Your First Email Marketing Project

Introduction

If you’re a web designer, and you’ve been put in charge of your very first email-marketing gig, we wrote this for you. It’s basically a list of all the things you need to consider when you work on (and bill for) an email- marketing project. We’ll take you step-by-step through what it takes to get your client’s email campaigns out the door.

Over the years, we’ve watched a lot of web designers tackle their first email-marketing campaigns for clients. The most common mistake we’ve seen is when a designer assumes an email campaign is simply a design project. They create a nice email in Photoshop, slice and dice it into HTML with Dreamweaver, and start looking for the Send button.

But email marketing should be treated like a full-blown website project. It requires the same basic methodology: discovery and planning, execution and follow-up. If you break down your project into these stages, you and your client will experience fewer bumps in the road.

If you have any questions that aren’t addressed here, feel free to contact our support staff at mailchimp.com/support. Now let’s get started.

Discovery And Planning

Before you start cranking out the email designs, you need to have a solid plan in place. Here are six steps to help you:

  1. Pick an email service provider (ESP). Obviously, we hope you’ll choose MailChimp. But no matter which way you go, you’ll want features like list management with automatic bounce cleaning, fancy email reports, powerful integrations and built-in templates (and the ability to upload your own for the client to edit).
  2. Find out what types of email marketing your client plans to send. They might want to send quarterly news, e-coupons, holiday cards, event invitations, letters from the president, internal newsletters to employees, etc. This will determine how many different managed lists you’ll need to set up, and how many different email templates you’ll need to design and set up. You may want to offer to set up holiday-specific promotion templates.
  3. Understand the way they target their marketing and sales. If they send direct mail to customers based on region, or by industry, or by their company title, consider working those different columns into their database (as long as it doesn’t make your signup form too big). For example, if your client is a franchise that sends updates to franchisees by region, just create a database and signup form that includes “region” as a column. Plan ahead, because these kinds of things are hard to add later.
  4. Help your client set up email accounts and aliases on their server. They probably want their email marketing to come from newsletters@example. com instead of bob@example.com. Pick appropriate aliases, because you want them to be used consistently and long-term (you’ll be “training” spam filters to accept emails from this address).
  5. Check their privacy policy. Sometimes it’s better if they don’t have one yet. If they do have one, be on the lookout for terms that conflict with what they’re trying to do, like “giving emails to a third party” or “tracking with beacons” and “personally identifiable information.” When you send email marketing, you usually host your list on a third party site. You also tend to track opens and clicks, and you tend to link that activity back to the recipient. This is all standard, non-evil stuff in email marketing, but some privacy policies are written primarily with web-browsing privacy is- sues in mind, and are too broad. This is mainly a concern with larger companies and financial institutions. Sometimes the concerns can be allayed by simply turning off open and click tracking in your email campaigns.
  6. API Integration. Some companies prefer to host their databases in- house, because they can keep everything centralized that way. So you may need to integrate their database with your email-marketing service through an API. API integration will require some programming work and lots of testing. Make sure you plan enough time. Our recommendation is to do it manually a few times (so you get a feel for the process), then come back and automate with the API. Check out http://apidocs.mailchimp.com for more info.

Execution, Design And Coding

Now for the fun part— designing and coding HTML email campaigns. Don’t break out that CSS Zen book just yet. Coding HTML email is like a trip back in time to the late ’90s. It’s all table cells and—well, more table cells. It’s not like coding web pages. If you don’t read all the secret little tips and tricks and hacks, your design will break in some of the major email apps.

Consider the entire subscription experience.

You may be asked to handle the entire opt-in process for a client (not just one little email). This means you’ll need to design:

  1. The subscription (opt-in) form
  2. Thank you landing pages (always include whitelist instructions)
  3. Confirmation link emails (if they’re using a service like MailChimp that employs the confirmed opt-in method)
  4. Final welcome emails (maybe you can include a promo code)
  5. Unsubscribe forms
  6. Unsubscribe confirmation landing pages
  7. Unsubscribe “final goodbye” emails (perhaps you can incorporate an exit survey)

Email Template Design

Most clients get started with a simple email newsletter or basic e-coupon type of promotion. But over time, they inevitably end up needing quite a few different templates. Here are some you should consider offering:

  • Basic email newsletter (two column, so they can stick promos in the narrow side column)
  • Basic email newsletter (one column, for when they have no promos, or want to send a very simple email)
  • Holiday promotion (usually a postcard style template, where they can swap out the main graphic)
  • Letter from the president (lots of white space, little formatting, simple branding to look like letterhead)
  • Event invitation (usually has a side column to put the “what, when, where” info for easy skimming)

Testing & Troubleshooting

When you’re designing HTML emails, you should test them in as many different email programs as possible. This isn’t like testing a web page in Firefox, then Internet Explorer, then Safari. There are a few dozen different email programs (Outlook, Lotus, Entourage, Apple Mail, etc.) and webmail services (AOL, Gmail, YahooMail, Hotmail, etc.) you should look at.

You can install all those different email programs and sign up for all those different webmail services, or you can use a service that screenshots your design in all of them for you. MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector will generate 60+ screenshots and test your campaign against all the major spam filters and email gateways. You just click a button, then wait a few minutes while we do all the work.

Troubleshooting your first email campaign can be extremely confusing. There are so many different variables, you don’t know where to begin looking for the problem (“Why’s this breaking? Why am I getting blocked here, but not there? Where’d my pretty CSS go?”). Here are some common issues that first-time email coders face, and how you can prevent them:

My images are broken in HTML email.

Make sure you’re coding images using absolute paths, and your images are hosted on a public web server (not a client’s private intranet). Also make sure your JPGs are in RGB format, because they won’t display in your browser as CMYK.

Spam filters are blocking my email.

Don’t use too much “dummy text” (lorem ipsum...) because it looks like you’re trying to trick content- based filters. And don’t use the word “test” in your subject line.

My client’s email server is blocking our tests.

You’re sending from an outside server, using a from-name and reply-to ad- dress of an inside- employee. And chances are, you’re sending to multiple employees to proofread your test. This looks like a spam attack. Your client’s IT group needs to whitelist your email delivery servers. Try using a different from-name and reply-to, and remove the word “test” from the subject line if you included it.

The formatting is ugly.

CSS doesn’t work so great in HTML email. Inline CSS is safest, and even then it won’t always work reliably. MailChimp will automatically fix your CSS for you when you paste your code in.

Test your client’s email campaigns like you’ve never tested anything before. If you haven’t sent at least five or six tests to yourself, co-workers, your client, and maybe to some test accounts, or used Inbox Inspector, then your campaign isn’t ready to send. The most common cause for email-marketing goof-ups is a lack of testing before sending. We’ve seen this lead to embarrassing typos and broken links, all the way to outright blacklisting by ISPs. You need to test—so work it into your schedule.

Time To Deliver

When it’s time to deliver, don’t just sit Send and move on to your next project. There’s still work to be done. If it’s your client’s first email campaign (and it’s going out to a large list), you may want to be around and on call when you deliver it, or at least advise your client to have some staff ready at the time of send. Depending on the email campaign, you can get a lot of phone calls and replies back from their recipients. Some positive, some not-so-positive. It can be a stressful time for a new email marketer, so it helps to be available for moral support.

Follow Up

After your client’s campaign has been sent, you can either give them access to their email-marketing stats or go over the stats with them. They’ll be beside themselves when they see all those opens and clicks rolling in.

You may want to set aside some time to go over the campaign reports with them and discuss what it all means, and what stats they should keep an eye on for future campaigns. They may ask you questions like, “How come my open rate was only 50 percent?” or “What does bounce rate mean?” and “What’s a normal unsubscribe rate for my industry?” Be prepared to answer those questions.

Ongoing Consulting

After your email-marketing project is complete, there are opportunities for ongoing support (if you have the desire). As clients grow more confident with email marketing, they’ll want to experiment with A/B testing, list segmentation, ROI tracking and API Integration. You may want to research some of these advanced concepts so you can help them:

As you can see, an email-marketing project can involve a lot more than slicing up a JPG into HTML. It can be just as large, complex and resource- intensive as a web-development project. But with the right methodology, a healthy dose of planning and testing, and the proper tools, you’ll be a pro in no time at all.

MailChimp’s got all the tools you need to impress your clients with beautiful and powerful email newsletters, and we make it easy. If you want to learn more about how to use MailChimp, we’ve got lots more guides where this one came from. Thanks for taking the time to prepare for your first email-marketing project.