Branding

Emails should follow any existing company branding to keep the tone and style consistent. They should also reinforce other marketing messages.

Personalising emails

Personalising emails can greatly enhance response rates. By personalising three areas of the email you can double response rates and you can treble them by personalising up to 6 parts of the email. Personalisation doesn't have to stop at the user's name. It can also include gender, age and purchase history etc.

Getting it to fit!

When creating your email, consider the email programme being used to receive the message and how the email will display as this can maximise its impact and success.

Some users have a preview pane that displays the email either at the side of, or underneath, the email list. Make sure that whatever set up the user has, there is no horizontal scrolling and the email can be viewed in full.

You may also need to take into account the resolution set on users' computers, which can affect the display size of the email.

When to send

B2B emails should be sent mid-week. On Mondays they can get stuck in all the spam that arrived in your user's inbox over the weekend . And on Fridays, users can be winding down for the weekend. The best time is during office hours and before lunch.

If your email is B2C then the timing is not so important and emails can be sent on Fridays or later in the day, ready to be opened when people get home in the evenings.

What format should you use?

HTML emails tend to get a higher response rate but can be blocked by some spam filters and firewalls, and some email clients do not support HTML emails. Ask your users which they prefer.

At Granite 5, our software sends a MIME version that utilises both formats and displays the one that is suitable for the email program being used.

Who should the email be sent from?

If you have a strong brand that users will identify with, then you should send using the company name. Otherwise, sending from a person can increase the messages opening rates.

Measure the response

It is crucial to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. This can be done by creating landing pages on your website. Links to these pages are placed in your email. You can then measure how many people use the link to click through to your website. To increase click through rates put the link near the top of page and then again at various intervals through out your message.

The legal bits:

Opt out messages
Make sure you have an opt-out message allowing users to remove their details from your list. It is very important to keep your lists clean so always honour any opt-out requests.

Privacy policy
Always remember that you are dealing with users' personal information and that means you must comply with the Data Protection Act. You should have a privacy policy outlining how this information is used and stored. And this policy should be clearly displayed.

Company details
Following new legislation, which came into force in January 2007, all Limited companies now need to include company details including registration number on all electronic communications.