5 simple ways to improve your email marketing campaigns

Welcome to the Message Express blog! We thought we'd share 5 quick ways for you to improve your email marketing campaigns to improve the reader experience as well as beat the Spam filters.

1) Have a link to "View page in HTML". Email never renders the same on every email client - sometimes font colours and background images can vary between Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail. Having a link to an HTML version of your email campaign gives a consistent experience.

2) Single click for email opt-out. One thing Spam filters don't like is making the opt-out journey too long and unnecessary - this gives a clear message that you're making it difficult for your readers to opt-out. Having a one click opt-out process improves your Spam score.

3) Include your company details on the bottom. All email campaigns should include the name of the registered company in the email footer (name, address, phone, email). Leaving this information off - especially for readers who don't know you - gives the impression that you've lifted their data from an untrustworthy score. And you Spam score will improve as well

4) Check your grammar and avoid exclamations. Spam filters regularly check for overuse of exclamation marks as this is a clear sign of unsolicited email (e.g. Buy Viagra here!!!). Ensure your creative is grammatically correct - remember you are trying to give the impression that the language you're using is your first language.

5) Test, Test and Test again. There is no substitute for thorough and detailed testing. Check that all your links work, your images display correctly and most importantly, test in a variety of email clients. It's so easy to setup multiple hotmail, gmail, yahoo and other email accounts for testing so don't fall into the lazy trap - as your competitors won't!

Get started with your Social Media campaign with these 5 free services

1. Twitter - for businesses this is the service for communicating with your customers and building your brand awareness online. 
2. Facebook - A corporate facebook page is a great way to post latest updates, share links and post your corporate photos.
3. Blogger - well I suppose it goes without saying that I'd promote the blogging service I use! However, the two important things are to have a blog and to make it about sharing useful information that's interesting to read, rather than selling yourself in yet another medium
4. YouTube Channel - posting videos to YouTube and linking them back to your site and social media services is a great way to build back links to your site and boost your Google ranking. Googlebot loves videos :)
5. Flickr - You could argue that posting photos to Facebook achieves much the same effect and you would be right. However, the more pages that link back to your website and the more social media services you use helps to expand your exposure and reach out to as many people as possible.