MindComet

Do you have a checklist?

Well, if you don’t, then you should. It’s 2010, people. Get into the habit of including a variety of things into every single email you manage. I’ve detailed my own list or “musts” for any email marketing send. Feel free to comment below and add your own!

Social Media / Network links
For any corporation in this new decade, promoting your business with Twitter and Facebook should be standard operating procedure. There should always be a number of various social media links within your emails to extend your brand’s reach.

If you have a small business and you’re just diving into the email marketing realm, make sure you use an ESP that can track your social media links specifically. Reporting and analytics are paramount to running successful campaigns online, so using a service that offers reports on email stats, as well as social media stats is cruical; I could not stress this enough.

Forward to a Friend
ALWAYS always always include a forward to a friend link or button within your email. Any ESP worth using should have a means to track how many times your email was forwarded through the system. The stats should be able to report who your key influencers are as well as how many new subscribers you have collected from your email. It takes little to no effort to incorporate FTF links in your emails, so stop stallin’.

Navigation
If you’re sending a monthly newsletter, for example, make sure your site’s navigation is reflected in your email. If someone’s signed up for your site, chances are they love your brand and visit your site somewhat regularly. The wireframe for the email should reflect the site’s design.

Preheader
The preheader should always consist of at least two things: a whitelist request and a view online link. A whitelist request asks the user to add your from email address to their contact list to make sure they will receive your emails. Easy enough. In addition to the whitelist request, you should also include a link to both an HTML version or a mobile or text version. Again, any ESP worth using should provide you the tools to do this with ease.

The preheader is so important to maximizing your reach and effort with email. If a recipient is blocking all incoming emails’ images, then the preheader is likely to be the only thing they’ll see. It’s the first thing any user sees, so it’s an undeniably important area of your email’s real estate.

Physical Address
In 2008, new CAN-SPAM rules were added to the original act of ‘03. One of the most notable additions has to be the mandatory inclusion of the sender’s physical address. If you don’t have your address present in the email and for some reason you get blacklisted from Spam complaints, you could get nicked and fined quite a bit of money. Save yourself the headache and add your physical address at the footer of the email.

Preference Update
And last but not least is the inclusion of a preferences link. This is hugely important if you want to retain users who initially want to opt out. If they’re receiving too many emails from you, and they see that they can limit getting sends to once a week, they’re more likely to choose that option than completely opting out. I reported on this a few months ago and I’m a big believer in this tactic.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jan. 25, 2010