Free of charge: A Field Guide to Email Marketing
Unformated preview of the document: 'A Field Guide to Email Marketing' (Part 12):
do the typical browser-based email stuff, like stripping your BODY and
HEAD tags.
Yahoo!Mail Beta
A much richer browser interface, with a preview pane. So far, support for
HTML email looks great.
Hotmail
Similar issues as Yahoo!Mail, where BODY and HEAD tags are stripped, so
background colors and embedded CSS are lost. At one time, Hotmail was
"expiring" hyperlinks in emails that were open for five minutes or longer.
Gmail
Extremely aggressive spam filters. And very, very little CSS support. It
strips embedded CSS, (even if you keep the CSS out of the <HEAD>
tag). It also strips every "class" code that it finds (such as in <span
class="header">). To get CSS to work in Gmail, you'll need to use inline
styles. Otherwise, your fonts will default to Arial, colored black, and about
13 pixels in size. If your fonts don't adhere to their CSS rules, check to
see if they end up blowing out your tables cells, or wrapping in weird ways.
Tips
1. Check Different ISPs, too.
If possible, check your emails when they're sent through different ISPs.
Different email servers will alter your messages before they even get to the
recipient's email application. For instance, some ISPs use email servers
that will strip any content below a line in your email that starts with a period
(we know, weird). We've been surprised at how differently email looks
when checked in Outlook 2003, but received through Comcast, Bellsouth
and Earthlink.
2. Send tests to friends and co-workers.
If you can't set up a few test computers, keep your designs really simple,
and send each campaign to a few friends or colleagues. Just ask them to
let you know if anything looks funny or broken.
3. Or just use MailChimp's Inbox Inspector.
If you choose to set up your own test machine, and all those test accounts
with the different ISPs, you could easily spend a couple grand. If you
also want to check your campaigns against the big server firewalls (like
IronPort, MessageLabs, and Postini), it'll cost you several thousand dollars
just to get started. If you've got the money, go for it. But who has the time
to maintain all that stuff?
You can save yourself a ton of time and money by using our Inbox Inspector.
We'll generate detailed screenshots of your campaign in all the major
email programs, and we'll tell you if spam filters are likely to block your
campaign, as well as what you need to change if you want to get through.
It costs less than what you'd charge for one hour of your time.
14
Email Marketing Basics And
Best Practices
If you're new to email marketing, we should go over some basic principles
before you start sending campaigns. We'll talk about best practices, legal
issues, and how to measure your overall performance.
What is spam?
If you get an unsolicited email from someone you don't know, is that
spam? Not necessarily. If you get an email that was obviously sent to a
whole list of people, is that spam? Not necessarily. So what's spam?
Spam is when you send an unsolicited email to a whole list of people.
Let's say you just bought a list of email addresses from some local business
organization. These are great prospects for your business, right? You
want to send them an email with a relevant offer they can't refuse. It's
spam if you upload that list into MailChimp (or any other email service
provider) and send that list an unsolicited email. It's not spam if you take
that list and write personal, one-to-one emails to each recipient, and the
content is unique for each recipient. If your immediate reaction is, "but
what if..." stop now, because you'll probably get yourself reported for
spamming. You simply cannot send unsolicited email to a list of people
you don't know.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
The United States federal CAN-SPAM Act became law on January 1,
2004. According to their website, the FTC says that if you violate the law,
you could be fined $11,000 for each offense (multiply $11,000 times
the number of people on your recipient list). ISPs around the country have
already successfully sued spammers for millions and millions of dollars
under this law.
We can't give you much legal advice, but if you send commercial email,
you should read through the CAN- SPAM Act of 2003 and understand the
rules. If you
Unformated preview of the document: 'A Field Guide to Email Marketing': Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19