Email guidelines

Keep it simple, maintain your subscribers trust by following good email marketing practices.

 

Don’t abuse permission

If you operate an opt in subscriber list (and if you don’t, you should) on your website, subscribers are asking you to market to them. So you’ve asked their permission to talk to them, they’ve said yes, don’t go selling or renting your list to other companies. That’s the quickest way to lose the trust of those that have given it to you.

Give them what they want

Subscribers and business leads have initiated a conversation with you, sell them what they asked for. If you're sending a newsletter once a month about a particular subject, don’t start sending a newsletter about something else. That’s a good way to get your audience to click the unsubscribe button and lose faith in you. Why not use a sidebar in your communication to ask your customers what they want, do they want to subscribe to your other newsletters, make your email marketing opt in and create a personal conversation with your customers.

Be a real person

It's no good sending a personal communication if you hide behind an anonymous email address. Always use an email address that is a real person then your real customers will want to know you and you stand less chance of getting treated as spam.

Make it easy to use

On all our email campaigns we add three links by default. The first is to forward the email to a friend which opens a browser window to forward the email to up to five friends with a message. The second link enables the viewer to see the html email in a browser and the third link is to unsubscribe. This last link instantly updates your subscriber list and removes their email address.

Design and testing (and testing and testing)

Many emails do not render images properly in email applications for a variety of reasons. Use of preview panes in email is widespread so it is important to design with the use of preview panes in mind. Many users turn images off by default and many don't receive html emails just plain text.


We design with all this (and more) in mind and at the end we thoroughly test each email to make sure it will work across a range of email applications.


Here's the full list of our test email applications:

© inspire design consultancy limited 2008