The From Line

Too many marketers forget one of the most important elements of their e-mail marketing campaign—the subject line. With spam filters furiously searching for reasons to dump your email in a junk email folder instead of the inbox, your choice of subject line is increasingly important. Consider these tips.

• Strive for accuracy and don’t exaggerate the content just to attract readers.
• Test the subject line with different segments of your group using eLoop’s A/B…Z Split option for campaigns.
• Personalize your subject line and give readers a reason to open it.
• Write the subject line like a headline and read newspapers for some ideas. 
• Associate a deadline to increase a sense of urgency.
• Use a spam filter to check the copy of the subject line too and avoid phrases that will tip them off.

Your e-mail template is another extension of your overall brand. It needs attention to stay fresh and functional.  Follow these tips to improve the visual impact of your email marketing template.

• Avoid background images – images help break up text and direct readers to online resource if they’re used correctly so test the message first. Background images often don’t appear in all email clients. Be sure to host any images you use on a Web site. 
• Image alt tags are your friend – use one or two words to describe what the image is for recipients that have email clients that block images. 
• Use an HTML programmer – “What you see is what you get” programs add extra code that can disrupt your template.
• Choose a horizontal layout over vertical – horizontal layout allows readers to scroll down and see more in a preview panel.
• Honor your brand – your organization has a visual brand represented by your Web site and other promotional materials. Keep your template in line with your brand but remember the reader’s needs.

If it’s been more than a year since you took a good, hard look at your email template, metrics, reports or design close the door, shut off the phone and schedule a check up.  Too often marketers spend time and resources setting up their e-mail marketing programs and forget that they need a little TLC (testing, list management, and cleansing) to function properly. 

Here are five things to include in your check up.  

1. Cleanse the code – review and clean-up the HTML code in your message template. This is especially important if more than one person uses the account. Small changes can flag spam filters and cause formatting issues that discourage recipients from opening it.  
2. Remove inactive contacts – keep distribution lists clean and manageable by analyzing and possibly removing inactive contacts. Try to find out why they’re not reading your message and brainstorm ways to grab their attention.
3. Test the opt-in process – do all the links work and take the intended reader to the right place? If it takes the reader too many clicks to sign up or they end up in the wrong place they’re likely to walk away completely.  
4. Test platforms and email clients – what does the message look like in AOL, Gmail and Yahoo? Does it make it through to mobile devices such as Treos and Blackberries? Don’t rely only on the computers in your office, move testing to off-site computers and servers also. 
5. Provide a little human touch – if you’re using your ESP correctly all process should be automated, but that doesn’t mean mistakes aren’t made. Assign a staff member to check all mailboxes to ensure that any messages or responses are handled in a timely fashion. 
6.  Above all…don’t forget the metrics. eLoop has extensive reporting capabilities that help you gauge the success of the campaign. Don’t forget to incorporate them into the email marketing process. 

Relying on friends and colleagues for references is one of the most effective ways to find new vendors. Whether it’s a new healthcare provider for your family or a marketing consultant for your company, referrals are the backbone of a growing business.

If you use email as the primary form of communication with current clients, adding referral pages can help build distribution lists and expand your client base.

A referral page is used to entice readers to recommend or refer friends and colleagues to your products or services. They’re useful because potential leads receive the referral email from a trusted source increasing the likelihood that they’ll open the message and read the content. Referral pages differ from the “forward to a friend” feature available in many email marketing systems because they capture data and automatically add the new contact to a database of active contacts. 

Referral pages are easy to incorporate into your email campaigns by adding a link in the body of the message that allows users to invite others to visit your Web site and sign up to receive your regular communications. The process is completely CAN SPAM compliant since it requires the “friend” to confirm their opt-in.  

eLoop has a wizard to walk you through the process of creating a referral page under the Data Collection section. However, you need to do a little work before starting.  

• Create the email message new recipients will receive when a colleague chooses to refer them to your company.  You create it the same way you create other emails in the Outbound Messaging section.  The referral message is what new recipients will receive so you should brand it to the look and feel of your other email communication.  The body of the message should include who referred them and why.  
• The person who referred the new recipient will also receive a thank you message.  Set this up in the Outbound Messaging module before you start the wizard to create the referral page.  

Once you have created the referral and thank you messages, mouse over Data Collection, select referral pages, and follow the wizard. Be sure to test your message before sending it out to ensure the referral page is active.  Here are some other tips:

• If you don’t have a custom template in your eLoop system, select the Gold Lasso “default” template.
• In step five of the wizard you can select how many referrals each recipient can send by using the drop-down menu. 
• Be sure to create any questions you want to include on the referral page, such as email address, name, company, title, etc, before you start the wizard so you can add them in step six.
• In the final step of the wizard, be sure to enter the status of the page. If you want to test it, it needs to be “active.”

I'm officially declaring that the Forward to a Friend feature email service providers include in their application as the most stupid thing ever created.  Yes, we at Gold Lasso are just as stupid for including it in eLoop.  The simple fact is that since 100% of the most common used email clients have a forward email feature people use that instead.  The Forward to a Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by email service providers to incorporate "viral" marketing tools into their applications.  We tried to reinvent the wheel and we failed.  The only thing we email service providers can do to save face is to hope that our Forward to a Friend feature reminds people to use their forward button.