Second Email Marketing Tip of 2007

Dog a Blog made a very good comment to my first email marketing tip of 2007. Rather than reply to the comment, I thought it deserved an all new post! (You can find the link to his very cool blog under my blogroll.) Dog’s asked if Dreamweaver wasn’t the answer to all of my inexperienced prayers. The answer – yes and no! (It can never be easy can it) Dreamweaver is in fact a wonderful tool that any novice web/email designer can use to very easily create and edit any type of html file. And if you learn all there is to know about Dreamweaver and it’s functionality, you can in fact create very professional looking emails and web pages. Unfortunately, like most things, there are potential limitations.

I myself took an existing email template, copied it into Dreamweaver and made all of my changes and adjustments. The problem is that I started with a template stocked full of email and html no-nos. As I did not have the experience to recognize these errors, I was not able to produce a clean and correct copy. Those who are novice designers like myself should either start from scratch and create a more basic email, or have a true designer create a basic template that can be easily altered.

The other problem with relying solely on Dreamweaver is that an email has certain restrictions and design requirements that a web page does not. These include but are not limited to size, image placement, the use of style sheets and the text vs. image ratio. You can create a wonderfully designed email within Dreamweaver very easily but if you are not aware of and working within these restrictions you could end up with an email that never gets to your customers in-box, or is never able to be viewed!

First Email Marketing Tip of 2007

Ensure your emails are created by a designer who knows their stuff!

I have spent the better part of my day trying to fix numerous validation errors within a few emails that I assumed I had the experience to design. The HTML files came to me, already created but very basic and I took it upon myself to “improve and redesign”. I have a little HTML experience and a little Dreamweaver experience. I very wrongly assumed that this little amount of experience was all I needed to create and design a batch of brand new emails (which by the way I had planned to send out tomorrow morning). After transferring the code to a markup validation service I found out how wrong this assumption was. I had a huge numer of errors in all three of my emails. (FYI – I HIGHLY recommend doing this to each and every email before sending to ensure that your HTML format is W3C compliant. The service I use is the W3C Markup Validator and is free of charge.) I have spent the morning and afternoon fixing my numerous errors and have now learned my lesson!

Learn from my mistake…Let a professional do it!

How to Become a Persuader

I just spent 2 hours of my Friday afternoon workday watching an old episode of Frontline (the PBS version of Dateline) which was centered around the past, present and future of marketing (gotta love my job) . The title of this episode is aptly called “The Persuaders” and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get their creative marketing juices flowing. The program stressed the saturation (or clutter) of the current advertising market and showed many of the ways that advertisers and marketers are trying to “break through this clutter.” As a marketer, it gave me a lot of great ideas on ways in which I could reach my consumers. As a consumer it showed me a lot of the ways in I am persuaded into buying products each and every day. The underlying theme of the program is one I am familiar with however – get to know your customer! Find out who your customer is and what they really want. Once you do this you can successfully sell to that customer, no matter which way you attempt to do it!

Following is the link to the PBS program. I think you can view some of the program online if anyone is interested.

The Persuaders

The Real Meaning of Customer-Centric

For the past few years, it has become fashionable, even essential, to become a “Customer-centric” organization. And though many organizations now claim this within their advertising, emails and websites, I believe few truly know the real meaning of the word. As a an ecommerce professional as well as consumer, I believe any company can be “customer-centric” simply by defining, marketing and selling it’s products and services from the customers point of view. As a customer, any customer, I can tell you one very important thing about myself:

My time is precious!
Like most consumers out there, I get bombarded on a daily basis with marketing emails, direct mail, phone calls, commercials and billboards. I also spend a decent amount of time using the Internet to research, shop and improve my life in general. As a consumer, I really do appreciate the availability of and access to all of this information however I do ask one thing: Let it be relevant! When I’m trying to shop for a birthday present for my niece, I don’t want to have to sift through 5 pages of unnecessary articles and advertising to get to her perfect gift. I am a 30-something woman, I don’t need weekly emails and magazines about retirement communities! (How I got on THAT list, I’ll never know).

Get to know your customers. Allow your IT department and designers to get to know your customers. Design your website and your emails based on this knowledge. And before you send out another email, or add another article or link to your website, ask yourself this…will my customer care? If the answer is maybe, or probably not, rethink your strategy!