Our client’s challenge:

The Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce had a long-term goal of redesigning and reorganizing its outdated website to better connect the Chamber businesses with the people who work, live, and visit Santa Cruz. The Chamber sought a new logo and brand identity that incorporated both the history and modernity of this local institution. New exciting and creative risks are taking place within the organization and the Chamber wanted to capture the spirit and imagination of its membership, and deliver more member benefits and results than ever before.

The Scott Design solution:

Scott Design redesigned the entire Chamber branding, from the logo to the website to the e-mails, and gave collateral a fresh, upbeat look. The site was updated to include new functionality, a cleaner navigation, and valuable SEO-optimized content. The site has become the go-to source for local Santa Cruz business news and resources, with visits to the site and page views more than doubling since the previous year. The new website, e-mail campaigns, and collateral have all helped attract new members.

Awards:

• Outstanding Achievement Interactive Media Award  — Non-Profit Website
• Award of Distinction, Communicator Awards — Association Website
• Silver Davey Award — Association Website
• Bronze Award, Horizon Interactive Awards — Non-Profit Website

Our client’s challenge:

Adobe participates in an annual education conference and wanted to unify their exhibits and handouts a fun and exciting theme. The event was held in Austin, Texas in the middle of the summer and would be attended by teachers and other education professionals.

The Scott Design solution:

Working with Adobe, Scott Design developed the “Camp Adobe” theme and marketing materials, including pre-event emails, event program, and event signage. The booth was staffed with “camp counselors,” visitors participated in a scavenger hunt, and all the materials were created with a summer camp theme. The materials provided a fun and engaging feel to Adobe’s booth at this yearly education event.

Awards:

• Silver Award, Summit International Creative Awards — B2B Campaign
• Silver Award, Silicon Valley ADDYs — B2B Campaign
• Silver Award, Davey Awards — B2C Campaign

Our client’s challenge:

Adobe Systems wanted to present its Acrobat solutions to enterprise customers, university professors, higher education IT personnel, and K-12 educators. Adobe also needed to provide effective messaging and strategies to the field reps and distributors who interact with customers.

The Scott Design solution:

Scott Design has developed numerous print, web, and online pieces that focus on the benefits that speak most convincingly to the targeted audience for each campaign. Scott Design also created a series of animated Flash product demos for Acrobat on document sharing, feedback and approvals, and protecting information. The imagery, graphics, headlines, copy, and narration always keep the specific benefits front and center in the customer’s mind.

Awards:

• Gold Award, Horizon Interactive Awards—B2B Interactive Multimedia
• Silver Award, BMA Beacon Awards—Multimedia Product or Training
• Silver Award, Silicon Valley ADDY Awards—B2B Interactive Multimedia
• Bronze Award, Silicon Valley ADDY Awards—B2B Interactive Multimedia

Our client’s challenge:

Adobe wanted to raise the profile of a new product line, display cutting-edge features in action, and generate sales by creating a “must-have” buzz. Adobe needed to promote a series of traveling seminars.

The Scott Design solution:

Adobe turned to Scott Design to quickly design and produce e-mail (HTML and text-only) announcements, enticements, and reminders to drive attendance for three distinct traveling seminars. As part of each campaign, Scott Design created marketing communications pieces that promoted the value of the seminars while also stirring excitement for the actual products. The imagery and written content of the communications were carefully crafted to speak to each target audience. In each instance, Scott Design then followed through by designing PowerPoint templates, event signs, reminder e-mails, and other support materials.

Awards:

• Bronze Award, Silicon Valley ADDYs—B2B Campaign
• Bronze Award, Silicon Valley ADDYs—B2B Campaign

I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Stu Carty at Constant Contact last week and he did a great job of laying out the best practices in e-mail marketing. Stu first defined the basic goal of e-mail marketing: Deliver professional e-mail communications, to an interested audience, containing information they find relevant, timely, and valuable, and that conform to best practices and anti-spam laws.

Following is a summary of all the great information Stu shared, which you can read all about in his full presentation.

1. Connect: Build good, permission-based e-mail lists

In order for you to legally use an e-mail list, it must be filled with customers with whom you already have a relationship. There are some great ways to build your contact list:

• collect e-mail addresses at events, meetings, trade shows
• get sign ups on your website and social networks
• ask for e-mail addresses in person or on the phone
• ask customers to sign up at a retail location
• add e-mail addresses of your colleagues and business associates
• include all of your past and current customers

Although you can legally buy or sell a list of e-mail addresses, it is illegal to use it to send e-mails! If you want to reach out to new customers that you’ve never met, you can use direct mail, advertising, web marketing, telemarketing, and event marketing—not e-mail marketing.

2. Inform: Create and send targeted e-mail campaigns

You should create a master calendar with all the e-mails you plan on sending. There are three main types of e-mails you should consider adding to your e-mail marketing calendar:

• Newsletters—monthly or quarterly e-mails featuring educational content
• Promotions—bi-weekly or monthly e-mails featuring promotional content, offers, coupons
• Announcements—periodical e-mails, depending on content, which usually includes targeted messages about invitations, new products, or special events

When building your e-mails, consider everything that will help your e-mail get past spam filters, get opened by the recipient, and cause them to click on your links:

• Design or select a clean, well-designed template that represents your company and brand
• Use a real person’s name in the “from” line
• Write an honest, straightforward, simple “subject” line
• Catch the reader’s attention in the first lines of the body of the message
• Keep it short and simple—include 2 to 3 newsworthy topics only

For more information on creating e-mails that work, read Getting your HTML e-mails delivered, Getting your HTML e-mails opened, and Getting your HTML e-mails read, Two little words: Subject Lines, and Watch your language in your e-mails!

3. Grow: Evaluate results and refine the process

Creating a robust e-mail marketing program is an ongoing process. You should be sure to analyze every e-mail you send out to find out what works with your audience, and what doesn’t.

Most e-mail service providers offer analytics on each of your campaigns, including information on who did and didn’t receive your e-mail, who opened the e-mail, which links they clicked, and more. You should use this information to find out which types of information are most interesting to your readers.

If your readers are divided on what they like, consider splitting your list into two or more lists, each with e-mails targeted to that list. Remember, your goal is to deliver information your recipients find relevant, timely, and valuable.

A few e-mail stats (be sure to test for your particular situation):

• Average open rates = 15-20% (For large companies, this number falls to 10%)
• Expect 1 person to click on “spam” for every 1,000 e-mails you send
• Include 3 or fewer links in one e-mail
• Use 5 or fewer graphics in one e-mail
• Best days to send e-mails: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
• Best time to send e-mails: 10 am to 3 pm

Do you have any best practices you’d add to this list? Let me know in the comments section.

If your e-mail has survived the spam filters and made it past your reader’s trash bin, what can you do to make sure your message gets read? Here are a few tips on getting your e-mail read rates up:

Limit the size of your e-mail. Keeping your e-mail under 700 pixels  or 72 characters wide will more likely keep it visible in your reader’s screen. For mobile viewers, keep it under 400 pixels or 40 characters wide. And, don’t write too much in the e-mail. Feel free to include an excerpt with a link to your site, where readers can read the full article.

Always include a text version. Viewers with low bandwidth need e-mails to load quickly. Blackberrys don’t render HTML, they just show the HTML gibberish as the message. Make sure you have both HTML and text versions so everyone sees what they want.

Make it personal. Have the reply-to address be a real person, have that person write and sign the message, include a head shot of the sender, and keep the “voice”  in the e-mail warm and real. Readers want to think they’ve received the message because of some connection, not simply as part of a giant group of people receiving an impersonal message from a company.

Looks count. E-mails with images perform better than those without images, but in HTML e-mails, less is more. Use images where necessary to support your copy, but remember that most people will have the images turned off. Use fonts, colors, and formatting to spice up the look in case readers can’t see your images, but remember to keep it simple. Too many colors or font size changes distract your readers (and can affect your spam rating) so keep to one type family, a set of 2-3 colors, and a coherent image style. And, remember to test to make sure your e-mail looks like you think it should on different machines.

Change is good. Make minor changes to the layout of your e-mails from time to time. Users start to ignore things in your e-mails if they always appear in the same place. Don’t be afraid to move things around, make minor changes in color, and add some new elements each time.

Target your message. If you have segmented your audience by asking them what type of messages they’d like to receive and how often, your messages are more likely to be read. Check on response rates to each kind of message you send and see if there are messages that are more compelling.

Don’t include too many bells and whistles. Many e-mail programs don’t know what to do with JavaScript, Flash, or even animated GIFs. Keep those for your websites and concentrate on well-crafted copy and a clean design to deliver your message.

E-mails that make it into your readers’ in boxes need to then survive the ruthless pruning that goes on once the e-mail arrives. How do you get a reader to open the e-mail instead of clicking on the “this is spam” button or tossing it into the trash? Here are just a few ideas:

Create a short, compelling subject line. The more quickly you can get your message out to your reader, the better. Since the majority of key decision makers use mobile devices to read their e-mail, your subject line should be 39 characters or less. And, the subject line should entice the reader to take a look inside by presenting a compelling proposition. Avoid vague subjects, such as “November News” or “Special Offer” and instead give a quick look at the content that the reader will find inside.

Personalize the subject line. If your e-mail database has first names, include the recipient’s name in the subject line. Personalized e-mails can increase open rates by 50-100% more than non-personalized e-mails.

Make sure the e-mail looks good in the preview pane. The majority of users keep their default settings in their e-mail programs, and the default is to list the e-mails and see a preview, or portion, of the e-mail in the preview pane. Since this almost always includes the top left corner of the e-mail, make sure you have relevant information in the upper-left area of your e-mail. The user should know what the e-mail is about by seeing only the preview area.

Don’t rely on images. Another default preference is to keep images hidden when previewing or viewing an e-mail message. A user with images hidden won’t see any of the beautiful graphics you’ve created. Make sure each image has an alt tag, which will display on screen even if images are turned off. And, make your headlines (at top left, of course!) be in HTML, not as a graphic.

Go light on the graphics. An e-mail that takes too long to load won’t get read. Keep your file size under 30K for better read rates. If you e-mail on the weekends, you might consider a text-only version, as many users check their e-mail on mobile devices during off hours.

Check your e-mail in as many scenarios as you can. Browsers and e-mail programs each have their own quirks and can vary from machine to machine. Take a look at your e-mail on Windows machines, Macs, Blackberrys, iPhones, and other mobile devices, and in different programs on each device. Make adjustments to your e-mail message until it works well on all platforms.

Don’t mail too often. If you bombard your readers with e-mails they will begin to consider your messages as spam. If you want to really target your readers, ask them when they subscribe how often they’d like updates from you.

A combination of a great subject line, a meaningful preview, and well-crafted HTML can help boost your e-mail open rate and land your messages in your customers’ minds instead of in their trash bin.

Over the coming several weeks, expect to get inundated with e-mails as retail businesses try to pump up holiday sales and B2B companies try to meet year-end numbers. And don’t be too upset when you get a lot of these e-mails, you have to look at the cost benefit analysis that businesses go through when they make direct marketing choices. A recent Associated Press article revealed these statistics from the Direct Marketers Association: For every $1 invested in e-mail campaigns, businesses earn a return on investment of $45.06; for an equivalent $1 investment, the return is $15.55 for direct mail and only $7.28 catalogs.

However, a quick warning to businesses that want to blast away this holiday season: E-mail recipients will start to experience e-mail fatigue, so increased frequency may not be the best strategy. The better strategy is to customize e-mail communications and segment your lists as much as possible. Those who have opted in to receiving e-mails only want to receive information that holds specific interest for them. Frequent general blasts to large numbers of recipients will  not have the ROI of customized, segmented blasts. Even better, add a personal touch of first-name salutation in the e-mail.

Update for 2009:

2009 numbers are slightly below the 2008 ROI numbers, but are still impressive. The 2009 Direct Marketing Association Power of Direct economic-impact study shows e-mail’s return on investment outshines the ROI of other marketing channels, but is slowly slipping.

• Commercial e-mail returned $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009.
• The second highest marketing ROI came from Internet search advertising, which returned $21.85 for every dollar spent on it in 2009.
• Non-catalog direct mail returned $15.22 for every dollar spent in 2009.
• Catalog direct mail returned $7.32 for every dollar spent in 2009.

The best way to make sure your e-mails get past spam filters is to make sure you don’t act like a spammer and your e-mail doesn’t look like it was created by a spammer. Here’s a quick list of some things you can do to ensure that your e-mail gets to your reader:

Don’t send too many e-mails. If you send a lot of e-mails and many of them are not relevant to those receiving them, recipients will not hesitate to hit the “report spam” or “this is spam” button. This is the quickest way to ruin your reputation with the ever-powerful spam filters. Keep your list clean and mail only to those people who want to receive your news. And, provide an option for the recipient to easily take themselves off your list.

Program like a professional, not a spammer. Spam filters assume that sloppy coders are spammers. However, many reputable e-mail designers don’t know that e-mail requires super clean code. Some things to remember are no “dotted” IP addresses, colors must be specified by hex number, remove <TBODY> tags, replace spacer graphics with table cells, and avoid changing colors and font sizes.

Don’t use trigger words. Make sure your copy doesn’t use words considered “spammy” by filters. Don’t use these words in the subject line, in the body of your e-mail, in your alt tags, in your footer, or in the file names of any graphics you include in your e-mail. (Your graphic can say “FREE,” but the file name and alt tag should not.)

Clean up your e-mail footer. Make sure you include a physical address, have a link to your privacy policy, include an unsubscribe (replace “unsubscribe,” “opt-out,” or “remove” with “Take me off your list.”

WHAT THE $$®©™é!! Using all caps, high ASCII characters, foreign language characters, and lots of dollar signs or exclamation points in your subject line can get your e-mail caught in a spam filter. A nice, short subject line (23 characters or less) with no funny characters is the best way to go.

While this list isn’t comprehensive, it can help you eliminate some of the most common mistakes that land your e-mails in the junk folder instead of the inbox.