Beginner's guide to email marketing

This article will focus on email marketing for life science companies, but many of the principles also apply to any properly designed email marketing campaign. My company, Ion Channel Media Group has done hundreds of these campaigns and this post will outline the most important things we have learned during the course of these campaigns.

Email marketing is a cost-effective and direct way for your message to reach your intended audiences. Email marketing is a favourite of online marketers because of its rapid effects upon the bottom line, quickly generating sales and leads. However, email marketing is challenging and is not as simple as putting a webpage online. These difficulties arise from the great variability in the behavior of email clients (email readers such as Outlook, Hotmail etc...) in interpreting HTML. If you don't design your HTML email to be read by the largest number of email clients, your message will not be seen by many of your recipients or will appear hopelessly poorly formatted. A second issue arises from increasingly aggressive spam filters which can prevent your message from getting to your intended recipient at all. I will attempt to address these issues in this post, highlighting the important details you must be aware of when preparing your email blast.

Coding Issues:

The first issue you must understand is the concept of headers. Headers are sent with each email and they indicate the format of the email message, the two most common being HTML and plain text. The advantage of plain text emails is that they can be viewed by anyone with an email client. Plain text emails, as their name implies, cannot have embedded hyperlinks, images, typefaces or positioning of elements on the page. HTML emails can have all of these embedded features, but older email clients may have trouble viewing the email or the formatting may not appear as you expect. The best way to maximize the ability of your readers to view your email is to send an multipart email with two version, one plain text and one HTML. To accomplish this, you need to set specific headers at the top of your email which indicate the MIME type (plain text or HTML) of each version. The email client should then seamlessly choose the most appropriate version. Here is an example of this approach:

MIME-Version: 1.0\\r\\n
FROM: Me\\r\\n
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary = --boundary\\r\\n

\\n--boundary\\n
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO_8859-1\\r\\n
This is the plain text version

\\n--boundary\\n
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO_8859-1\\r\\n
This is the HTML version

So you can see that the --boundary string separates the two email types and you must set the correct MIME type with the Content-Type directive. The dashes before \'boundary\' ensures that if the word boundary appears in your message, it won\'t be considered as a separator. The \\r and \\n characters specify carriage returns and new lines respectively and must be present in the header for the header to be parsed correctly.

The next important issue is formatting of your HTML. Now, cascading style sheets (CSS) are commonly used in webpages to control the presentation of your markup (HTML). CSS can be used with HTML emails, but with some important caveats. First of all, you should not link to an external style sheet (.css file) on your server since it will be ignored by most clients. You should do all of your CSS styling inline (within the HTML document). Secondly, many web-based mail readers (e.g. hotmail, yahoo, gmail) will automatically strip off the head section of your HTML email so that it does not interfere with their own page formatting. For this reason, you should put your CSS directives after the head section. An example of the CSS declaration you could use is below:

Most modern email clients should properly interpret any CSS contained with the style tags and apply it to the HTML markup that follows. Another caveat related to CSS is that you should never use CSS positioning to position elements in the email. While browsers do a fairly good job interpreting positioning with CSS, email clients are notoriously bad at this. You should use old-fashioned HTML tables to position and format your HTML. You should be careful not to nest too many tables, since this can also be problematic. Often starting a new table is a better choice than nesting too many table elements.

I have just come across a fantastic resource for CSS support in email clients.

One of the most common mistakes I see made by clients who are new to HTML email is thinking that one can simply attach the relevant images to the email and they will be automatically embedded in the HTML. This is not true, you must host the images on your own server and refer to the absolute URL in the HTML markup:

(e.g.

)

When designing the width of the email, be aware that many email clients first show the email in a preview window which only has a width of 300-600 pixels. For this reason, you should try to keep your email as narrow as possible so that it is fully viewable upon first viewing the message in the preview pane. I try to design my campaigns so that the width does not exceed 650 pixels. This provides enough room to include a sensible amount of content, but not so wide as to require extensive sideways scrolling to view the message. There are a number of great templates available which will make your job much easier. One of my favourites is from mailchimp which includes a template for postcard sized emails, 2 column newsletter type emails and the popular single column design. A very good tool for the creation of the header of an email which typically contains the company logo, a title and a slogan is Adobe Photoshop with ImageReady. You can create your header in Photoshop, import the photo into Imageready (bundled with photoshop) and slice the image to your liking.

One very useful tip stems from the behavior of online mail clients (e.g. hotmail, gmail, yahoo) to strip the body and head tags as I mentioned earlier. Many people code the background colour of the email into the body tag and when the body tag is stripped out, naturally your email will no longer have a background. You can deal with this issue by placing a wrapper table with 100% width and your desired background colour. The code would look like this:

remaining HTML here

Content Issues:

Now, even if you have a perfectly coded HTML email message, if your message gets caught by the spam filter, no one will even see it. Most spam filters rely partly upon Bayesian probability to filter potential spam. What this means is that your HTML email will be compared with other messages the user has previously classified as spam as well as messages not tagged as spam and use a variety of scores to classify your message as either spam or not spam. If you are marketing PDE inhibition assays and one of your standards is sildenafil (viagra), I would suggest using another standard which might not be considered as offensive to the spam filter. Language such as "click here", "free trial", "limited time" will also increase your spam score. Other features of spam include all capital text, lots of exclamation points!!!!!!, large red fonts, repetition of text etc... Just look through your spam box and design your content so that you don't emulate any of these styles. Most biotech email is technical enough to pass the language sniff test, but careless use of fonts, captial letters, exclamation points etc... can land your message in spambox purgatory. Another interesting feature of spam filters is to regard a message only containing HTML, with no corresponding plain text version to be more likely to be spam. Reduce your "spam score" and increase the readability of your email by using a multipart MIME format as discussed above. If you really want to see the inner-workings of a spam filter, review this list of spam criteria used by the popular program spam assassin.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even if your message gets past the spam filter and is perfectly formatted for 99% of email clients, unless you have good ad copy and/or targeted recipients, your message won't be read or acted upon. Let's first deal with ad copy. The most important features of the ad copy are the "from" and "subject" fields. You need to include your company name (or personal name) in the from field. This is important since it helps reduce your spam score and the mail appears more trustworthy, especially if your company is known and trusted in the field. You can specify it in the headers like so:

From: Ion Channel Media Group\\r\\n

Your subject should not be too long and should be direct and to the point. It should be interesting and prompt the user to click further to read more. You should be sure not to sound too "salesy" or your message will be immediately ignored. A good subject might be the following: "Apoptosis assays which do the work for you" or "The purest RNA for RT-PCR is essential". You want the person to open the email, so these subjects suggest some benefit to be obtained upon reading the email. Avoid a subject line like "Our RNA purification is the best available" or "Our apoptosis assays will blow you away". These subject lines are too "salesy" and are too vague to suggest that any concrete information or benefit will be obtained upon opening the email.

Once the person has clicked through to your email, you are still only 10% of the way to making a sale. Your ad copy must be compelling to induce an action such as replying to the mail, signing up for your email list, or visiting your website. You need to highlight the features and benefits of your service or product. Why does Dr. Smith need to buy assay XYZ for her lab? How will her experiments improve? How will data quality improve? Why is assay XYZ better than assay ABC? If you are advertising a service, emphasize the benefits of your service. For example, are the experiments done under GLP conditions? Have you or others published articles in peer reviewed journals comparing your service to the laboratory standard? Do you offer fast turnaround time? Features and benefits, features and benefits, this is what you need to consider when writing your copy. If you are writing for scientists, do not be afraid to get technical and provide references in the email (you should link to the abstract on Pubmed, because the scientist will not likely bother searching for it, unless you've done a REALLY good job.

People don't read emails, they scan emails, so you need to use many bulleted points, columns, strong headings which guide the reader to the most important points you want to get across.

The balance of your success then lies upon how well targeted your recipient list is. If you are marketing phosphatase antibodies to behavioral pharmacologists, you probably won't get much of a response, but if you have a good targeted list of scientists to work with, you will fare much better. In my experience, this is the most important factor in success, but all the previous ingredients must also be present to have a successful email campaign. You can contact me to arrange a targeted email campaign for your product or service and I promise to include all the ingredients mentioned in this article. We've done this hundreds of times, so it is second nature to us now. All the best in advertising ... Christian Hesketh.