EDM – Email Direct Marketing explained
Email marketing
EDMs… Mmmmm… What does that mean?
Well, the clients will often refer to them as email marketing, html emails or newsletters.
It means Electronic Direct Marketing. You receive them in your inbox. They seem pretty straight forward. But sending your first EDM is not always as easy as it seems. So why bother taking on those projects?
Well, if you can make it work they are a great source of income as they are fast turn around projects. Some clients will send them on a weekly or monthly basis creating a constant stream of work for you.
Designivist gives you a few hints on how to go about creating your first EDM.
Step 1- Designing the EDM
One word of advise: keep it simple!
It needs to be seen in the preview pane of most email systems. As a rule of thumb the EDM shouldn’t be any more than 600px wide. The height doesn’t really matter but make sure you keep the most important information above the fold. Some people will not open your email but they will still be able to read what it’s about in the preview pane.
As far as the format goes, you can use gifs for animations but no flash. Also bear in mind that images can be blocked. So make sure the email will be legible even without the images.
Sometimes it might be easier to use a template. Sites like www.campaignmonitor.com and www.mailchimp.com offer great templates and even make the psds available to download.
Step 2- Coding the EDM
Forget about divs and tableless html. Forget about linked CSS.
Each email systems will read the html differently to avoid any trouble you will need to keep all your content in tables and use in-line CSS. If you want to read more about the reason why you have to use tables, … has a great article.
A few other things: Don’t forget the unsubscribe link and always add a link to the online version of the email in case the receiver can’t view it perfectly.
Once again the templates available from the specialty sites can be very helpful.
Step 3- Setting up the EDM
There are a range of sites out there that can help you. We have listed a few of them at the bottom of this post. Most offer similar functionalities.
First set up your account. It usually takes only 10minutes to be up and running.
Then set up your campaign. With most sites it’s as simple as uploading your html page and your images in a zip file.
Step 4- Testing the EDM
Now that’s where the trouble begins! As mentioned earlier every email server will read the email differently, stripping some of the html. The one to look out for is Outlook 2007. See, Windows decided to change the way Outlook reads html and Outlook 2007 now uses Word to render html. To summarise: not good!
You can manually test your emails by sending them to friends or to yourself. Try to cover as many email servers as possible. Designivist advise to test the following:
gmail, hotmail, yahoo, outlook express, outlook 2007, lotus…
When testing you have to look out for 2 things: is the email being displayed reasonably well and does it go passed the anti-spam filters.
Or you can pay a few dollars to get campaignmonitor.com or mailchimp.com to test it for you. They will create a report showing a screengrab of your email for each email server plus a report of the major anti spam filters.
Step 5- Sending the EDM
You must have permission to email people. If that’s the case upload your database and just press the button.
Hopefully you’ll get great click rates and opening.
Resources:
www.campaignmonitor.com
www.mailchimp.com
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