Ten steps to make an effective e-mail message

Here you will find the ten most important steps to consider when drafting HTML email messages.

Enter the focal contents of your message in the space between 7 centimeters in height and 600 pixels in width

For recipients who are equipped with email programs that contain a preview panel, or who simply need to click on the subject to open the message, the situation remains absolutely unchanged.

Therefore, regardless of the email software used to receive your messages, these must have the main content inserted with a maximum size of 600 pixels x 7 centimeters, in order to give the reader an immediate overall and synthetic view of the entire message, for ensure that he is later motivated to read the entire message.

Therefore the summary of the contents, your sales proposition, your call to action and any information suitable to attract the navigator to read the entire content, must be inserted in that space.

Consequently, avoid using graphics that are too heavy both in terms of pixels and in terms of displayed size.

In fact, in the first case you would run the risk that your logo or what is described in the inserted image are not loaded by the recipient's program, while in the second you would give less space to the contents which must already appear in the preview panel or when opening the message .

Make your text links look like links

If you want to get the highest click-through rate, format your links so that they stand out as such within your message.

Usually the links should be underlined and colored electric blue and in wide format.

However, if your graphics prevent you from using the color blue, always remember to use underlining.

Never use graphical links in messages, such as buttons or similar objects, but if you feel the need to insert them, make sure that there is always a text link nearby.

Limit the use of images to the bare minimum.

Certainly images can strike the recipient and make him feel the importance of your brand and make your offers and promotions more attractive.

However, remember that most email programs are by default set so as not to load or display images.

And therefore visualization often implies a prior positive action on the part of the recipient.

If you insert too many images or if you make the few you have inserted too large and invasive, know that most of your recipients will see blank space instead of the images themselves.

It is true that some of the recipients will be able to view the images, but do not base the sale of your product and/or service and your advertising messages only on them.

Therefore I advise you to format your message in html so that your every important message is not trapped in an image.

Then also use alternative text (ALT) and a text title within the image tag to ensure that your main clauses appear even when the images are not loaded.

Include as little text as possible in terms of sales pitches and promotional content in the message

Typically an email message contains sales pitches and descriptive text content.

All this can be considered as the heart of any promotional message.

So don't create texts that are too long

In fact, you ran the risk of being placed in the recipient's spam box, or even being blocked by the recipient's server, because your contents exceeded the heuristic percentages of spam messages attributed to certain words (such as free, buy, etc. .).

So avoid boring the recipient with overly long texts

Therefore shorten the content to the bare minimum and use links that refer to the complete article, or to your product page, inserted on your website.

Make sure you respect the privacy policy

Include your email address in the message so that subscribers to your list can unsubscribe with a single mouse click or by replying to your message, and make sure that your message clearly shows that it is an advertising and promotional message, therefore commercial.

Make cancellation easy.

With any professional autoresponder software you can make the unsubscribe system ultra easy because it will only really be enough to click once on the link contained in the message, while with systems relating to external e-mail marketing services, this is practically impossible, and therefore you need to click at least 2 times.

While this may seem against your best interests, if you make it difficult for users to find an easy way to unsubscribe from your list you run the risk of your messages being marked as spam.

This can damage your reputation and the admissibility of your messages and block your online activity.

Therefore, and I will never tire of repeating this, make the system for unsubscribing easy and simple for subscribers so that they don't include you in spam.

In this regard, avoid inserting too much empty space between the body of the message and the cancellation link, because you would always get that negative effect by giving the impression of wanting to make cancellation difficult.

Personalize the subject and body of the message with the recipient's name

Your email message will be more effective if you personalize the subject and body of the message with the recipient's name.

Obviously remember not to insert this name further into the body, only once is enough.

There is an exception to this rule: that is, when the sector in which you operate has a target made up of users who, for privacy reasons, prefer not to see their name displayed in the subject and body of the message.

When you need to personalize the subject and body with the recipient's name, professional software can help you.

Avoid using internal style sheets and use style sheets external to the message (CSS)

Your message, governed by internal style sheets, may not be well interpreted by the email programs of the major internet service providers.

There are some ISPs, such as Gmail, which completely exclude the internal style sheet of the message, both from the head tag and from the body.

Therefore always make use of style sheets external to the message because you will be able to facilitate the correct display of the message by the recipient, because it will appear in a more orderly way, compared to a message from which the CSS style has been excluded.

You could possibly make use of the font and p tags within the message to easily create better message formatting, but without great demands.

Limit the use of words considered spam to the bare minimum

It is quite difficult to avoid using words that activate anti-spam devices.

So pay attention to your content because recipients' email programs check your messages for words that are considered spam and to which they assign a specific score.

When the sum of the scores for each word exceeds a specific limit, your message could be blocked both by the recipient's server and by the latter's email software.

To overcome this inconvenience, only professional autoresponder software contains a particular function that allows you to immediately see the spam score you have achieved.

But not only because with that software you will be able to find the words in your messages that have reached that total.

Always test the results of your messages

It is really important to verify the effectiveness of your efforts, test the results of your messages and normally you could do tests by changing only one element at a time, starting from the object and then moving on to other elements, such as graphics, etc.

But to proceed, obtaining certain results, divide your main list into several parts and send the various versions of your messages to each of them.

This way you can verify that the formatting you choose for your message is displayed correctly by different email service providers.

Furthermore, you will be able to examine the subject of the message and the graphics that are more attractive and convincing and ensure that your messages reach the right recipient's inbox, rather than the spam one.

The changes you make will allow you to choose for all the messages the optimization of the message that brought you the best results for that small group of recipients.

E-mail marketing is essential for your business

E-mail marketing is essential for your company, whatever is the structure and the subject.

In general, using e-mail marketing in the form of follow-up marketing campaigns and sending newsletters is necessary to increase your online business, finding new customers and retaining those already acquired.

Regarding the scope of acquired customers, a problem may arise arising from the privacy law.

So to set up an email marketing campaign with your customers you need to delve into the following aspect.

First of all, please note that in Italy, as in the countries that join the European Union, the purchase of your product and/or service presupposes the implicit consent of your new customer to receive promotional messages for further offers for others products and/or services, as long as the products subject to future promotions are similar to the product initially sold (in Anglo-Saxon speaking countries and the United States a rule applies that excludes such a need).

If you have ever noticed, in the past, before the issuing of the European GDPR, on every sales page of a classic Italian e-commerce site you could find a box and the words "Select the box to receive any future promotional messages" .

Currently, based on the European GDPR, this box is no longer necessary to obtain consent to receive emails with content relating to offers of products similar to those previously sold.

This box is only necessary when it comes to subscribing to newsletters or automatic follow-ups, since it is always necessary to ask for consent to the sending of future commercial promotions, if users are primarily asked to give their address and -email, as in a form or registration form, in exchange for a gift, bonus, discount, etc.

Therefore, if you already have a large database of customers acquired with a first purchase, on the one hand you will be able to use it 100% to promote further supplies to your customers via email, on the other it is a precious reserve for obtaining new sales with your email marketing campaigns to try to retain your customers.

However, you will have to make your mailings with a grain of salt!

Why'?

Simple, you could also be accused of spamming, with all the negative consequences that could derive from it, if you don't get in touch, via email, within a certain deadline, or at least by telephone, because the new customer could very well forget about you and your your company.

If, however, you also have a second group of customers who have known you for a long time and trust you, you will be able to carry out your promotional email marketing campaigns without problems, trying to maximize your sales.

In addition to being an easy-to-use tool and a rather economical means, e-mail marketing has the advantage of giving you an immediate response from the market, unlike all other standard advertising channels, for which considerable investments are required and whose effectiveness is measurable in relatively longer times.

In fact, the results of your email marketing campaigns are quickly measurable.

This will allow you, equally immediately, to make any changes to the settings, form and contents of your messages, to verify which ones obtain the best results and to set up your new campaigns, significantly improving the performance of your business online.

Generally we talk about e-mail marketing as Direct Response Marketing (DRM) or immediate response marketing, precisely to indicate the immediate measurability of the results obtainable by the target market.

Furthermore, you will be able to segment the target of your messages based on the specific needs of the recipients, something that advertising messages on billboards, newspapers, radio and television, apart from the costs involved, cannot do, or rather, they can also obtain successful results. a certain importance, but in the face of huge investments, and to monitor its effectiveness it will be necessary to proceed with the creation of equally expensive opinion polls or market surveys.

Not to mention the costs of paper mailing and telemarketing, which have fewer and fewer results and more and more limitations due to privacy, which are legally sanctioned, the same as those of email marketing, but with the difference that in the latter case the Email sending and sales processes, in addition to having almost no cost, can be 100% automated!

If we then move on to talking about an attempted sale with the help of a team of agents or representatives, representation is currently no longer as profitable as it once was.

In fact, a major transformation has occurred in the market: from distributive sales, once the main driver of a company's development, carried out through a network of representative agents, which today, with lower costs, is also carried out by shopping centres, has moved on to selling increasingly personalized and less generic products.

Obviously I am talking about the business to business or B2B sales sector, while in business to consumer sales opposite considerations apply regarding the generic nature and customization of the products.

Therefore everything that needs to be personalized can still be sold with personal contact, created by a network of agents, while for the rest you will also have to opt for online sales and this in competition with the same shopping centers or wholesale.

But not only that, because attempted sales with personal contact are no longer as profitable as they were a few decades ago, also because nowadays company targets no longer have the time they once could dedicate to sellers' visits.

Companies, pressured by the necessary reduction of staff, by having to chase after their customers and production needs, will purchase the essential tools for their business on the basis of schemes that are now based on price, with equal quality, rather than on the skill of the seller, making the representation activity less and less requested and less and less profitable.

Furthermore, the area of ​​product sectors where the person of the seller still has a certain importance and influence is increasingly narrowing towards specialized technical profiles, in which the seller must be an expert in the subject, who knows how to provide a quick solution to the problem , in this panorama where we run more and more to survive rather than to earn.

Therefore, companies will increasingly go online to look for the best offer, with the consequence that representation will be increasingly reduced to a mere collection of orders, following an already pre-arranged contact, perhaps obtained by telephone or also via the internet and/or e-mail.

Moreover, it is now known that most companies, when making telephone contact, ask you to send a presentation of the company and the specific product via e-mail, and then conclude that, if interested, they will contact you.

To avoid the impasse it is necessary to first create a website that meets certain attractive criteria and the contents of e-mail messages that are truly focused on the problem to be solved and that are concise and decisive.

Naturally it is necessary to exponentially increase the contact options and the number of contacts, that is, you need to shoot into the crowd by widening the range of pellets.

In short, any business selling to companies will have to set up its own marketing plan, integrating it with web promotion and email.

And if the very nature of the product and/or service does not directly allow purchase and delivery with the order form inserted online, it will still be possible, via the web and with email messages, to provide the necessary information and guarantees , creating the conditions for an offer request, perhaps brought personally to your target.

From another point of view relating to products not advertised with advertising or sales networks, another signal that pushes the creation of online businesses supported by e-mail marketing is that of the huge demand for products that must satisfy needs and pre-existing compelling desires, precisely because internet research normally has as its object products and/or services that fulfill the function of satisfying needs whose necessity has already been verified.

In fact, it would make no sense to try to sell something new online that no one is looking for, because it would be a totally unsuccessful activity (unless you have the necessary capital to face a particularly expensive market survey and in case positive, you can invest in a massive use of standard advertising, or you can equip yourself with a sales network entrusted to representatives).

Indeed, everything that is new, and that at the same time is advertised in the mass media, with considerable investments, can also be sold online, but with other types of strategies that base their support directly on the websites that operate through electronic commerce, as, for example, happens for consumer goods such as clothing, food, smartphones, computers, etc., i.e. the business to consumer or B2C sector, where the e-mail marketing used follows completely different from those that you will be able to delve into and that I will take care of in this blog.

Don't undermine your e-mail marketing campaigns

In this blog I am showing you some email marketing techniques and strategies useful for professionals, small and medium-sized companies, which do not have significant capital to invest in surveys and market research and in expensive advertising, but which at the same time are effective because ' they can give you immediate and measurable results, with a small investment and without major risks.

But if you really want to have these results you must absolutely forget:

To spam, even if only with companies and not with private individuals!

If you believe that it is legitimate to send unauthorized emails to the whole world targeted with your product, and this only because you receive an unsolicited message from you every 30 seconds... then it means that you have understood nothing!

I'll give you an example: imagine you receive a visit from a representative who wants to sell you a supply that you may also need.

The salesman is 'nice, for goodness', he also seems prepared, but every time he comes to visit you, he knocks on your office door, instead of waiting for someone to tell him that you have freed yourself and that you are waiting for him!

Certainly a representative like this will never do a lot of business and will only cause annoyance: know that by sending unauthorized messages you make the same impression... you only have to lose... and in addition to not concluding good deals, you risk being reported to the Privacy Guarantor, with the resulting bad publicity, and end up on blacklists, or even be blocked by ISPs, including your own internet service provider, and you will gain a very bad reputation, so you will be forced to close up shop, because on the internet negative opinions travel at the speed of light!

Furthermore, unauthorized emails, in addition to being prohibited by law, are annoying and create economic problems due to investments in antivirus and the time that must be wasted distinguishing them from legitimate messages.

But there's more: in fact, consider that not all legitimate messages can be interesting... many will end up in the trash... if not in the spam box of the end user and/or that of the ISP (Internet Service Provider). (and you will have to apply very specific strategies, which you will find in the Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up, to prevent all this from happening)... let alone unsolicited or unauthorized messages or messages without consent!

But don't be discouraged, because there are more remedies so that you can send emails to companies, without having had prior written consent, to ensure that you do not have to suffer negative legal consequences.

We will talk about it soon at this point.

To use external email marketing services that send your messages to their contact database!

In addition to having no control over their lists, you will only be able to conclude a few meager deals... you will also be able to sell... but it's a long way from here to saying you can achieve success with services of this kind.

You may also receive complaint messages about spam, because often in the contract clauses there is a note according to which these external services do not give any guarantee and do not assume any responsibility for any actions for spam by the guarantor, considering that the messages sent contain your company logo and not theirs.

Also consider that once the message has been created, you will not be able to modify it, making any split testing strategy difficult and/or more expensive to verify the message that gives the best results.

It will therefore be impossible to create a good number of loyal customers, which is the main purpose of any production and sales activity.

To use external email marketing services that provide you with a database of names and addresses that you will contact via email!

You may encounter two types, without the price giving you any signal regarding professionalism.

For a first type, very professional and serious, you will be guaranteed the existence of the recipient's consent to be part of that database and at the same time to receive your messages, but by contract you will not be able to use the purchased contacts to send them promotional emails, with hyperbolic phrases or with references to discounts and prices.

You will only be able to send descriptive contents of your business, your site, and what you sell, forcing you to carry out promotional campaigns only on your website, perhaps being able to obtain a small turnover, but only in the long term and without being able to enjoy the results immediate results that only promotional email campaigns can give you, after testing their effectiveness in terms of message openings and conversions.

It's money wasted because even in this case it's difficult to create a large group of loyal customers, certainly not impossible, but it takes a long time... and if you have to make revenue in the short term... forget it.

There is another type of external service that does not require the same conditions, perhaps they are a little more flexible, but believe me you even run the risk of being reported for spam, because they do not give you any guarantee on the actual correspondence between consent and membership in the purchased database and consent to receiving your emails with promotional content!

In each of these types of contacts, the best solution is to obtain their consent to send promotional emails with a specific telemarketing strategy, in order to verify the contact person to send the message to and their email address, received with the purchased database.

It is certainly not a quick system like the one you could create based on a series of contacts to immediately send promotional messages, but it is certainly better than sending generic messages to get to know your company.

To use external non-professional email marketing services to send your messages to your database, created with effort, because:

You have no control over the mailings.

As there are new members, these services impose ever-increasing monthly costs on you.

If you already have a list created with another software you cannot import it into the service software if it was not created with double opt-in.

You can only manage subscriptions with double opt-in.

You could run into sending queues, which without any warning would postpone your sendings to an unknown date!

If one day you want to change your system, you risk losing some of your contacts!

Of course, if you have the necessary capital, these services can be very professional and allow you to save time and money instead of purchasing a server where you can install self-hosted autoresponder software.

The non-professional services can be used by those who are new to the internet, have a small list and do not want to make any significant investments on the web, being able to spend no more than 100 euros per year, including these services, domain name and web space.

There are also some external professional e-mail marketing services, which within certain limits, in terms of number of recipients, allow them to be free, as long as they accept that their target may receive advertising messages within the contents of the e-mails. email.

Naturally you understand that this solution, although economically convenient, is not in terms of professionalism in the eyes of your recipients, who may misunderstand or not understand the reasons why you may have inserted messages that are not very useful as they are not coherent with your editorial line or with the object of your business.

It is obvious that when the business grows it will be better to change the system, but with the necessary precautions so as not to lose the data already acquired.

External professional email marketing services are very attractive for companies of a certain size because they allow significant savings, they must be structured and designed to be used for Italy, therefore by third-party Italian companies.

Professional external services are also recommended for professionals, small and medium-sized companies, since on the one hand the standard services, which are mainly foreign, do not offer, despite having increasing costs based on the increase in members, an excellent service in every respect of view, while professional external services, despite having rather high management costs, guarantee notable results in terms of contacts and customers and therefore can be supported by all types of companies and freelancers.

To use autoresponder software from the self hosted category because:

You can now realize that the costs of external e-mail marketing services are almost similar to those you could sustain in the context of self-hosted autoresponder software.

The most obvious difference is that on the one hand you will no longer have to waste time installing software on your potential server and consulting and/or requesting assistance from the hosting service provider.

You will no longer have problems because you will have services available that will allow you to avoid the risk of having to deal with incompetent technical assistance, as often happened to me with HostGator.

In fact, I calculated exactly that in a year, what I spent was double the actual yield, due to the incompetence and the spasmodic and prolonged waits for days in search of an effective solution for the problems that the servers granted by HostGator they provoked me.

Not to mention the abusive and undue payment requests sent to my bank, and the money stolen for services no longer used.

HostGator is no longer the one that 8 years ago guaranteed a solution to your problem within an hour.

Now his assistants, with the excuse of turning to someone more competent than them to get the desired solution, do nothing but put you on hold, and at the same time dedicate their attention to problems that perhaps they know better and can highlight their competence in the eyes of their supervisors.

But not only that, because they still have to get in touch with 3 or 4 requests for assistance at the same time.

What's their little game?

Very simple, instead of ensnaring the customer with spasmodic waits before someone responds to the requests, they currently prefer, as a marketing strategy, to respond immediately, giving you the sugar, and then making you wait dozens and dozens of minutes, with the excuse that they have to consult with someone more competent.

The real problem is that HostGator is no longer the independent company created almost 15 years ago, but is part of a group owned by an investment company, Endurance International Group, which also owns others well-known hosting provider brands, such as BlueHost.

How to notice this?

It is sufficient to enter the support chat interface to verify that it is always the same interface, with the exact same typing problems, common to all the companies that are part of that group.

Certainly if I were American I would have sent a summons to court demanding damages.

But being almost 10,000 kilometers away they account for the lion's share.

For my part, I am also pushing to damage them as much as possible with my negative word of mouth.

But it's not just the costs and time losses of managing the server and installing the autoresponder software.

Even owners of autoresponder software have now doubled the costs of the license and annual updates.

There are even those who, like arpReach, produced in Great Britain, make you pay the famous tax on replacing the domain name, no longer used, with a new domain name, a tax which amounts to as much as 35 dollars.

Just think about the fact that, having had the possibility from the old owner to grant nine domain names, unlike the current owner of arpReach, who only grants two, one day I decided to change just one of these two domain names, they asked me for 315 dollars, because for them I no longer had space to install new domains in their database, considering that with my old 9 domain names I would have exhausted that space.

Naturally, in order not to succumb to such blackmail, I closed with them forever and changed platform, moving from WordPress to Blogger, therefore with zero costs on everything!

It's a shame that arpReach will suffer the costs of ferocious negative word of mouth, a natural consequence that those who reveal themselves to be greedy for money on the internet suffer, and who at the same time act by blackmailing others, in order to have undeserved economic advantages.

Your e-mail messages deliverability

Today I'm talking about the causes that can harm the admissibility of your messages

It can be said that there are at least three destinations for your email messages.

The first is the recipient's email inbox, and this should be the normal hypothesis, when everything goes well, but this is not always the case.

The other destination is the spam inbox, and this can give rise to problems in the sense that you cannot always and continuously force recipients to check the ever-changing rules adopted by email marketing services.

The rest of the messages are lost, no one knows how or where, in cyber space due to the fluidity of electronic communications.

And this is confirmed by recent statistics which have ascertained that at least 16 % of e-mail messages are lost, in the sense that if they are not on the server, if they have not reached the recipient's inbox, if they are not in their spam box and if it hasn't been returned to the sender, it must have gone somewhere, but we don't know where...

Other reasons that can invalidate an e-mail marketing campaign are messages rejected by the sender due to hard or soft bounces, for reasons such as causes related to malfunctions of the IP number, insertion of incorrect URLs in the message, blocks due to body and text contents. the subject of the message that cause software to react, such as, for example, Spam Assassin, or sending to non-existent addresses.

The first thing you need to check for the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns is to examine the average number of emails arriving at their destination or deliverability, an English term that has no direct Italian equivalent.

Once we have finally understood what deliverability is, another topic to explore is that the messages sent do not automatically go to the spam box, but that they go directly to the recipient's email inbox.

There are many tools that can help you increase the deliverability of your messages in recipients' inboxes and test whether this actually happens.

First make sure your sending server settings are correct, for example, by setting your SPF record.

Here's how Google clarifies the need to create an SPF record

We recommend that you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain.

An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies mail servers authorized to send email on behalf of your domain.

The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with spoofed sender addresses to your domain.

Recipients can refer to your SPF record to determine whether a message that appears to come from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.

For example, let's say your example.com domain uses Gmail. You can create an SPF record that identifies Google Apps mail servers as authorized mail servers for your domain.

When a recipient's mail server receives a message from user@example.com, it can check the SPF record for example.com to determine whether it is a valid message.

If the message comes from a server other than the Google Apps mail servers listed in the SPF record, the recipient's mail server may consider it spam and therefore reject it.

If your domain doesn't have an SPF record, some recipient domains may reject messages from your users because they can't confirm that the messages came from an authorized mail server.

Ends report from Google

Continuing on the subject of the discussion, it could happen that you are using a third-party email marketing service (such as periodic fee service providers).

However, in the latter case you have very specific limits on the amount of data you can have access to and it can be said that you have no control over the settings to be able to increase your deliverability.

Secondly you should do some testing with Spam Assassin or similar programs.

Consider first of all that the heuristic criteria for scanning the terms used in the subject or body of a message, for the purposes of attributing the spam score, vary depending on the algorithms used by each program that operates as Spam Assassin, so you cannot have the certainty that, if a message meets the score given by that software, the same message can be considered similarly by other software.

At most you will be able to set a default estimate, compared to the Spam Assassin criteria, to have at least a minimum of peace of mind regarding your deliverability and not suffer a complete block in relation to the contents of your message, even if it could happen eventually that the message may end up in the recipient's spam box.

You will have to check your IP number, and verify that it has not ended up on any blacklist.

Naturally, if you use a third-party email service, you will not be able to test all the IPs used, but you will certainly be able to send a test email message to yourself and verify the IP number actually used, obtaining it from the information relating to the message itself.

You will also need to check that the URLs inserted in the body of the message are not on a black list.

If all these conditions are met, you will be able to effectively isolate the problem of your deliverability in the context of your message and your marketing.

So at this point you can consider other tools to test any obstacles to deliverability.

Therefore, make sure that you are taking effective action to remove the causes of complaints from your members.

Subscribers who click the “I consider this a spammer” button, or similar terms, in their email programs have clearly indicated to you that they do not want your messages, and you should remove them immediately.

You must be very thorough and clear about what your subscriber will receive once they send you their name and email address.

At all costs, do not believe that you will be taken literally when you ask the visitor to enter their details in exchange for a gift.

This may be trivial for you, but not for many surfers.

Be simple and precise about the types of emails your subscribers will receive and the frequency of your mailings.

If your frequency is subject to change, it would be much better to specify this.

Keep your list clean regularly.

When a message does not reach the recipient and is returned because the address is rejected by the recipient's server, as, for example, in the case of a non-existent user or non-existent domain (so-called hard bounce), immediately remove it from your list .

If, however, the message returns for any other reason, for example, the user has exceeded the email archive quota, or the recipient's server is temporarily unavailable (so-called soft bounce), let your system ensure that the message has been rejected at least 3 times, in a relatively short period of time in relation to your sending frequency, then remove it from the list.

Your system should be able to distinguish between soft bounces and hard bounces: ArpReach (also if I don't use it anymore, because it's owner is a shark) does this job seamlessly by keeping your list clean automatically.

Never contact those who unsubscribe again!

If you offer a gift in exchange for the navigator's registration, it is still good practice to ask for confirmation of the registration with the double opt-in.

Otherwise and that is only with the single opt-in, you will be destined to receive numerous registrations with false addresses, from people who believe that the free gift will reach them immediately after registration, instead of receiving it with a message sent to the address email entered by them in the registration form.

Not to mention that on the one hand some of those addresses could also work, while on the other you would get a greater number of non-receiving addresses, and this at any server used, with the result that you could also be considered spam by any server that hosts those fake accounts.

In fact, a high percentage of emails rejected by an internet or web space supply service can lead to the blocking of your account or your domain, damaging the reputation of your IP number with numerous services.

Make a backup of your lists at least weekly or at most bi-weekly and keep the backup copy on your hard disk and on external magnetic media.

Don't try to hide the unsubscribe link from your list by placing multiple blank lines between the body of your message and that link.

Not only could this annoy those who want to unsubscribe, but many hosting services may take this as an indication of incorrect practices, and consider it against you in the case of any spam complaints.

Make sure the server you are using has sufficient capacity, during sending, to receive bounced messages at the moment the rejection occurs, and to process cancellations right at the moment you are sending messages. email messages.

If you were to make these operations difficult, with the forced use of your sending server, you could have quite a few problems, both due to complaints from users whose cancellation was unsuccessful, and from the receiving servers who they could block your accounts, domain and IP.

Likewise, you will have to be compliant and precise regarding the expectations of your subscribers when they ask you to stop your mailings.

Use split testing tools to test copywrites that may be more successful than others.

In your email account, enter, in the field assigned to replies, an email address different from the main address: in this way you will have a greater chance of being considered positively by many online service providers.

So you have to examine multiple entries to increase your deliverability, verify that your messages end up in the recipient's email inbox and not in the spam inbox and you will have to test several elements to try to isolate the problem.

E-mail marketing, graphics and targets

In this article I examine what are the most important elements in the structure of the graphics, so that your email marketing strategies are successful.

Are you clear about the purpose of your branding strategies through email marketing?

For example, it could very well be that you have not yet inserted elements that make you more easily relate to your users.

If you are sending a newsletter or a series of messages that have interesting content, but are intended to put your subscribers in a greater relationship with your brand, then you do not need to use in-depth statistical analysis regarding the clicks they direct to the pages of your website and the conversion rate into customers.

However, you will take into account the following elements:

checking the opening rate of your messages so you can be sure that the subject of the message and its content have been created in such a way that the message itself reaches the recipient's email inbox instead of the spam folder;

the evaluation of cancellation requests and spam complaints, in relation to your content, their positioning in the message, such as, for example, a position of the cancellation link that is too far away, at the bottom of the message, compared to the body, the formatting of the message and sending frequency;

you won't have to worry too much about link visibility, the number of links, or the massive use of images.

Therefore, if the purpose of your message is only to carry out a branding activity, you have the possibility of greater freedom in the insertion of your contents.

What if the purpose of your messages was to bring more traffic to your website?

In fact, it is equally possible that your business model is not based on the sale of products and/or services, but rather on the number of clicks that your site manages to obtain.

For example, if you sell advertising on your site, through the impressions obtained from the ads you have inserted, your revenue will be generated by the number of views achieved by the pages of your site.

This means that the aim of your messages or newsletter is to get as many clicks as possible from the content of your message to your website.

Therefore, if your aim is precisely to obtain clicks and views of your website, then the most important design and statistical elements on which to base your strategies is that of clicks from email messages to your website.

Of course, message opening rates, unsubscribe requests and spam complaints are always important for your email marketing strategies to be successful.

However, always remember that the most important statistics concern above all the click-through rate from messages to your website.

You will still need to focus your attention on the formatting, positioning and number of links placed within your message.

In fact, they must be clearly visible, made up of text and represented by a very convincing "call to action".

You will also need to make sure you insert a good number of links in the most visible part of the message.

Finally, as in most online businesses, the purpose of your newsletter or email marketing program is to create events that generate economic revenue.

After all, you still have to get subscribers to your list to open messages and then click on links that lead to your website.

And you need click throughs to your website to get events that generate your revenue.

And of course to achieve all this you need your target to always be fed by new people who want to be subscribed to your list so you always have new potential customers to sell to.

So you will have to take into account everything I have told you if you want to create successful email templates in order to make your newsletter or your email marketing program likely to generate events that lead to huge profits.