HTML EMAIL REAPS REWARDS FOR YOUR VENTURE
A strategy employing e-mail marketing can reap rewards for your venture. E-mail marketing works, even with the proliferation of spam.
There are a plethora of email programs
that design, publish, share, track, manage, integrate, etc. rich-text
HTML email campaigns. I recommend taking a good look at Mail Chimp.
Rates today are $10/mo up to 500 addresses. Mail as often as you like and it is way cheaper than direct mail through the USPS (even though the
independently contracted USPS sorely needs our print communication
business).
Most web developers offer proprietary
email and email-tracking programs but in today’s wild-west-web
environment there are two reasons it is best to use a commercial email
program: spam and CSS.
Spam
Ever hear of opt-in and double opt-in
lists? You will when you delve into the new world of list generation,
i.e. the laborious process of collecting names to build an email list.
Basically, you have to ask a potential recipient to “opt-in” or give
permission to email to them. And even beyond that commercial email
programs highly recommend to ask twice or “double opt-in.” Stop
whimpering.
The whole rationale behind this exercise
is to prevent someone from flagging your email as spam. If more than 1%
(yes, that’s one out of a hundred) reports spam your Internet Service
Provider (ISP) may block your email server. Penal? Yes, but that is how
it rolls now. Read the CAN-SPAM Act, http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
. You may want to risk sending to non-compliant lists for your own
endeavor but you have to seriously ask yourself if you would put a client in that
potentially risky position.
CSS
Browser based email services like Google
Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, and Hotmail strip out Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
and render that beautifully designed HTML email into garbage. The
frustrated web designer, reduced to a quivering mass by this time, has
to go through each line of code and hand insert inline code. Here is a
more techy explanation:
Wonder why the HTML based email sent out
by your PHP script will NOT display properly? Browser based email
services will strip all the CSS that is included in between the
(style)content goes here(/style) tag pair or the external style
sheet such as (link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”
href=”http://mycss.com/my.css” /).
In order to make your HTML or web-based email to properly display, you must use inline CSS, inside the HTML element , such as
(div style=”font-size:8pt;padding:2px;margin:2px;”)content goes here(/div)
or
(span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 25px; COLOR: rgb(255,255,255); FONT-SIZE: 12px")content goes here(/span)
Looking forward to hours of hand coding? You don't have to. Don’t wimp out now, you can do it. Just go to Mail Chimp or Constant Contact or Cooler Email and let them do the heavy lifting.
Making email work for you―who really does come to your site
Web site owners bemoan the fact they do
not know who specifically looks at their site. Now you can at least find
out exactly who is opening your email campaign. Email programs track
who opens your email, where they click through to and then what
links they respond to. So data includes not only who but how many they opened, etc. With the list of respondents you can develop a list of addresses to email back to.
Why is collecting all this data so cool?
You know who is specifically interested and you can respond to these
people. Now you are way beyond a cold call. Make that new email offer
more narrowly tailored to exactly what they are interested in and go for
it. You can even add attachments to an email―like an iron-clad
contract.
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