Every element of your landing page should either state (continuity) or support (congruence) your email offers otherwise your conversion rate will suffer.

Element #4. Use Design & Rendering Best Practices

If you design your email for Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail and Yahoo Mail, you will capture 80% of your audience.

You should always include a link to a web version on your newsletter, in case there is a problem with rendering of your email due to the use of older email client by your subscribers.

• Avoid using scripts like javascripts as most scripts get stripped out of email messages and some email clients will automatically reject your email.
• Use universally supported fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Tahoma and make sure your font size is no smaller than 10pixels.
• Limit email to 500-650 pixels in width. This is the email window message width used by Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. HTML messages wider than 500-650 pixels will require a recipient to scroll horizontally and should be avoided.
• Use alt tags to make your emails disabled image friendly. Use good description of each image. Research has shown that as many as 30 percent of email recipients have the images turned off in their email clients.
• Make your email preview panel friendly: avoid using large image headers as they take too much of your pressures email display real estate in the preview panel.
• Keep message size to 40-50 Kb

Element #5. Manage Deliverability

• always gain opt-in
• provide option to change subscriber preferences
• send from a recognizable “from” address

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