Frontline Perspectives

On any given day of the week, I get several hundred e-mails. Thanks to my IT department, 98% of spam gets filtered out before getting to me so I’m not confronted with black market pharmaceuticals and other tawdry offers on a daily basis. After I answer all my client and staff e-mails, I’m left with a large number of eNewsletters, offers and announcements to peruse.

Here are the top three things I see companies doing wrong:

1. The subject link stinks. Your prospects and customers are not going to open it if it doesn’t sound relevant, helpful, interesting or important.  “July eNewsletter” doesn’t fit any of those.

2. Not designing for the No Image display option. There are really three display options that you should design for (HTML, HTML with no images and plain text) but the no image display is currently the most widely used.

3. The e-mail is actually an online War and Peace. Keep it short, simple and provide multiple click-through points to move people to the next step (put your details on a landing page).

I have a few other beefs: gigantic headers that put all the relevant content below the fold,  images that make no connection to the message and sending me requests to purchase something that I already bought from you (for heavens sake, pay attention to your database).

The truth is that getting it right takes time.  You need to test and track, and then test and track again.  But paying attention to the top three above is going to put you way ahead of the majority of e-mails in my inbox.