How to Become a Better E-mailer

Hello to all 1.5 of you who still visit this blog (via Google searches).

Although I stopped blogging here about a year ago, I thought a post I wrote yesterday at No Straw Men would be appropriate to plug at Digital Flacking.

Here's a teaser (click here for the full text):

1. When responding, reply to the original e-mail rather than starting a new one. This way, you minimize confusion about what the original e-mail said, and the correspondence is contained in a single document, which makes everything easy to reference later.

2. Because we send so many e-mails today, it’s tempting to skip small chat and get right to the point. Yet while concision is commendable, being impersonal can often be perceived as being impolite. For this reason, I always begin e-mails with the recipient’s name, or at least a salutation. Compare receiving the message, “How’s XYZ coming along?” to “Hey Jill: How’s XYZ coming along?” This small courtesy acts as a cushion, buffering the professional with a touch of the personal.

Odds and Ends

1. Jesse Thomas (who's redesigning SusanDavis.com) will send you free stickers if you promise to stick them to something, take a picture, upload it to Flickr, and tag it with "jess3skull."

2. PR Week analyzes its annual survey of salaries in the PR industry.

3. E-newsletters should come in multiple formats—daily, weekly, monthly, TV appearances, etc—not as one-size-fits-all.

E-mail Best Practices

Via techPresident, based on Campaign Monitor's "E-mail Design Guidelines for 2006":

1. Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.

2. Use alt text for all images for a better experience [with images turned off].

3. Always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn't throw your design out.

4. Add a text-based link to a Web version of your design at the top of your e-mail.

5. Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).

6. Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.

7. Ensure that your e-mails are sent from the same e-mail address

8. Send e-mails from a "real person" and not a generic moniker.