Getting your newsletter out on time can be hard, and when life gets busy, it seems like everything else comes first. Over the years, we’ve found that most people under-estimate all the steps and how long each step will take to get their e-newsletter sent.

You’re not alone. This is the typical scenario we frequently witness:

You want to send out our company newsletter every month, but then you don’t start working on the e-newsletter until just a few days before it needs to go out. You don’t have the time to think up ideas, build the content, create the blog that you want to click through to, organize and enter new email addresses and test and proofread the e-newsletter. So another month slips by without reaching out to your customers and prospects.

The most important thing to do is work backwards and plan all of your steps.

Our E-Newsletter Planning Checklist (PDF) breaks down your planning step by step to help get your e-newsletter out on time.

And, if you’ve realized that you never manage to your e-newsletter out on time, consider hiring a virtual assistant to help, or give us a call for an estimate on writing and sending your e-newsletter with great content to a targeted audience.

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Bulleted lists, otherwise known as ordered lists, can make text more quick to read. They allow a reader to quickly and easily read key points and convey importance or chronology. However, in your email newsletter you may want to think twice before using them.

Bullets Don’t Always Look The Same

By default, browsers and email clients add a left margin or padding to an unordered list which indents it from the left margin.

The problem is that different email clients render the margin or padding differently. Because different email clients have different formatting for bulleted list, formatting it for one email client may make it look even worse in another.

For example, Apple Mail and Gmail render the exact same bullets differently. Apple Mail renders left padding as the space for the bullets before the text, Gmail renders the the left padding as space, before the bullets.

Outlook doesn’t display bullets in emails

What’s even more frustrating is that in Microsoft Outlook 2007 and newer, bullets are truncated and the margin is ignored, this means the bullets just don’t show up.

3 tips for working with bullets in e-newsletters

1. Format templates and styles for your most common email clients

Knowing that the way bullets will display is going to look different from one client to the next, you need to factor that into your design.

Here at Mail on the Mark we do our best to make adjustments to our newsletter templates to target specific email clients. With use of our email client reporting, we can make sure that if you need to use bullets, they look best in which ever email client the majority of your readers are using.

However, even with our adjustments understand that the bullet styles will not look the same from one email client to the next.

2. Don’t wrap bulleted lists around images

It’s best not to try and wrap a bulleted list around an image. Even with the best styles in place, things can get weird when the lists wrap around an image. Often, what had been properly aligned bullets now run over the image.

3. Don’t use bulleted lists

Our best advice is often to avoid using bulleted lists altogether.

Consider if you really need bullets. With longer list items, we suggest creating them as separate paragraphs. You might want to bold the first few words to help the reader along.

Another option is to “fake” your bullets. Rather than looking for the bulleted style button, add  a bullet character at the beginning of a paragraph.

In summary:

Use bullets sparingly, and when you do use them, know they may not display universally from one email client to the next.

As we head into 2016, email marketing continues its reign at the top of marketing tactics.

It’s easy to get distracted with social media, search or pay-per-click ads, but study after study puts email marketing as the most effective way to build awareness, acquire leads, convert prospects, and retain current customers.

These days, it’s easy to send out an e-newsletter, but it’s hard to send out a really good e-newsletter: one that builds your brand, closes sales and grows your business.

If you’re ready to jumpstart your e-newsletter in 2016, start by focusing on these best practices.

1. Mobile first

Depending on your audience, mobile email will account for 15 to 70% of email opens. If smartphone users are not your largest group of email readers yet, they may be soon. And no matter what your statistics show, you can’t ignore this group.

According to Movable Ink’s “U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report: Q1 2014,” 66 percent of brand marketing emails were opened on a mobile device (smartphones and tablets) during the first quarter. This represents a huge leap from just four years ago, when only 9 percent of email opens took place on mobile.

Why does mobile matter? Because reading email on a smartphone is a different experience.

Make sure you’re sending emails that are optimized for smartphone readers as well as desktop email clients. Check that your email service provider (ESP) has templates that are responsive in nature, not just mobile friendly. Not sure what the difference is? Read: Responsive vs Mobile E-Newsletter Templates.

You want your readers to have a great viewing experience on any kind of device.

Tailor design elements to a small screen. Buttons should be large enough to be easy to click. While most web designers are aware of this issue on mobile-friendly web sites, it often gets overlooked by e-newsletter designers.

Limit the length of content. People often use their phone to check email when they just have a brief moment. They expect to get through your email content quickly, so make your e-newsletter as short as possible, while still being useful.

Studies of eye-tracking when reading e-newsletters show that most attention is spent at the top left corner and then interest drops quickly after that.

Rather than sending one e-newsletter with many articles, consider sending each individual article as an e-newsletter. This will lead to higher frequency (improve your brand visibility), and probably higher engagements in your e-newsletters.

2. Snippets, previews and subject lines

Whether on your phone or on your desktop, we’ve all learned to quickly sort (and delete!) our email. In most e-mail clients (the software you use to read your email) you see the from, the subject and sometimes a snippet or preview.

Carefully craft the message in your preview snippet. I receive far too many e-newsletters where after the subject line all I read is “Having trouble viewing this email? View it online.”

Figure out how to override this setting! (Here at Mail on the Mark we make this really easy for our clients by making this an easy-to-edit field.) Customize this content for every e-newsletter.

Boost your brand visibility even without an open. After every e-newsletter you send, you’re probably eager to see what your open rate is. And that stat is still critical. However, think about the message you want to convey to people who don’t even open your email.

For example, I get a lot of e-newsletters from retailers I shop with. If I’m not looking to buy from them right now, I just quickly swipe and delete the message. But before I do, I’ve registered two things: 1) who sent the email (aka brand visibility) and 2) what the offer is (aka key message).

Keep subject lines short. Yes, subject lines are still critical and on smartphones they are often truncated. So, keep keywords to the first few words and make sure your message is understandable with only a few words.

3. Personalize your e-newsletters

There is growing proof that personalizing content increases engagement, and e-newsletters are a prime vehicle for creating personalized messages for your readers.

Go beyond just “Dear {First Name},” People love to see their own name. So, make sure that you are collecting at least first names when you have people sign up for your e-newsletter.

However, we are all aware of how easy the {First Name} “trick” is. So, in addition to the typical: Dear {First Name}, consider other places where you can add personalization. For a B2B marketer, you might weave in the recipient’s company name, if you have that data. For a retailer, try inserting information about a recent purchase.

Segment your lists. An important way to tailor your messages to your readers is to segment your list. All of your readers don’t need to receive every email you send. In fact, fewer messages that are better targeted is a far more effective email strategy.

Make yourself personable and human too. The whole idea with personalization is to give authenticity to an email. Make your own information human too. The “from” address and who signs the e-newsletter matter. Unless you are marketing for a very large firm, consider who the email is coming from. Make it a real person.

4. Raise your email newsletter quality, or lose readers

One of the biggest challenges with e-newsletters is the sheer volume of email we all receive. It’s hard to cut through the noise. If there is nothing special about your email, it will be quickly deleted, or worse—permanently unsubscribed from.

Most readers want one of three things when they sign up for an e-newsletter:

• special offers
• exclusive information
• or to stay in touch with you.

Let’s start with the third one first.

Assume people don’t care that much about you. Very few people (besides your Mom) will sign up for your newsletter just to get “news” from your company. That will rarely attract people to sign up for an e-newsletter, so you’ll have trouble building your list.

There are a few of exceptions. Some non-profits, school, or events can get away with this approach. You probably have signed up for an e-newsletter from a group you support or your kids’ school because you want to be kept up-to-date on things like people hired, upcoming events, or even photos of the holiday party, etc. But very few people want to hear similar news from their insurance broker, restaurant, etc.

For everyone else, figure out what’s in it for your reader.

People want special offers. The number one reason people cite for joining an e-newsletter list is special, exclusive offers—coupons or special sales only available for subscribers.

Use these offers to entice people to sign up and don’t dilute their power by then turning around and offering the same thing to everyone.

Share exclusive information. Some businesses, especially B2B firms, are not going have sales or offer coupons. That’s OK. Your subscribers are probably looking for information, rather than offers.

Just like with a blog, your newsletter should provide useful, expert thoughts, tips, etc. that would be time consuming to find elsewhere. Your e-newsletter is the perfect place to position yourself as an industry expert.

Improve your visuals. It’s easy to quickly add a royalty-free photo to your e-newsletter without much thought. But an image that doesn’t add to your message and maintain your brand identity is a waste. In fact, it detracts from the whole e-newsletter.

Consider developing graphics—photography, charts or other imagery—that are customized to support your brand and message.

Make sure your e-newsletter looks professional. Sorry, but there a ton of ugly e-newsletters out there. Think how many times you let you out a sigh as you cringe at yet another poorly-assembled newsletter. It is clear that the person sending it out didn’t have a full handle on the email tool they were trying to use.

Maybe the colors don’t match the brand, or there are strange formatting issues like a mix of centered and non-centered type, or randomly bold type. These are often a result of rushing through the process of creating your template.

Turning over your e-newsletters to an email marketing expert may be the best way to proceed.

5. Connect your e-newsletter to your blog and social media

When you think about your e-newsletter, blog and social media, stop thinking about three different silos. Rather than three different channels that need three times the attention, think about how they can complement each other and build on each other. Yes, you will have to do work in every medium, but you don’t need to start each from scratch.

Write once, promote everywhere. It’s hard work writing great content and developing high-quality imagery to accompany it. Cross promote your content across channels.

The most efficient way to do this is to create a blog post and have the full content live there. It’s on your own domain and web site, so that’s the best place for its permanent home.

Then, send out an email blast with the beginning of the blog post and a key graphic included. Have people click through to read the entire article. That keeps the email short and gives you something to track (clicks).

Then, promote the blog post through social media using a similar technique. Make sure new viewers to your site are encouraged to join your e-newsletter list with easy-to-find signup forms.

6. Stop sending e-newsletters, start email marketing

Overall, you may want to stop thinking about e-newsletters and start thinking about email marketing.

The idea of an e-newsletter conjures up the idea of a monthly, multi-article format. First of all, that format is too long (see #1 above). Secondly, your email marketing program could be much more robust. Once you’ve mastered your e-newsletter, it’s time to think about auto-responders, drip campaigns and more.

Any good e-newsletter tool should make it easy for you to build these systems.

Create auto-responders. Make sure you have auto-responders so that when someone signs up for your email list they immediately hear from you. This auto-responder should be sent to new subscribers immediately or within a day or so. This is when they are most interested in hearing from you.

The great thing about auto-responders is that you set it up once, and it goes on auto-pilot for you, reaching out and communicating to all your prospects, effortlessly.

Build drip campaigns with multiple emails. A drip campaign is a series of emails in a certain sequence. It may be a robust form of an autoresponder for new subscribers.

Also, a drip campaign can be longer and more thorough almost amounting to an online course. Your e-newsletter service provider should make this easy to setup.

Coordinate these automated efforts strategically and visually. Be careful when you set up different email systems. If you have a regular newsletter, an auto-responder and drip campaigns, they should all look like they come from the same brand.

The design does not have to be exactly the same. In fact a drip campaign that works like an online course will most certainly violate our prior suggestion of being as short as possible.

However, all your email marketing should maintain the brand identity. Remember, every time your email lands in someone’s inbox it either builds or destroys your brand’s trust.

If you’re going to send an e-newsletter, do it right!

Having the ability to specify who receives your e-newsletter lets you tailor your message to specific groups of readers. For example, you may want to advertise a “new customer special” only to prospects and not current clients. No one likes getting the “special offer for new customers only” email when they have been a loyal customer for years. It feels unfair, unpersonalized and clutters up their inbox with non relevant emails.

There are many reasons you may want to divide your lists and then select only specific groups to send to. Even if you are providing the same general information or offer, the more you customize the message to the recipient the better engagement you’ll have. You can read more about segment examples here.

Mail on the Mark features many useful list tools to make it easy for you to send to just the right list. Let’s walk through these features, using the scenario of promoting an upcoming conference or event.

Unlimited lists

Mail on the Mark has no limit to the number of lists that you can create.

We encourage our clients to divide and label their email recipients into as many useful lists as possible. To start with, it’s good practice to create different lists for the different ways people join your lists. For example, you may have one list for people who registered for a previous event, another for people who join by using the form on your web site and another for contest entrants. As people buy tickets for your upcoming conference, you can create a new list of ticket buyers. If anyone ever wonders how they got on a list, you have a record of where they signed up.

Additionally, you can create your own lists based on other information you have about the recipient. For example, you could divide your list by geographic location or industry sector if you’ve collected that data.

Cross Checking

Cross checking your email lists is one of the most essential features of Mail on the Mark. If you’ve taken our advice and created multiple lists for your recipients, it’s likely you’ll find that some people are on more than one list.

Mail on the Mark’s Cross Checking tool automatically scans across lists and detects if an email is a duplicate and only sends one email.

Let’s say you have a customer that you have multiple touch points with—they originally signed up for your e-newsletter using a form on your web site, then they purchased a ticket to a previous event, then they entered a contest or give away. If you have been creating multiple lists to track all of these signups, that person is now on three lists.

Isn’t it annoying when you get the same email twice (at exactly the same time) from an organzation? That won’t happen with Mail on the Mark.

Excluding

Excluding can be very helpful when you need to make sure someone doesn’t get an email.

We use this function a lot when doing event promotion. Consider this scenario: Initially, you announce your event to all your lists and encourage them to buy tickets. Once people start buying tickets you start building a second list of current ticket buyers (aka attendees) only. You may not want to send emails to promote buying tickets or special ticket offers to those who have already purchased them.

In this case, you would exclude ticket buyers. By hovering over a list or segment in Mail on the Mark, you will see the option to exclude them from the campaign.

Segment your list to build better engagement

These are a couple of useful tools to make sure that your recipients are getting only the content that’s relevant to them. This helps your emails feel more personal and helps build trust with your subscribers. Remember, a more customized email marketing strategy leads to more engaged readers.

Have a question about a feature of Mail on the Mark, or want to know how this tool could help your business? Get in touch, we’d be happy to talk with you about your email marketing.

It’s January, which means a time for reflection and resolutions. For many Americans, there is an urge to simplify and de-clutter. This includes dealing with our overflowing inboxes. Not only are we thinking about New Year’s resolutions, but many people are also returning from time away from the office which makes the email overload feel particularly acute.

This past week I heard several people remark, in person or on social media, about needing to unsubscribe to unwanted emails and tame their inboxes. Personally, I’ve spent considerable time setting up lots of rules in my Mac Mail to filter out less important emails and unsubscribing to unwanted emails and notifications.

Expect an uptick in your unsubscribe rate in January. And here are some tips to minimize your list churn and avoid the New Year’s purge.

Stay Relevant in the New Year

On the positive side, this time of year is a time for self-reflection and goal-setting. So people are receptive to educational and informative messages if they feel it can help them. If you create an offer or educational series that connects with people’s natural pursuit of improvement, January is a great time to launch it.

If you’re cranking out newsletters just to adhere to a pre-determined editorial schedule, but not really feeling any passion for it, it’s likely that your readers will catch that vibe and unsubscribe. This is not a time to send something out just to meet your quota, it’s almost always better to deviate from your schedule (and send less frequently) if it means producing something better. Just don’t put it off too long!

The most important piece of advice I give people is to put themselves in their readers’ shoes. This sounds so basic, but too many people think completely differently about what they want to send compared to what they’d want to read. They easily label other people’s email as junk or a waste of time, but never consider that their own emails may have that same perception for their readers.

A time to rethink and refresh

The new year is a good time to take a fresh look at your email marketing.

Examine the structure and content of your newsletters. For example, are the length of the articles and the type of subjects still working with where your business is headed and is it resonating with readers? Simplifying your approach by showcasing less content in each newsletter can be a relief to you and an easier-read for your recipients.

Consider delegating the work. Are you running out of ideas or interest? Writing an e-newsletter is challenging and if it’s feeling like an increasingly hard burden, you may want to delegate the work. If the newsletters are well-received, but you just don’t have the time to write them anymore, consider working with an outsourced e-newsletter service like Mail on the Mark. Your time may be better spent working on another area of your business.

Rethink how your e-newsletter connects with your web site and social media. Your e-newsletter, your web site / blog and your social media channels should all work together as a unified marketing effort. Ideally, this means less work with better results. Do you make it easy for readers to connect from one of these media to the next with linking and sharing? Do you repurpose content between the channels? Is there a consistent brand identity to all the pieces? Web sites and social media continue to change rapidly so take a fresh look at how you’re connecting these channels to your e-newsletter.

Finally, make sure that your e-newsletter is mobile optimized or responsively built! More and more, people are reading their email on their phones, but it needs to look good on their large monitors as well. People are much more likely to delete or unsubscribe to something that is challenging to read because of poor formatting. Even the best content in the world can’t overcome that!

Let me know: Are you unsubscribing to more e-newsletters this January, and how did you decide which ones got the axe?

According to a survey of nearly 1500 adults, 64% said that what makes them open an email from a business or nonprofit is who the email is from.

When respondents were asked what makes them open an email from a business or nonprofit, the organization the email is from (64%) and the subject line (47%) were far more popular than other factors such as liking the offer (26%) or the first few lines of the body of the email (14%). I just came across this stat even though it is a few years old, but I’m guessing it still rings true today. Face it, people are making a decision to open your email before they even get to the meat of the content.

What does that mean to you, as you create and send your e-newsletter?

Two factors in recognizing the email sender

When your recipients receive your e-newsletter, there are two factors that influence whether it is recognized by email servers and by the real human reading your content.

1. Is your specific email address recognized by the email server and email client of the recipient? The computer systems powering email are looking at the name@domain.com and checking whether it is a known and trusted address. Depending on how your recipients get their emails (Gmail, private email server, via your shared hosting plan, etc.), there are multiple layers of technology that are deciding whether or not to send your email through to your recipient’s inbox. It may be stopped by a firewall, stopped by a domain-based spam filter, or it may be redirected based on the individual’s rules set up for their own inbox. This is why you want to maintain a known and trusted email address as the from email on your enewsletters.
2. Will your email reader recognize your personal or business name? Assuming your email has been delivered to the recipients inbox, the decision to open it is made based on the real name that shows. For example, you may start sending your e-newsletter out using the email address jane@domain.com. Then, you decide to change the sending address to news@domain.com, but you keep the same visible name: “Jane Smith” —your email readers will decide whether to open your email based on that personal or brand name rather than the email address.

5 Tips to keep your brand relevant by email

1. Choose the right “from” address for your e-newsletter. If you’ve had personal contact with most of your recipients, you should use that email address as the “from” address of your e-newsletter. This is what we advise for most professional services firms.
2. Don’t change the “from” address of your e-newsletter without considerable thought. We’ve seen it happen where an e-newsletter starts out coming from a specific person’s email address, but as their list grows they make the decision to change it to something more generic like info@ or news@. Remember, that any new email address will be less familiar to both the human recipient and the software that the reader uses as their the email client. Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and change your “from” address, but do it with care.
3. Your current clients are most interested in hearing from you. You probably already guessed that, but reaching out to them keeps you top of mind and introduces them to new products or services you are offering. You will have a higher delivery rate because they will already have your email address white listed. You may be surprised that some of your customers only think of you when considering purchasing the exact product or service you already provided. Introducing them to other services will be beneficial. This is why that old adage holds true that it is easier to sell more to current customers than to sell to new customers.
4. Reach out to new subscribers quickly. When someone joins your e-newsletter list, they’ve just had an interaction with your brand. It may be by making a purchase, joining your list from your web site or from accessing special content and offers like a white paper or promotional coupon. At that time, they are aware of your brand. If you wait a long time to send them anything by email, they may no longer remember who you are or why you have their email address. So, try to email them again within a day or two of their initial contact. The easiest way to do this is by setting up an auto-responder so that every person who joins your email list automatically receives an email from you.
5. Continue sending valuable content. As you can see by these stats, the majority of people are making a decision about whether to open your email or not before they get to the content or offer. Essentially, they are forming an opinion based on previous email communication from you. You’ve earned their trust, don’t ruin it!

High-quality newsletter design is critical to the success of having your e-newsletter opened, read and clicked on. You often have only a split second to catch your reader’s eye before they decide to keep reading, or almost instantly delete your message.

If you’re hoping your newsletter has impact as it flashes into your readers’ inbox, design matters.

10 Design tips for better e-newsletters

1. Keep it simple. The name “newsletter” may conjure up a picture of multiple stories, columns and sidebars, but people don’t have time for that. Choose one main story per newsletter for the most impact.
2. Make sure it’s mobile optimized. More than half of all email is read on phones nowadays. So your newsletter needs to look good on a small window, but everything just can’t shrink down. Type sizes must stay readable even as column widths get narrow; so styles within your e-newsletter system should be built using a responsive technique that changes based on the window size. Don’t worry, here at Mail on the Mark all of our e-newsletter are built this way.
3. Match your brand identity. Your e-newsletter is a great way to give repetitive exposure to your brand. In fact, even if someone opens but doesn’t read your e-newsletter, you can gain positive visibility for your brand. So make sure that the colors, fonts, logo, etc. match your brand identity. Your e-newsletter design should closely match your web site design.
4. Make your call to action clear. The goal of most newsletters is not just to be read, it’s to push the reader to take action. So pick one thing you want the reader to click on, and make that link bright and bold. It’s best to have it look like a button, not just a text link.
5. Avoid cheesy stock photos. Pictures are great because they engage people, but if they are too generic they just feel like a space filler. Remember, cheap photos just look…cheap. I doubt you want to have your brand portrayed as cheap, so find quality photography or skip it altogether.
6. Keep sentences and paragraphs short. If you’re used to working in Microsoft Word, what seems like a reasonable looking paragraph, will feel excessively long in the more narrow format of an email newsletter.
7. Use each piece of the email structure to its max. Every email has a sender’s name and subject line. You should also be able to control the snippet that previews in most email clients. And of course there’s the content of the newsletter itself—including headlines. Don’t repeat similar text in all these places. Use each piece of text uniquely.
8. Make social sharing clear and easy. Most people want to grow their e-newsletter list, so make it easy for your readers to share your content on Facebook, Twitter or other channels. When you put a little Facebook icon in your newsletter, be clear whether you’re asking someone to like your Facebook page or share the content of your newsletter on their own timeline. Both are great! But make it clear which action you’re prompting people to take.
9. Remember that many links will default to blue. There are many email clients that will default to a blue color and underlined style of hyperlinks. Even if you set it to another style in your e-newsletter composer, it may still look blue and underlined to some of your readers. So, avoid putting a text link on a blue background, because it will be difficult to read.
10. Make it professional looking. Choosing the various fonts, setting up the layout, and selecting or creating imagery can lead to a mess. If you’re hoping your newsletter will promote your brand, think about the impact that your unprofessional-looking newsletter may be having on your prospects. Don’t get so caught up in the pride of doing-it-yourself, when hiring a professional e-newsletter firm will make the improved effort worth the costs.

1. Start out strong to get your foot in the door

People are busy—make sure the first paragraph is the best in the newsletter because some readers may not make it past there. Instead of starting with a rambling introduction, start out with a strong statement that pulls readers in.

And it goes without saying: a strong subject line is required to get your readers to open your email in the first place.

2. Short sentences

Short sentences are powerful. They can pack a punch and grab attention.

Readers are bombarded by loads of information all day. People have short attention spans; get to your point quickly before they move on. Short sentences and short paragraphs make your statements easy to understand and easy to remember.

3. break up your content

Nobody wants to open their inbox to a 30-paragraph wall of text. Break up your content to make it easy for readers to skim and jump to the topics that interest them. Use headings, photos, graphics and dividers to help break up your text into pieces that are easy to skim and digest.

But… as tempting as a bulleted list may be, they don’t translate well across all email browsers so our suggestion is to avoid them all together.

4. Make it clear what to do next

Include a clear call to action (CTA) so your readers can take action easily, even if they are just skimming. Make the CTA stand out visually. It should be graphically different (buttons work well), and not be crowded in with other content.

The CTA should be easy to understand what will happen when they click. For example, if you are providing a resource to download, which makes more sense, “Download now” or “Begin journey”?

5. consider the voice

Before sitting down to write your newsletter think about the voice you will use. For example, you may use a very casual, fun tone if you are an ice cream company announcing a new flavor in your newsletter, where a bio-engineering lab announcing new research findings would not want to use that same tone.

Also, it’s ok to write using the first person (“I”) if you are a solo business owner, or the e-newsletter is supposed to come from one person. It will feel more authentic than saying “we.”

6. Mobile-ready

As mobile increasingly dominates how we access and read email, all of these guidelines become even more important.

To begin, make sure your design is built using responsive techniques (not just mobile friendly) so it will look good on everything from large desktop monitors and small phones. Then realize that people are scanning their email more quickly and in a more distracted way when using their phones. The ability to quickly scan, clearly understand and then easily act are even more acute when reading your newsletter on a mobile device.

Struggling to write your newsletter?

If you are having trouble generating content that gets your readers engaged, or just can’t find the time to get it done, Mail on the Mark can do it for you. Get started.

You’ve written your newsletter, placed your graphics, gathered your email list, and are all ready to hit ‘send’—but have you checked your pre-header text?

Pre-header text (also known as preview text or a snippet) is the short text that displays below the sender’s name and subject line in your inbox.

This little bit of text is key in catching your recipient’s attention and is a huge deciding factor on whether or not your email gets opened and read. It’s often overlooked or not given as much consideration as the subject line, even though they’re usually viewed at the same time. In an email research survey, 24% of respondents look at the preview text first when deciding if they will open an email.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your pre-header text:

Don’t leave the pre-header empty!

If you leave this empty, some email readers will just pull in the first few words and make an awkward sentence. Other classics you’d like to avoid are “view this email in your browser”, “having trouble viewing this email?” or even worse, “not displaying correctly, click here.”

Create something that engages the recipient and makes them want to read more.

Don’t repeat the subject line

Frankly, repeating the subject line looks a bit lazy or as if a mistake was made.  More importantly, you’ve wasted a great opportunity to give your readers a taste of what’s inside. Your pre-header text is a way to build on your subject line with supporting information.

Are you covering multiple topics? You can detail some of them here. Or, reference a secondary offer you’ll be mentioning inside the email, “free shipping over $50” is a great example of that.

Test your pre-header text

You can send yourself a preview to see how much text displays and where it is cut off when opening it with different email clients. The number of characters that show can vary greatly, from as few as 35 characters in Outlook ’13 to 140 characters in Apple Mail.

And yes, some people have their email set so that the pre-header text doesn’t show at all—so if something is important, repeat it somewhere else in the email as well.

steal from the best

Go take a look at your email inbox. Chances are, like in our graphic above, there’s a wide range of copy in the preview text. Which ones pull you in? Which ones would pull your customer in? Are there any you find especially inspiring (or dispiriting)? Keep those in mind the next time you’re stuck on writing that copy.

The pre-header text is something that should help your readers know what to expect, and encourage them to open. It’s a little thing that can pay big dividends, a lot like your newsletter.

Are you overwhelmed with all the details that can make your newsletter a success? Reach out, we’d love to help.

Nobody likes getting bombarded with spam in their inbox. Some people mark emails as spam and it gets reported to their ISP or email provider. Alternately, some ISPs or email hosts generate their own rules (which can be adjusted somewhat by users) to automatically funnel certain emails to junk or spam boxes.

Follow these simple steps to make sure you don’t end up in the same place as the emailed pharmaceutical ads.

Make sure your mailing list is clean

It’s never okay to use purchased lists, and reputable email clients (such as Mail on the Mark) won’t even let you use them. Purchased lists have unverified emails and may contain SPAM traps. If you send your email to a spam trap, you can end up on a spam list… ensuring your emails never end up in your subscriber’s inbox.

One way to make sure your email list contains only people who want to be receiving emails from you is to have a two-step sign up so that subscribers have to opt-in via a confirmation email once they have subscribed. Read more about permission to send here.

Ask to be whitelisted

Having people add your “From” email to their address book is an easy way to make sure that it doesn’t end up marked as spam. You can add a note saying, “Don’t forget to add myemail@mydomain.com to your address book” right alongside your signup form.

Use a recognizable “From” address

Speaking of your “from” address, make sure it’s obviously from you. People are less likely to recognize your mailing if it’s from some random email address they’ve never heard of. Avoid changing your “from” address from mailing to mailing to ensure people identify it, recognize it, and receive your newsletter.

Allow people to unsubscribe or change their preferences

If someone is no longer interested in your mailings, give them a way to get fewer mailings or to unsubscribe altogether. This way people aren’t marking you as spam when all they want to do is hear from you less or have changed their interests.

Unsubscribe links are included in all Mail on the Mark templates and anyone who chooses to unsubscribe is automatically and immediately removed from your lists. However, you may want to consider giving an alternative that is less final than completely unsubscribing; consider having an option to receive less frequent emails.

Send frequently

If you don’t send an email for a long time, people may forget they subscribed in the first place. Your subscribers are signing up for your newsletters because they want to hear from you, don’t let them down. It’s most critical to send your first email quickly after someone subscribes to your list. It’s easy to automate this using auto-responders so you can capture their attention while they are most highly interested. Don’t forget to feature valuable content in the emails you do send out.

Connect your emails to your brand identity

People are overwhelmed with email and may not remember your business or organization when your email arrives in their inbox. But if they are able to quickly recognize your brand, they are more likely to remember who you are and how they got on your mailing list. Using consistent design elements not only enhances your brand image, it decreases your chances of accidentally being marked as spam.