Wise Startup Blog

For those of you looking to capitalize on your growing mailing list or those of you who have yet to take full advantage of email marketing, email marketing is the easiest way to increase conversion rate for your eCommerce store or turn visitors into members, but too few people know what it takes to create a great email.

1. The subject line is your message

If you want your intended reader to actually open the message, you have got to convince them in the subject line. Most times, the subject line is all a user will read, so it must be compelling, and give them a reason to open it.

Add urgency to the subject line, explain what the reader will find within the message, perhaps explain why they’re receiving the message. Most people make the fatal mistake of putting all of the design and thought into the body of the message, when the subject line is the most important part of any email blast.

2. Make your message look good even without pictures

You can expect users to have Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo! and pretty much any email reader that hates your images, and wants to destroy your beautiful design.

Use tables with backgrounds that will give your design a nice design-touch even with the images disabled. Make sure to also take good use of alt tags that explain what the images say and why users will want to click to display the images.

For all Blackberrys and smartphones without HTML rendering, the ATL tags are going to be displayed in lieu of any images ever being displayed.

3. Go back to the days of web 1.0

Forget CSS, forget XHTML, AJAX, and pretty much anything that makes the web an amazing place. To make great emails, you want to go back to old school tables and inline styling because almost all email readers are different, and to ensure that your styling is applied to all different readers in the same format, stick to tables.

4. Send your message on Tuesday or Wednesday

Studies have shown that sending your email on Tuesday or Wednesday is going to increase the likelihood of a user opening it by a HUGE amount, and it makes sense if you think about it.

You don’t want to send any emails on Monday, because people are just piling through their emails from over the weekend, and Thursday doesn’t make sense because people are wanting to wind down the week, and Friday emails just end up as piled up on Monday.

Tuesday and Wednesday give you the best opportunity to break through the clutter and actually guarantee your visitor will receive and read your email.

5. Test, test, test

We’ve all been there, designed a beautiful site, launch it, and then get the call from the client. “Hey, this site looks horrible. Really? It looks great on my computer? What browser are you using? …IE6″.

So the same problems we have with IE6 we can have with Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora. Send your messages to as many services as you can and see how it renders. As long as you stick to tables and inline styling, your emails should look good, but better test than be sorry, very, very sorry.