Email Marketing Articles by SEO Speedwagon

February 13, 2008

Timing Email Messages Key to Winning Over Customers

As a smart email marketer I'm sure you've read articles on how to increase opens, how to write catchy subject lines, and how to create compelling offers. If you're looking for a powerful way to win over your customers, consider the timing of your email messages. The timing of your email messages is as important as the content. Send too many emails at the wrong time and you run the risk of alienating the customer. Don't send confirmation or welcome emails on time and you risk confusing the customer. Timing is the essence of great customer service.

Consider the case of email communications pioneer and ClickZ writer Al DiGuido who planned a stay at a Westwood W Hotel. Mr. DiGuido discusses his delight with the hotel's superb email timing here. The hotel sent a welcoming email two weeks before his trip asking if they could do anything to make his stay extra special. They followed this message with an email a week later that gave a view of his room, then completed the exchange by timing several emails during and after his stay to ensure he was receiving the best service. It's all in the timing, which is definitely a fine line between being intrusive and establishing a dialogue that shows the customer that you care.

If you're a Netflix customer you likely enjoy how they time their customer emails. For example I get an email asking me "When did you mail back your movie?" and they list several dates. All I have to do is click on the date and I'm done. They also send an email saying "When did you receive your movie?" Again all I have to do is click on a date. Such ease of communication shows me they care when I get my movies, which is a key component of their service. The best part is that I am not inundated with Netflix monthly newsletters and extraneous email messages that I don't want. That makes me really happy.

One last point - timing email messages is worth little if the customer service isn't there to back it up. Westwood W hotels not only engaged Mr. DiGuido in a dialogue, they backed that up by providing outstanding service during his stay. Netflix not only times its emails well, it doesn't turn a hair if your dog chews up a DVD; they just say "Stuff happens. No problem." Email can help begin a personal engagement with customers, but it's the human element that closes the deal.

Timing Email Messages Key to Winning Over Customers
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February 06, 2008

Create Great Email Newsletters with these Free Templates

Have you ever been caught in a pinch where you needed to update a customer's HTML email template and just can't get the right look and feel? As a veteran of the email marketing wars I have spent more hours than I would care to mention tinkering with and cobbling together templates to create email newsletters that 1) Function well in the majority of email clients, and 2) Offer layouts conducive to getting users to click through. As savvy email marketers, we know we have to create compelling offers and persuasive calls to action. All that hard work is for nought, however, if the newsletter layout is not user friendly. Then there's the ultimate challenge...What happens if your template won't work in a recipient's email client? If that happens they'll never even see your marketing message.

Thankfully there are a few good resources available such as Campaign Monitor's 30 Free Email Templates. This template collection not only includes a variety of content layouts but the templates have been tested in all major email clients. These templates even work in Outlook 2007, which can cause some rendering problems through its use of Microsoft Word's HTML rendering engine. A little tinkering and you can add customer brand-specific colors and other tweaks to customize these sample templates.

If you're going to be doing some heavy newsletter template tweaking, you may find yourself in the market for a good text editor. I've found over the years that people get pretty attached to their text editors. I remember one company I worked for practically insisted that employees use one particular editor. Over the years I've tried so many editors but keep coming back to Arachnophilia 4.0 (scroll down the page for download links). The newer versions of Arachnophilia are built to be platform agnostic, so if you're not running a Windows machine, you might want to use a newer build. The Build 5310 version I use is quite old - from 2001! I heartily recommend it to Windows users for its nice array of command and macro functions without a lot of fluff to slow you down.

Create Great Email Newsletters with these Free Templates
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