interlinkONE

If you are looking to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts, there are many items that you can look at.

Today, we’ll chat about two of them.

“Handling E-Mail Bounces”

How great is your email list? Even if you had a perfect list last month, chances are, a few of the emails will not be valid next month. People might decide to change their address… or they’ve moved on from a job.

Whatever the reason might be, it’s important to address the emails that are returned as undeliverable after each blast. If you continue to send email to “dead” addresses, this could potentially increase the chances that your mail is considered as spam. Yes, it will have a detrimental effect on your email marketing program.

The interlinkONE software makes it easy for you to handle and process email bounces. Through a report, you can see how many emails bounced, what type of bounce they were (i.e. Invalid Address, Out of Office, Mailbox Full), and more.

If you have any questions about using our Email Bounce feature, please contact our Support team.

“Design Considerations”

The process of designing an email can be quite enjoyable….. that is, until you view your message in your email client. Yes, the HTML for your email might look great in your editor, in the template, or on the web.

But the truth is, when people view their email in Outlook 2007, Gmail, Hotmail, etc…, the results may not always be consistent.

Yes, those clients render HTML a bit differently.

For example, some email clients will provide trouble if you try putting a background image in  your email. Also, the support for stylesheets in an email client may be very different than how a web browser might display it.

However, even with these discrepancies between email clients, there are a few best practices that can help ensure your email marketing efforts are as successful as possible.

Tag Your Images

By default, most email clients today block images from being displayed. Thus, make sure to take full use of the ALT tag. This allows you to put a description on each image. So, even if someone decides that they do not want to view the images, they will see the text descriptions that you provided.

TEST!

Oftentimes, people are very excited after they’ve created an email. But before you send it out to the boss, the sales team, or your contact list, you must send a test to yourself! This will help prevent some unnecessary embarrassment, in the case the email was not perfect the first time. Also, there is a great program available named Litmus. It can help you see how your email will look across multiple platforms.