Creating an Email Campaign

You have a list of email addresses, a great business to promote, and you are ready to start marketing via email. Where do you begin?

The first step is to decide on an email marketing service provider. These services are inexpensive and handle the problems associated with managing your contact list, your campaigns, as well as provide valuable statistics regarding the success of your email marketing efforts.

Our recommendation is that you sign up with ResultsMail.

Once you have come to this point you are now ready to start crafting your email campaign. But where do you begin?

First you must understand that email messages are communicated in two formats. The first, and most common format, is plain text. Plain text is just that, it is very plain. There is no formatting involved other than line breaks and spacing. You can not use bold type, italics, colors, or any other formatting.

Plain text is the least common denominator in the email world. Everyone can receive email in plain text no matter what computer they use or what software they use to read email. One thing to note is that many plain text email programs wrap long lines of text at a preset limit. This limit is typically between 65 - 80 characters. Keep this in mind when crafting your plain text message and enter carriage returns as appropriate to control the text wrapping.

The second format is HTML. HTML email is like receiving a web page in your inbox. HTML formatted emails allow for fancy formatting, colors, and even images. Because of various security concerns there are limits to what you can send via HTML email. Outlook will no longer allow you to embed java applets or flash animation, for example, because these types of embedded elements have created security problems in the past.

One cautionary note about designing an HTML email and that is that every email client (the software used to read the email) is different. While Microsoft's Outlook will display inline styles and other fancy HTML elements many of these elements will break completely when viewed over the web in a Hotmail account. Therefore, it is recommended that you design your HTML email for the lowest common denominator. For example, make use of the <FONT>, <EM>, and <STRONG> tags for styling your text instead of using inline styles.

If you are not familiar with HTML code there's nothing to worry about. If you use ResultsMail for your email marketing service their handy campaign editor takes care of all this behind the scenes. All you need to do is just create your HTML email using their included tools.

We strongly recommend that you preview any email marketing campaign you create on as many platforms as possible so that you can be sure that your audience will receive the message as you intended. Possible testing platforms include various web based email systems like Hotmail or Yahoo, Microsoft's Outlook or Outlook Express, as well as Netscape Navigator.

Once your email marketing campaign has been created and passes your tests with flying colors it is time to send it to your potential customers and watch the responses pour in!