Creative graveyard...all I see are tombstones

Those gray boxes aren't tombstones, but they do effectively bury your creative efforts. The work of evil spammers has led email clients to block all images by default, desecrating your beautiful-in-life images. Instead, your message turns into a wasteland of gray boxes praying someone will allow them life again by clicking "enable images."

Keep as many tombstones as possible out of your email by using text, background colors, or background images. Whenever possible, use text instead of images, even if it means compromising overall design. Sure, your emails might look nicer with stylized text, but if the user never sees it, it's effort wasted. Worse yet, it's a message not communicated.

Headless emails

Is the head of your email getting chopped off by the preview pane? Many emailers pour the heart of their effort into the head of the email, the topmost three inches that are visible in a preview pane. But if this effort is done with one image, or a block of images, the head of your email has been effectively cut off if images are disabled.

Instead, make use of this space to further sell the rest of your email. Provide an "in this issue" list of articles if you're sending a newsletter. If you're sending a promotional message, provide key details of the offer. Entice readers to open your message to see what's below the preview pane rather than show them only enough to prove to them they're not interested.

Calls-to-action buried alive

Are your calls-to-action getting buried alive among other content and creative? A string of three hyper-linked words in a block of text or paragraph is not likely to catch the attention of someone skimming through your message. If your message is one large image with no cue to click for more information, you could be killing your own results before they ever get a chance to breathe on their own.

Instead, make your calls-to-action clearly stand out and make sure it is extremely obvious that there is a clickable action. Make text links a bright color, bolded, underlined and not surrounded by un-clickable text. You may even want to spell it out: "Click here to purchase online." If using graphics, make sure the graphic resembles a clickable button. And heeding our warnings above, add a line of text below the image as well in case images are disabled.

Clean up the dead...addresses

Are long dead email addresses haunting your open and click-through rates? They might have once been active addresses, happily opening and clicking through, but now they've fallen off the land of the living. They're no longer opening your emails, they're no longer actively reading or clicking. You're not sure they're around to get your emails at all. If someone hasn't opened a message from you in over six months, chances are the address needs to get the axe.

If chopping your list scares you, send an email to this group of non-responders asking them if they would like to continue to receive messages from you. If they still don't respond, you can comfortably call them dead and hack them from your list.

Scary trips to lands unknown

Are you sending recipients on scary trips to lands unknown when they click on a link in your email? Are they left wondering where they are, how they got there, and what they're supposed to do?

To learn more about using SubscriberMail to increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns, contact us today.