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Admittedly, if your business is email marketing and design, you might want to change it to Preview Pain, because you’re frustrated with images being blocked.

But what if we changed the name to Precious Pane instead? Maybe if we called it the Precious Pane it would help us remember how precious that piece of on-screen real estate is! And how we need to pay a lot of attention to it!

Renaming it might keep us focused on what’s really important when creating our email marketing campaigns, from design to copy to alt tags.

After all, after the From address and the subject line, the Preview Pane is the third most important element you have to get people to open your emails. And if your emails don’t get opened, you won’t have any conversions, so what’s the point of having a great deliverability rate if your emails don’t make money? (For more on this topic, see the ClickMail Marketing whitepaper on driving ROI after you get into the inbox: http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/resources/whitepapers.php.)

The Preview Pane is limited in size, it might be horizontal or vertical, it appears differently in different email clients, it might or might not allow images…and you have to pay attention to it. Period.

What do you think? If we change the name to Precious Pane, will we pay more attention? And up our email marketing ROI as a result?

When you’re online looking for information to improve your permission-based email marketing, you might wind up overwhelmed. So I’ve put together my favorite short list here. These are the resources I turn to every week to keep me up to speed on the latest in permission-based email marketing:

• Email Marketing Reports (www.email-marketing-reports.com)
• MediaPost’s EmailInsider (you have to register as a member for it, but it’s free: http://www.mediapost.com/)
• MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com)
• Email Experience Council newsletter (www.emailexperience.org)
• Silverpop’s newsletter (www.silverpop.com)

Do you have a favorite email marketing blog or email newsletter to recommend? Let us know by posting a comment…

The article is easy to read with plenty of samples to illustrate his points. It’s a little scary too, I confess. Even as a seasoned email marketer, I’m constantly amazed at how different results can be in different email clients! This article illustrates that point really well.

It’s also yet another reminder that the only way to ensure your emails look and act the way you intend them to once you send your email marketing campaign is to test, test and test.

Think of it this way: If you don’t test, you don’t need to worry about your email marketing ROI, because there won’t be any to speak of or point to when it’s time to argue for next year’s budget!

See Mark’s great article at http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/format/image-blocking-suppression/alt.htm.

It’s a known fact that the more information you ask for on your email signup page, the fewer email signups you’ll get. And that’s frustrating for us email marketers who want to get more stats so we can segment, personalize and target our email marketing campaigns.

The answer isn’t to ask for more, at least not upfront. The answer is to answer more over time. And email surveys help you do just that.

Silverpop has a great little email marketing whitepaper on how to use email surveys to learn more about your email marketing customers over time.

Titled “Connect with Your Customers: 4 Survey Tactics to Enhance Enterprise Email Marketing,” you’ll find it at http://www.silverpop.com/practices/whitepapers.html. (I tried to get you an exact URL but couldn’t because of the signup form, ironically!) Scroll down the page and you’ll spot it. It’s only four pages long, but includes examples and is easy to act on. Highly recommended!

Because when you learn more about your customers, you improve your chances of improving your email marketing ROI!

I suspect that’s because at many companies, the email marketing department is either under-staffed or under-trained. Email marketing tends to be a job that people fall into rather than train for and seek out. Not to pick on email marketing! Trust me, in my career as a marketer, I’ve seen a serious lack of knowledge in every aspect of marketing, from direct mail to web analytics.

But part of our task as an email marketing service provider is to educate. Hence this blog, and our newly launched email newsletter. And our recent whitepaper.

Below is a snippet from the whitepaper, illustrating a critical and often overlooked aspect of email marketing and design: email html is not the same as the html you use for a Web site. If your email marketing design is built as if it’s a Web page, be careful.

For example, there are several tags you want to avoid in your email design because they don’t function in all email clients. Some will even get your email flagged as spam or kept out by an ISP. These tags can affect rendering, but really your first goal is to get your email delivered, so just don’t use them. The risky tags are:

• <Body> elements meaning background color on a page or setting page margins because it’s ripped out in Web clients: the open and close body tags are ripped out
• Page margins “0″
• Background images, whether for the page, a table, a cell; none of these are supported. You can use background colors for tables and cells but not images
• Layers are a fun way to control some functionality as well as layout, but they don’t work in email, so don’t use them
• Rollovers, at mouse state; these don’t work because they’re dictated with JavaScript, which you’re not using in your email, remember?
• Forms <form method=”get || post” action://…….>; if you have a post or even a get form method, it won’t work

For more email marketing and design information, download the whitepaper. For more email marketing edification, subscribe to this email marketing ROI blog!

That means when you’re working to build up your in-house email list, your competition isn’t just a crowded inbox, nor is it list fatigue, or a growing distrust of email marketing in general, or…you get the picture.

It means you have competition for those subscribers from other email marketers too. If ClickMail Marketing offers potential subscribers an email newsletter on business-to-business email marketing strategies, chances are some other email marketing agency is already offering a similar email newsletter.

That brings us back to a recurring theme in this email marketing blog: content. Content is what gets people to sign up for your email newsletters, it’s what makes them anticipate your e-newsletters, and it’s what keeps them subscribed to your email newsletters.

Offer better content than your competitor and over time you will win the subscribers…and the forwards and viral marketing too, if your email newsletter content is really good.

And there’s another benefit to making sure your email marketing content is better than your competition’s: Post your e-newsletter content on your Web site in an archive and you’ll win searches too, as potential subscribers who haven’t maybe haven’t even heard of you use search engines to look for information…and find you! And then subscribe to your email newsletter.

Offer the best content, be the resource they rely on the most, and you’ll win trust, subscribers and even searches. And that all adds up to better email marketing ROI.

Unless you test.

At ClickMail, we are constantly reminding our email marketing clients about the value of testing. It’s only by testing that you can continue refining your email marketing campaigns, improving open rates, conversion rates…and ultimately email marketing ROI, right?

The easiest way to test email marketing campaigns is with an A/B split test. An A/B split test means splitting your list into two, then trying two different things with it (like two different subject lines). Whichever one performs better tells you something. Maybe a shorter, more promotional subject line performs better than a longer, dryer one. That tells you your audience might prefer the shorter, more sales-y subject lines, and you can use that knowledge going forward for your next email marketing campaign.

You can test pretty much any email marketing and design component in your email campaigns:

• From names
• Subject lines
• Personalization
• Offers
• Calls to action
• Images
• Delivery days or times
• Click throughs
• Amount of copy
• Type of content
• Html vs. text
• Frequency
• Layout

To do an A/B split test, divide your list into two groups: one is A, one is B. Now change one, just one, thing about the emails between them. (If you have more than one variable, you can’t accurately measure your results.) Then send out your emails to both groups at the same time (to avoid the time variable). Finally, compare your results and learn. That’s all there is to it.

You can either do an A/B test to your entire list (if it’s small), or you can do an A/B to a statistically significant size portion of your list. Your email test group should be at least 10,000 email addresses to be statistically significant.

Wait, there is one more step: Keep on testing. Make it a habit. If you do, you’ll keep on learning, improving, and increasing that email marketing ROI.

Below are seven best practices you can easily implement to make sure your email signups go up when your site traffic does:

1. Offer a link to your signup page on every page of your site. Notice I said “a link to,” not a signup box? That’s because offering just the signup box is arrogant. Any site that asks for your email address without any information about what you’re signing up for is assuming that they don’t have to sell you on the idea of subscribing. Your prospect’s email address is a form of currency. You wouldn’t ask him or her to buy something from you without telling her what it is.
2. So that makes the next best practice: Include a signup page. This page sells the idea of signing up. It’s a promotional page telling the prospect what they’ll get in exchange for handing over their email address to you. This page should tell them what they’ll get from you and how often. It should extol the virtues of your email, or at least tout the benefits. Your goal? For someone to consider it a no brainer to sign up.
3. Notice I haven’t yet used the word newsletter? That’s because not every company publishes an email newsletter, but it seems to be a default. Recently we took on a new client who advertised their email newsletter on their home page (good) but didn’t actually publish an email newsletter (bad). They sent out email promotions. And to be honest, that was a better fit for their younger demographic which is more likely to sign up for deals than news. So the best practice is: Name your email communications appropriately. (Here’s an email newsletter written a few years ago by one of our partners. It includes many suggestions for alternative names for your email communications: http://www.weknowwords.com/may2005.htm.)
4. Include a sample issue, and link to it from your signup page. That way people can kick the email marketing tires and know what they’re really getting when they sign up.
5. Reassure them by stating that you won’t sell or share their email address, and link to your Privacy Policy page.
6. Consider an incentive. Maybe they get an in-store coupon or free ebook if they sign up.
7. Don’t ask for too much information on the signup page. More on this in another blog post…

There you have it. Seven easy ways to optimize your email signup on your Web site, so you have more willing recipients for your email marketing!