Create Better Performing Assets

In the following issue I will be addressing a few concerns that all email marketers come across at one time. Successful email campaigns take considerable effort to acheive. Unfortunately, blindly sending emails is not enough because if "undelivered" the emails become useless no matter how interesting the content may be. It requires a lot of testing, delivery assurance and tweaking assets for optimal performance. If the customer never sees it, it is ineffective. I will be discussing the following topics:

Topic 1: Subject Line Length
Topic 2: Designing Creatives
General Tips: Unrecognized characters in text creatives

Hopefully the topics discussed, will help you create better performing assets.

Topic 1: Subject Line Length
The issue of subject line length has been a matter of debate amongst marketers. How long should an email subject line be? A good rule to follow is anything longer than 55 characters, this includes spaces, will be cut off. However, many people agree that 35 is a better number to aim for. All this only matters, if response rates are shown to be affected by subject lines and reports confirm they do. Subject lines longer than 50 characters show a decrease in response rates (measured by clicks). Meanwhile emails containing 49 or fewer characters had click through rates that were 75% higher and open rates that were 12.5% higher. There are always exceptions and the only way you will know what works for you is to test subject lines on your lists. However, keep in mind sometimes less can be more.

Topic 2: Designing Creatives
Now, let’s discuss creative design. The way a creative is designed does affect deliverability and response rates. A common mistake made by email campaign designers is they create emails to be viewed in its entirety -- i.e. understanding a web browser look is different than what an email will render once it reaches an ISP. Unfortunately, emails don’t work that way. They are scrolled through and in small windows. That means the most important part of the email needs to be on the top part of the page, the part recipients view immediately. Graphics can also be a source of problem for email marketers because some mail servers like Gmail or Outlook 2003 don’t display images by default. This means, if the majority of your creative is a graphic some users will see nothing.

General Tips: Unrecognized characters in text creatives
As a rule of thumb, text creatives must never be created in word processing documents such as MS Word. The problem arises while saving and converting the creative to text format. During conversion formatted characters are left behind within the text. Although these characters will render correctly on the computer screen, when it reaches it's destination the characters are unrecognizable and are replaced with default characters depending on the ISP and desktop email application. The most common characters that I have seen cause this problem are: " , ; ' among others. The best way to avoid this probelm is to build the text creative in Notepad.

Having said that, If you need to convert your word document into a text file, begin by saving it as a text file, then open the file in WordPad and save the file as a "Text Document – MS-DOS Format". This will convert the text and remove all residual formatting from MS Word. Please note that foreign languages using special characters may be changed to default.