Real Business

Email marketing is a fantastic way to reach out to your customers and promote your products. There are many benefits to email; you can target specific products you want to sell; personalise products based on past purchase history; and recipients are less likely to be distracted when reading emails. If you’re looking to get started with email marketing, here are my five top tips for getting started.

1. HTML emails are not like normal webpages

There is a certain coding "etiquette" that you need to be aware of. In order to be compatible with everything, make sure you code the old-fashioned way, like using <font> and <table> tags. Avoid <div> tags at all costs, they’re very unpredictable.

There are some fantastic resources online which can help you make sure your code is perfect:

* 20 email design best practices and resources for beginners: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/20-email-design-best-practices-and-resources-for-beginners/

* Guide to CSS support in email clients: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

* Fixing link colours in Yahoo! Mail: http://emailfail.posterous.com/fixing-links-colours-in-yahoo-mail

* Styling HTML emails with disabled images: http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/tips/styling-emails-with-disabled-images/

Once you’ve designed your email, you need to test, test and test again. Sign up with all the free email clients (Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail) and check if your email is consistent. If you have other email clients, test those too. Still want more? Litmus app lets you test on 33 different email clients and devices: http://litmusapp.com/

2. Get social

Got a Facebook fan page? Are you on Twitter? Why not put these links into your email? There’s nothing like a bit of shameless self-promotion to increase your readership on these channels. However, try not to repeat content. You need to give people a reason to subscribe to the different channels. Examples are exclusive competitions or Tweets such as “We’re sending out our email newsletter today, why not sign up?” work well. 

3. Segment your customers

If you run an ecommerce site, you may want to consider segmenting your customers and providing them with different content based on criteria you specify. Many email clients, such as Mailchimp and Emailcenter, give you the ability to do this easily.

One of the simplest ways to segment your recipient list is to separate your customers into those who have purchased from you and the non-purchasers. For those who haven’t purchased before, why not suggest popular products that other customers have bought and tell them the benefits of buying from you. You could even provide incentives like a first-time purchase discount, free priority delivery or a free gift with their first order. For existing customers, you could choose products they may like which are related to past purchases. 

4. Be personal

If you gather recipients’ names during your sign-up process, use them to personalise your emails (eg “Dear Becs”). This makes you seem more caring and looks like you’ve tailored your email just for them. It also helps to capture the readers’ attention. Some email marketers even use recipients’ names in the subject line (eg “Becs, an exclusive offer just for you…”).

If you do use personalisation, ensure that you use a fallback (such as "Dear Customer").

5. Have a consistent design

Designing a few basic layouts for your content is a great idea. It can help you to plan your content and customers will be familiar with how to find what they want within the email. You should also try to make it fit in with the branding of your website as much as possible. If your logo is on the left-hand side on your website, for example, make it on the left-hand side in your email. If your navigation is at the top on your website, put it at the top on your email. It’s not rocket science, but it does make all the difference.

Becs Rivett runs marketing blog Email Fail and food site Lay the Table. You can follow her on Twitter.