Brand. Target. Design. Think. Test.

Seems basic, but if your email campaigns are falling flat or you don’t know where your emails are going once you hit “send,” getting back to basics may be all you need to punch up those results and feel good that your message is being heard. Brown Dog came away from a recent conference with a renewed appreciation for our email campaign software, and tricks we would like to pass along to you:

1. Brand Consistency! Ensure that all your messages across audiences are brand consistent. Your emails should look like you! Don’t sacrifice your brand to a generic interpretation!
2. Target your audiences! It’s always great to be able to boast about whose list is bigger, BUT is that giant list getting you the results you crave or, worse yet, sabotaging any hope that your message is actually reaching an inbox! Using legitimate sources for creating your lists is key.
3. Design to the email client and like its 1999! I think we’ve all sent an email to our personal account (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) after carefully finessing it to look a certain way in our WYSIWYG, only to realize that it doesn’t look that way at all – what is going on with those green headlines or black links? We all know that using up-to-date technology is critical, except when it’s NOT – email design is one time when using the latest stylesheets can bounce you quicker than a big guy at the door of the hottest club. Web Standards do not apply, so stay away from background images, divs, and relative links; embrace those tables you thought were long gone.
4. Think about the device! While creating a graphically rich experience for someone sitting in front of a desktop is important, don’t forget about those customers who never get the chance to catch up on email except while standing in line on their iPhones, Droids and Blackberries. Your “graphically rich experience” has caused them to not see a thing, and your email will likely get tossed to a “mark as read,” never to be looked at again!
5. Test! Test! Test! You can of course set up various email accounts and test in various browsers…but a paid service like litmus.com or emailonacid.com (which Brown Dog uses) is worth the few dollars to ensure your emails are getting to your customers and keeping you off a spam list.

Brown Dog likes to anticipate the needs of our clients and their customers, which is why, while we are developing your website, we also customize an email template that looks like you, communicates effectively to your audiences, and uses analytics so that you can know what is hot to your customers and what is not. Have questions about whether you have an email template, need a Create Send (CampaignMonitor) refresher – we now offer monthly unlimited, want to jazz up your existing CreateSend email template? Just whistle, we’re here to help!

One of my favorite products we offer at Brown Dog is our custom email campaign. This is a graphically enhanced email message that supports your company’s brand look and feel. With a targeted message applied, you can really get your key points across. A branded campaign is a positive touch point for your company that helps you keep in communication with your customers in a focused way.

I love the idea of making it convenient for those customers that may not visit your website, or blog site, frequently by sending them links to your most popular headlines for the quarter. This technique does double duty by reaching those that might have missed your original post and by creating more links to your website’s inner pages which in turn helps your search engine optimization or SEO.

While there are many applications out there including Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Cake, etc. We like Campaign Monitor with its “Create Send” interface because it allows us to professionally brand your look into a custom template that you can easily add content and resend over and over from the web as you need. We like it so much, we use it ourselves!

Here is a recent post with step-by-step instructions on Sending your first email using Campaign Monitor. We do the set up, you do the sending. It’s that simple.