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Email is still the killer app, no matter what folks, including me, predict about RSS and the like being email’s demise. Using email as a marketing tool is still very effective, it’s just gotten harder to do. (When I talk about email for marketing I am only referring to legitimate, opt-in email that people have asked to receive.)
Email marketing has become increasingly difficult because email inboxes are flooded with lots of legitimate mail and lots of junk so getting your customer or prospect to pay attention to your mail has become more difficult, but that’s really only half the battle.
A growing challenge for emailers are aggressive spam filters (I use them too, but they aren’t perfect) and countless mail readers with special quirks each unto their own, causing your HTML emails to look funny or not render at all. There are lots of great email services out there that can help marketing send great looking HTML email that gets delivered, gets opened and gets tracked. I like iContact, SwiftPage, Vertical Response, Constant Contact and MailChimp just to name few. It’s a bit maddening at times though because they all seem to do one thing or another really well.
All of these services work very hard to understand the spam filters, help fight spam and help you get your mail delivered. MailChimp recently added a very cool feature called the Inbox Inspector. This add-on, fee based, tool allows you to run your proposed email campaign through the actual filters used by the leading ISPs, get very accurate spam scoring and a snapshot of how your email will actually render for AOL, Outlook 7 or a host of other email clients. The service is available whether you send your email through MailChimp or not.
Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at Sep 25, 07 | 8:52 am and is filed under MailChimp, email marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Nice headline. I was expecting an article on how to test your HTML email on different email readers to make sure it looks exactly the way you want it using the right amount of inline CSS and HTML tables.
I normally create the emails in Dreamweaver, and then test it in browsers before sending them out in another actual email test.
Hi John,
And what about the one you use for sending your messages. I mean: aWeber.com
Regards from Spain
Raul Abad
http://www.abadmarketing.com
Billy,
Read to the end of the post and that’s exactly what I did - the service from MailChimp allow you check your emails on different readers to see how it looks.
Raul,
Yes indeed, AWeber is a good one as well.
What’s also interesting about email is that we are now designing emails in text only - a recognition that in certain segments, many users are viewing their emails on PDAs, blackberrys etc… which do not support HTML well.
There is email testing software out there (ASP model) that will predict how your campaign will do against standard metrics against 300+ email clients
Future of email? Txt messaging… some platforms are now offering SMS with email deployment
Your last two posts are exactly in line with what we’re using/doing in our company. Just had a call with MailChimp (AWESOME service) with some serious volume, and we’re testing out Jigsaw as of last week. Great posts!
[...] What do your HTML emails really look like? [...]
My company specializes in email marketing and we have had great success using a service called Habeas which also has rendering for email clients.