Predictability stems from consistency. The better you plan your email marketing campaign the easier to react to the unexpected. Here is a list of no-brainers and some quite insightful findings:
- Do you have an email template or need to build one? The template must be mobile responsive - do you need additional help with coding?
- Do you have branding guidelines in place? Are changes to the template likely to occur frequently?
- Do you plan some “enhancements” such as background images, custom fonts, conditional formatting, interactive features, performance heavy elements?
- What is the text to image ratio?
- Do you host images internally or externally? Is the external provider reliable?
- What is the size of your images? Did you optimize file size and doubled images for retina screens?
- Do you have well defined roles in the email marketing team? How large is the team and what’s the overall commitment (campaign owner, email sender, designer, coder, data miner, copywriter)?
- Is it Commercial or Transactional campaign?
- What’s the source of data for subscribers? Is it reliable in terms of a status, bounces, and privacy?
Content Creation Best Practices
- Write a compelling subject line
- Consider the rest of your envelope’s content - sender, a snippet of the email’s content
- Design your email for all devices
- Select visually interesting and resonating photos and graphics
- Choose a meaningful color palette, branding-wise
- Communicate in a clear brand voice
- Make call-to-actions (CTA) stand out
- Consider consumer behaviour (whether in the office or on the go, wearables, send-time-optimization…)
- Test for multiple email clients and devices
- Review and optimize plain text version (wearable devices)