There’s no point sending out an e-Newsletter if you don’t make it past a preview pane. Design your e-Newsletter to be read.
Are clients reading your first sentence and then hitting delete?
The preview pane is fast becoming the default option for email clients and unless your e-Newsletter is optimised for this feature many of your clients will either delete or ignore your e-Newsletter. Many clients also routinely block images.
What does this mean for you? To get noticed you must redesign your e-Newsletters to reflect that the most important area in an email is the top few lines which is the only area visible in both horizontal panes – the most widely used previews.
The preview pane is just a teaser area to grab the readers' attention and ensure that they either scroll or click to stories or fully open the email. Move all the interesting info to the top of the email.
Because horizontal panes are the most popular you should redesign your email templates with a horizontal layout for both content and advertisements with content organized in sections that are wider than they are deep.
Avoid use of white or light text links with a dark background. Some email clients will override your link style colour with the default blue underline link style, thus making it difficult to see the links. Also study your click-tracking reports to see where readers are clicking most often - these are the links that need to be highest in your future e-Newsletters.
Many readers automatically glance at the "From/Sender" name so choose a short, trusted and simple name.
Is your e-Newsletter being incorrectly marked as spam?
Spam is a problem for all and many ISPs are now adopting authentication standards such as Microsoft's Sender ID and Yahoo DomainKeys to filter emails. These provide a way to verify that an email server is authorised to send email for the sender's domain. If you do not comply with these standards then your mail may also not get through or your images and links may not display properly.
It is therefore important for you to use these authentication standards. If widely used Internet Service Providers won't let your email through because of authentication systems then your whole email marketing campaign may be wasted.
To ensure that your messages be relevant and timely to the consumer it’s possible to use dynamic content to personalise each message to each subscriber, and triggered messaging, which automatically sends messages based on time and user action and/or inactions, allowing marketers to tailor each message specifically to each member so that the messages are wanted and expected.
A good Email Service Provider can help you with all this. We, at Datasearch have been addressing these problems for years and have many satisfied clients using our e-Newsletter programs for their email marketing campaigns.