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1. Make Sure That Your Email Has Many Obvious Links

 The purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your landing page, product page or website. It’s really that simple to define the main purpose of an email. Without driving clicks to your page or website, users can’t convert to sign-ups or customers. They key to accomplishing this is, quite simply, capitalize on every moment where a user may feel compelled to click. Include lots of links (at least one per paragraph of text) and make sure that your links look like links. Using strong calls to action and even authoritative “click here” messaging will also help you.

 

2. Minimize Your Use of Images

We’ve covered this in great detail in a previous article, but always keep in mind that an email is not a print mail piece. Many (if not most) of your recipients will not see the images included in your email, which means that every image you include can be wasted space. Use well-coded html instead of image heavy design. Never send an email that is simply one big image and certainly don’t put any messaging in an image that a user must see to complete the action you want from an email (i.e. “click here” or “order now” messages).

 

3. Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

It may seem counter intuitive to make it easy for a user to leave your mailing list, but the other option is much less appealing. When users get frustrated while trying to figure out how to remove their email from your list, they eventually just start to flag your email as spam. Every user who notes your email as being spam counts against your sender reputation with email providers and makes it harder (and sometimes impossible) to get your email into the inbox instead of the junk folder.

4. Follow Spam Tips From the Beginning and EVERY Time That You Send Email!

We’ve also covered in detail the best ways to avoid getting flagged as spam and removed from your users’ inboxes, but we can’t emphasize enough how important it is to follow those steps. More importantly, it’s important to follow them from the beginning of your email marketing effort and to follow them every single time you send. We know that it’s tempting to send a harder sales email that trends against some of our advice for staying out of the spam folder, but it only takes one email that looks like its high spam to keep you out of the inbox for weeks, months or years afterwards.

 

5. Maximize Your Email Template Dimensions

You don’t have a lot of space in a person’s inbox to convey a message, and most of your users will be viewing your email in a preview pane with the images turned off. Make sure that your html email template isn’t more than 600 pixels wide and that you clearly get your value proposition and at least one link into the first 100 pixels of height. It won’t look as nice as putting a shiny header graphic up there, but it will yield better results. Also, consider a secondary column on the right or left hand side in order to get more information above the fold of an email preview pane!

View Comm100 Blog for the full article

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