Written by: Administrator Account
4/11/2011 9:09 AM 

Springboarding off of our last post about marketing mailing lists, we’ll discuss some good practices in designing the email messages you will be e-blasting.  There are a number of approaches to take, all with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Text only marketing messages:  By far the easiest to create and the “safest” to send, basic text messages are a fine approach if your messages are simple and don’t require eye-catching graphics to be effective.  A text only message will look like most of the email correspondences you receive, just text and no fancy layouts or images.  Using text only email messages gives you the best chance of getting your email message through looking like what you expect.  Obviously the downside is that your email will look like most of the email messages that your prospect already receives, so it won’t stand out in any way.

HTML email messages: This is the most popular format of blast emails.  You probably receive many of these every day.  These are the emails that have attractive images and layouts.  These are the eye-catching messages you receive daily.  Depending on the settings in your email program, you may see these messages with the images stripped out (and you can choose to download the images if you want).  That is the main drawback to HTML email messages.  You don’t have control over whether the email will get through looking like what you intend.  Most email marketers will go with this approach and hope that recipients will download the images or add them as a safe sender (which will allow for the images to be downloaded automatically). 

A hybrid email message:  There are a couple of ways to utilize both of these message types and gain an advantage.  If you use an email service to create your email messages (we recommend VerticalResponse), you will have an option to set up the email for both text and HTML.  This allows the service to send the correct version out to recipients.  This will not save you from recipients receiving an HTML email without the images, but it will save you from sending out a HTML email to a recipient whose email service doesn’t accept HTML email messages.  Another approach is to send out a text email that simply includes a link to a HTML version (or a video, web page, etc.). 

So choose your email marketing approach carefully.  We recommend using an email marketing service and of those services, we recommend VerticalResponse because of its cost-effectiveness, ease of use, and its many great features.  If you’d like to give VerticalResponse a try and get 100 free emails to start, click here  Email newsletters from VerticalResponse.

Chris Meyer, Editor

Copyright ©2011 C.D. Meyer, Inc.

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