Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

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Archive for the 'Email Template Design' Category

Should I Use Text or HTML?

by Justin Premick on May 3rd, 2007

HTML says 'Plain Text Can't Do This!' We field a lot of questions from customers about the pros and cons of using HTML in your messages.

Like them, you may not know the major pros and cons of sending a multipart message (Text/HTML) versus sending text-only emails.

There are a lot advocates on both sides of the fence when it comes to Text and HTML.

In my experience everybody tends to focus only on the pros of what they do, and the cons of what they don’t. You rarely get a balanced view.

So… right here, today, let’s size ‘em up:

Text. HTML. Toe to Toe in the Ring.

Somebody get Don King on the line.

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Two Places to Find Graphics for Messages

by Marc Kline on April 19th, 2007

Images provide a great opportunity to break up the text in your message and add a powerful visual component to your copy. In our Intermediate Webinar, Justin and I cover how to insert an image into an HTML message.

It’s easy to do, but where do you get your images from? You can’t just snip them out of a magazine or pull them off of someone’s website, and drawing up your own requires quite a bit of work without a graphic design background.

Read on to explore two ideas on where to get the images for your messages.

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Take Your Campaign Off Auto-Pilot

by Marc Kline on March 29th, 2007

Using an autoresponder service helps to automate a portion of your communications with your prospects, customers, and other contacts. This, in turn, helps to save you time by answering commonly asked questions before they need to be asked.

But before you resign to put the entire campaign on auto-pilot, let’s talk about the benefits of soliciting feedback from your subscribers.

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More on Plain Text: Keys to a Good Header

by Justin Premick on March 22nd, 2007

Recently we went over the case for spending a bit more time on your plain text messages.

Today, let’s talk about how to design them so that you get the best ROI of that extra time spent.

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We’re All Here To Learn

by Justin Premick on March 15th, 2007

When I was in school, particularly in the earlier years of my education, I was a “good” student.

I regarded the teacher as the highest authority on whatever the topic of discussion was. I would question, but I tended to conclude that if the instructor must know what they were talking about… that was why you taught, right? Because you knew.

I’ve long since found out that we learn best by challenging our teachers, something that’s served me well in educational roles here at AWeber and elsewhere. One of our blog readers reminded me of that recently.

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Easy Way to Remind Subscribers of Their Opt-in

by Marc Kline on March 6th, 2007

We’ve posted several articles now on SPAM issues, including those on how to avoid being perceived as a spammer.

Among these, you’ll find blog articles on content filtering, a guide to personal e-mail filters, do’s and don’ts for adding subscribers. You’ll also find some important information in exploring our knowledge base.

These are big, important things to consider. But of course, there are also more subtle, easy to implement things you should do as well. I thought it’d be helpful to chime in with a quick tip.

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Do You Take Full Advantage of HTML Images?

by Justin Premick on January 23rd, 2007

Like many publishers, you may be using images to enhance the effectiveness of your HTML messages.

As we’ve discussed before, one of the drawbacks to using HTML images is that many email clients block images. Of course, there are things that you can do to address image blocking issues.

Today, I want to bring your attention to a little trick with HTML images that can help you to get your message across even when images are blocked.

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Even The Big Guys Make Mistakes

by Justin Premick on January 18th, 2007

Ever Feel Like This? We’ve all done it.

We spend an hour (or longer) carefully crafting an email, reading over copy countless times, and we press “Send.” The message goes out.

And then we see it. A blank subject line. Or maybe the wrong image inserted into the message body. Or the wrong date. Or we sent the message to the wrong subscribers.

And then we start to panic.

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Three Easy Ways to Brand Your Campaigns

by Marc Kline on December 21st, 2006

You know that branding is important when marketing your business with print ads.

Well, it’s just as important for your email campaigns.

Take advantage of the opportunities you have to brand your campaigns with this checklist:

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HTML Emails: How To Use Images Effectively

by Justin Premick on August 14th, 2006

HTML messages offer several advantages to senders:

they can be customized to include colors, formatted text and tables
they enable the sender to track message open rates
they allow the sender to hyperlink words and phrases rather than typing out full URLs

However, many email programs by default block HTML images from being displayed, including the following popular software and web-based email clients:

Microsoft Outlook
Mozilla Thunderbird (unless sender is in Personal Address Book)
AOL (for non whitelisted senders or sender IP’s not on the enhanced whitelist)
Yahoo (for messages that Yahoo’s SpamGuard believes are spam)
Hotmail (for messages in Junk folder)
Gmail

If your messages are image-heavy, image blocking can cause them to look significantly different than the way you envision them. It can also cause your open rates to appear artificially low, since if images are blocked, the image used for open rate tracking is blocked.

What Can You Do?

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