Designing the Email

Designing the Email involves Newsletter Design and collection of information and resources that you’re looking to send to your clients or customers. The Design should be consistent with the brand in tone-of-voice, color, and design.

Email Personalization

Nobody wants to read your Promotional email unless it’s really important. People ignore promotional emails and your emails may get directly into their trash boxes. Make the email more personalized, use segmentation, person’s name strings to build a relationship between the user and the company email. The Emails should be directly talking to them, they should feel as if someone is conveying a message to them.

Resources: 6 Email Personalization Techniques | 15 Email Personalization Stats That Might Surprise You

Email Signature

Email Signature is an important part of a newsletter. This directly showcases the person/company behind the email. Add relevant stuff like Name, Company Name, Designation, Contact Info, Profile Picture and if possible a CTA.

Resources: Hubspot Email Signature Generator

Consent Declaration

Don’t let your Subscribers accidentally report the email as SPAM, provide a 1 or 2 line consent on why they’re receiving the email. You can put this just before the Unsubscribe Option in the footer.

Company Address

This is again important and it goes inline with the CAN-SPAM Act that the physical address should be mentioned in the commercial emails. You can put this in your Email Signature or in the footer above the Unsubscribe Option. This also improves credibility to the user.

Email Unsubscribe Option

This again comes under the CAN-SPAM Act, wherein all the companies need to put an Unsubscribe Option inside their Emails. It’s just not like that you should have this just because of the ACT, it also helps you filter the people who really want to read your emails.

Read Email in Browser

It’s not mandatory but it is a good option to give a link to your user that links to your email and can be opened in a browser. Sometimes your Email Delivering Host may falsely render the email or the HTML in a way that is not supported by the device or the Email App. So it’s better to provide a link to view the email in the browser.

Email Spam Checker

Email Clients often move the emails to the SPAM box if it finds anything that sounds fishy. Or even sometimes, the email clients move your emails falsely. It’s better to run your email through a SPAM checker tool to ensure the email delivery to their mailbox.

Resources: SPAM Email Checker

Optimized Email Subject Line

There’s a 75% probability that your email subscribers may end up ignoring your email if they don’t like the subject line. Don’t let your Email sound SPAMMY or Fishy just with your Subject Line. Format a nice subject line that will drive your customers to open the email. Make your Subject Line appealing, you can use emojis to enhance it.

Resources: How to Write Catchy Email Subject Lines: 19 Tips | The 9 Best Email Subject Line Styles to Increase Your Open Rates

Check Mail Merge Tags

Mail Merge tags should be placed accurately inline with your email or it may distress the whole email look which again leads the email look like a spammy content.

Resources: Getting Started with Merge Tags for Email

Images with Alt-text

If your email largely consists of images, then this is just for you. Sometimes, the users turn off the images which may make your email look bad or less informational. Alt-text helps you to put a hidden text that will be visible only when the images are not shown.

Resources: The Ultimate Guide to Styled ALT Text in Email

Attachments (if any )

One of the most committed mistakes by Email Marketers is to forget attaching one or all the attachments that you want to send along with the email newsletter campaign. Make sure you upload and attach the relevant attachments. Also, be sure to name your attachments accordingly so it clearly reflects what’s inside the document. One such example is, betasaurus-email-marketing-checklist.pdf.

Social Media Linking

While is obvious to add the company social media icons and link them to their particular handles or links, but one should double-check if they’ve correctly linked the same. You may lose a potential customer if someone wants to see your social media. You should add the social media icons just below the company address or below your email signature.

Email Formatting

If you have amazing content, but the format or the UI is badly designed then all the efforts are a clear waste. Always think it in a way that would you read & understand it if you were a customer. If not, there’s no reason to send that badly designed Newsletter.

Resources: How to Master Proper Business Email Format

Replace Placeholder Content

Placeholder texts are used to make the emails look more appealing. Most templates come with these, But this may not look good to your audience. So it’s better to remove any visible placeholder texts.

Reason Identification

If your customer doesn’t understand what you want to pitch through the email, there’s again no reason to send that email. Treat yourself as Customer and read in that way or get it read by your friend/colleague, they’ll let you know better about it. Ask them if the email delivered the pitch to them or now?

Grammatical Errors

Grammatical errors are what one should put on the topmost priority or task that should be double or thrice checked. It gives a bad impression if your email content has grammatical mistakes and errors. You can use a free tool called Grammarly to check any possible errors. The error-free email looks great.

Resources: Grammarly Tool | Ginger Grammar Check

Testing the Email

Email Tracking

Track your emails to know about your campaign’s success. You can track the engagements, open rate, CTR Rate, Link Clicks, etc with the tracking options. Make sure you set up everything correctly and also test it before sending.

Resources: Campaign URL Builder

Email testing

It’s always better to test the emails before you shoot the email to your thousands of subscribers. Sometimes due to formatting options, responsiveness, tracking setups, should be checked. Different devices have different screen sizes. Send a test email to yourself or maybe a colleague, and test it on your mobile as well as the laptop. Make sure it looks good on both, buttons are linked to correct places, etc.

Email Responsiveness

Your user has different devices that will have different sizes, so it’s your responsibility to make your emails responsive. There are some people who read their emails on the desktop while some read them on the phones or some may be on other devices. The emails should be responsive so that the email opens up correctly irrespective of the devices and their sizes.

Resources: Improving Email Responsiveness: What You Need to Know

Proofreading Emails

After checking for any possible grammatical errors, you should once read your entire email or get it read by someone. It helps make it error free and have confidence in yourself that the email was bloat-free. This should be your last step before actually start the sending process for the campaign.

Sending the Email

Check Sender Details

The sender details should be correct as it tells about you. The first thing the user checks is the email address if it’s first time he’s receiving any email from you. Make sure aliases, Name, and the email address is correctly added.

Email Cleanup Tool

If you have a very large list of subscribers, there’s a possibility your list may get corrupt due to duplicate entries, invalid syntax of typos related to the tld sender and receiver email clients domains. So it’s advisable to use an Email Cleanup tool to make sure your emails are actually sen to right addresses.

Resources: Moonmail Email Verification and List Cleaning

Exclude Inactive Subscribers

There’s no point in sending emails to your inactive users. Inactive users can be any, a person who closed his email account, or no longer uses it or one who doesn’t open your email from a long time now. This can be clearly tracked from the previous campaigns through your email client’s Tracking or Analytics Dashboard.

Email reply-to Address

Reply-to address is very important as this directly relates to your further possible communication from your lead or customer. If you’re using an email address that only allows outgoing emails, then always notify the users through a notice “Please don’t reply, this is an only outgoing email”. Add a different email address where your customers can connect with you in such cases.

Remove Unsubscribed Users