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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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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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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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 and 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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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.

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.

We’ve all done it.

We spend an hour (or longer) carefully crafting an email, reading
over it countless times, and we hit “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.

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:

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:

Often times when working with customers on their message campaigns, I notice they are including only HTML versions of their messages to their subscribers, with no plain text version. I politely bite my lip while I work with them on whatever issue they’ve called in for, then in an attempt to be as helpful as I can, I point a few things out to them about this…