How to Get More Mileage From Your Emails

As an online mar­keter, it’s impor­tant that you should take every oppor­tu­nity to elim­i­nate bar­ri­ers and chal­lenges to the deliv­ery of your mes­sage to your tar­get audience.

While RSS feeds, blogs, and social media are all the rage right now, noth­ing beats that long-​​reigning monarch of the message-​​to-​​market medium online. Good ol’ email.

As one Twit­ter user, Michael Kern, once remarked while com­ment­ing on one of my arti­cles, “Email is still king.”

For instance, at the time of writ­ing this blog post, this blog has close to 50,000 sub­scribers — grow­ing by about 100 new sub­scribers every day. How­ever, just 15% of that num­ber are sub­scribed to my RSS feed, while the remain­der are email subscribers.

My num­bers are far from being unique. They are the same with a large per­cent­age of blog­gers and social media mar­keters, let alone Inter­net mar­keters with blogs.

With the vari­ety of ways avail­able to deliver an opt-​​in email newslet­ter, such as plain text, text with images, embed­ded HTML, and attach­ments, which one is the best?

These days, open rates are at an all-​​time low.

Some of my coach­ing stu­dents have told me they’ve never seen such low per­cent­ages, falling from a com­fort­able 40–60% down into the single-​​digit range. We’re talk­ing legit­i­mate (not spam­mers), pop­u­lar, well-​​established, double-​​optin email marketers.

Sure, open rates are on the decline over­all for a vari­ety of rea­sons. But be care­ful when jump­ing to con­clu­sions, because the num­bers may be skewed somewhat.

Open rates are largely cal­cu­lated based on the appear­ance of images embed­ded within an HTML email — in plain-​​looking HTML emails, it’s often a small, trans­par­ent image. But these days, images do not show up in a grow­ing num­ber of email clients.

A great exam­ple of this is the explo­sion of web-​​based and mobile-​​based email, which the major­ity have HTML or images turned off by default — often to save band­width, speed up down­loads, or pro­tect users from spam­mers and phish­ing scams.

(Even pop­u­lar email soft­ware have HTML switched off by default. You have to man­u­ally turn it on, or tell it which indi­vid­ual emails you want to allow images to be displayed.)

In my case, since the intro­duc­tion of IMAP and offline access over at Gmail, which you can find under their “labs” fea­ture, I’ve recently con­verted all my email to Gmail, using it to retrieve all my other POP mail­box accounts into one cen­tral­ized location.

I’ve dumped my email client com­pletely. Nowa­days, I check my email via any web browser or my iPhone. If I do use my desk­top email client, then IMAP allows me to read my email directly on the server — with­out the need to down­load them to my computer.

At any rate, with dwin­dling open rates and per­snick­ety email read­ers, the ques­tion remains: how do you get your mes­sage across? Here are some tips I’ve found useful.

Before I begin, let me first start off by say­ing that I’m not an email mar­ket­ing expert by any stretch. Some peo­ple in the busi­ness have knowl­edge that is way above mine.

(In some cases, I mean that quite lit­er­ally. Jason Hen­der­son may be over seven-​​feet tall, but he is def­i­nitely one of those incred­i­bly well-​​versed email mar­ket­ing giants who know far more than I ever will. And so do many others.)

But while I don’t have the win­ning answer, let me share my experience.

For a long time, I’ve been an advo­cate of plain-​​text emails only — either that, or of emails sent in dual, delim­ited for­mats (i.e., both plain text and HTML) so that non-​​HTML email clients can still receive your mes­sage, with the look and lay­out you intended.

Also, stick with CSS for col­ors, for­mats, and lay­outs. Check your HTML to see if your mes­sage still looks the same when HTML is (specif­i­cally, when images are) turned off.

Stick with the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor to reach as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. Your safest bet is to use plain text, or plain-​​text/​HTML dual for­mat. With HTML, manip­u­late the look of your email through on-​​page CSS, with­out any images or exter­nal files.

Keep in mind that, while open rates may be dwin­dling and you should def­i­nitely look into ways to improve your deliv­er­abil­ity, what’s more impor­tant are click­through rates.

So the process I now use and rec­om­mend is, send a dual-​​format email, but have your email drive peo­ple to a web page instead, whether by using teasers or incom­plete ideas, or by embed­ding mul­ti­ple links through­out your mes­sage — and not just a sin­gle one.

That way, you can drive peo­ple to a web page over which you have full con­trol of the look and feel, includ­ing adding any con­ver­sion boost­ers, eye grav­ity, and length­ier sales copy — let alone scripts, forms, and mul­ti­me­dia such as audio and video.

Plus, some aggres­sive spam fil­ters sill frown upon HTML email. For exam­ple, Spam Assas­sin, the most widely used spam-​​filtering soft­ware on the mar­ket pre­ferred by many ISPs, still assigns a cer­tain score — albeit minus­cule, nowa­days — to HTML-​​only emails.

By the way, I use a pretty cool tool to deter­mine my spam scores. It’s a soft­ware called Mail­ingCheck from the folks at Send​Blaster​.com. The rea­son I like it is that it not only scores your email but also gives you point­ers on where to improve.

They offer a ton of resources, includ­ing this link to Spam Assassin’s arti­cle on how to con­sid­er­ably reduce the chances your email is acci­den­tally fil­tered as a “false positive.”

For those mes­sages that do sur­vive run­ning the fil­ter­ing gaunt­let, there is a fur­ther chal­lenge in ensur­ing your mes­sage is not gar­bled by end-​​user email con­trols, result­ing in your newslet­ter being viewed under less than ideal conditions.

For instance, some con­sumers, par­tic­u­larly those who sign up for newslet­ters via offline meth­ods, do not change these set­tings man­u­ally — such as allow­ing HTML, images, scripts, or mul­ti­me­dia, or whitelist­ing the sender’s address.

Nev­er­the­less, these fac­tors can harm your message’s deliv­er­abil­ity and pre­vent your newslet­ters from get­ting through to the inboxes of many of your sub­scribers. Obvi­ously, you can’t read or respond to an email mes­sage that never arrives.

So how do you get more more mileage out of your emails?

One way, I have dis­cov­ered, works extremely well. And that is to con­vert your mes­sage into a sep­a­rate, down­load­ale PDF file. PDFs are not just for newslet­ters, either. Think “spe­cial reports,” “white papers,” “ebooks,” “ecourses,” stand­alone arti­cles, etc.

In my expe­ri­ence I have found that plain text or dual plain-​​text/​HTML mes­sages, with newslet­ters as PDF doc­u­ments either attached or linked so to down­load them, are a supe­rior choice, pro­vid­ing more ver­sa­til­ity and flex­i­bil­ity than any one of these.

(Note that Adobe’s PDF for­mat now has video and form capa­bil­ity with its most recent ver­sion, so you can lit­er­ally put a web page or an entire saleslet­ter in a PDF document.)

Your goal is to make access to your newslet­ter as easy as pos­si­ble. For this rea­son PDF doc­u­ments are the log­i­cal and pre­ferred choice for lead­ers in online marketing.

Think about it…

If you receive an email from some­one with a PDF attach­ment, chances are you would open your mes­sage more read­ily than you would a plain one, if only out of curiosity.

Plus, you don’t need Adobe Acro­bat, which for many is too expen­sive, to cre­ate PDF files. To pro­duce a PDF newslet­ter quickly and eas­ily, there are many PDF con­vert­ers on the mar­ket that are only a frac­tion of the price of Adobe’s Acrobat.

How­ever, the sim­plest short­cut I’ve used is to upload your file — such as a Microsoft Word doc­u­ment or web page — into Google Doc­u­ments, and then export it as a PDF.

The ben­e­fits of using PDF are many, not the least of which is the fact that they allow you to express your unique cre­ative free­dom while pro­vid­ing you with com­plete con­trol of the visual expe­ri­ence — espe­cially when that expe­ri­ence leads to sales.

For exam­ple, it allows you to incor­po­rate many of the con­ver­sion boost­ers you nor­mally use in web pages, such as col­ors, boxes, fonts (even odd fonts not found in most browsers since PDFs embed them into the doc­u­ment), graph­ics, and so on.

In fact, you can use graph­ics and pho­tos to illus­trate your mes­sage, and punc­tu­ate your words know­ing they will be seen in con­text where you orig­i­nally intended. This can be a sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage in main­tain­ing your brand integrity.

Unlike the other choices avail­able, PDFs pro­vide an assur­ance of consistency.

PDFs look the same on any com­puter or in any browser. There will be no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences to the reader no mat­ter how they choose to digest your infor­ma­tion. The reader will see what you intend, whether they read online, on their desk­top, or in print.

(Recently, one reader uploaded one of my free reports on Scribd​.com, which allows any­one to view the doc­u­ment, whether they have the PDF plu­gin in their browser or not.)

Another sig­nif­i­cant area of con­trol is in the dis­tri­b­u­tion. If you want the newslet­ter to be viral and develop a wide read­er­ship base, then it is easy to encour­age sharing.

How­ever, if you want to restrict dis­tri­b­u­tion to opt-​​in or pay­ing mem­bers only, this is also easy to accom­mo­date through pass­word pro­tec­tion and other secu­rity features.

There is a cer­tain degree of pro­tec­tion from con­tent theft in the for­mat itself. Piracy is slightly inhib­ited sim­ply because edit­ing your dis­trib­uted doc­u­ment requires mul­ti­ple steps. You can even lock your PDF from being mod­i­fied, copied, or printed.

Granted, no pro­tec­tion mea­sure is 100% foolproof.

If a thief is deter­mined enough, they will find a way. But gen­er­ally, the more steps it takes to com­plete a func­tion, the less likely you will find peo­ple will­ing to make the attempt.

Also, one of the eas­i­est ways to cre­ate a con­ti­nu­ity pro­gram is not to cre­ate a mem­ber­ship site but to sim­ply use email autore­spon­ders to deliver your con­tent on a reg­u­lar, auto­mated basis in exchange for a monthly sub­scrip­tion fee.

That said, how­ever, I was recently asked a related ques­tion by a coach­ing stu­dent about down­load theft rates, and whether it was nec­es­sary to pro­tect dig­i­tal products.

Most of us don’t think twice about lock­ing our front door when we leave the house, and some of us even acti­vate alarm sys­tems as an extra mea­sure of security.

Tak­ing steps to pro­tect our assets is nat­ural when it comes to our homes. But what about our busi­ness’ assets? It’s often over­looked, but you should absolutely be think­ing about pro­tect­ing your­self when it comes to your busi­ness and infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, too.

Intel­lec­tual theft is an insid­i­ous and dif­fi­cult issue not only due to those with mali­cious intent, but because of the gen­eral pub­lic atti­tude towards cre­ative works.

There is a cer­tain level of obliv­i­ous­ness towards copy­right within the gen­eral pub­lic when it comes to cre­ative works. Whether it’s pho­tos, music, mul­ti­me­dia, web pages, or the writ­ten word, most peo­ple sim­ply do not take copy­right vio­la­tions seriously.

There­fore, it is for both the mali­cious and obliv­i­ous that you must pro­tect your work.

You might be tempted to over­look secu­rity mea­sures, think­ing you won’t lose much. How much will a few rene­gade copies of your prod­uct in cir­cu­la­tion really cost you, after all?

In a recent inci­dent, a hacker’s site went up pro­vid­ing free down­loads of prod­ucts from lead­ing mar­keters. One of my friends’ prod­ucts was included. How did he find out? The stolen doc­u­ments were pulling images from this marketer’s servers.

After count­ing how many down­loads were made, he fig­ured he lost over $21,000. Granted, sites like that are shut down as quickly as they are iden­ti­fied. But the losses and frus­tra­tion incurred in the mean­time, even if it’s a short time, can be significant.

For the same rea­sons that it is impos­si­ble to stop shoplift­ing, it is undoubt­edly impos­si­ble to com­pletely halt theft of dig­i­tal prod­ucts. How­ever, it is pos­si­ble to reduce the impact on your busi­ness by putting sim­ple secu­rity mea­sures in place.

First, make sure you mon­i­tor the Inter­net for vio­la­tions so you can stop leaks before they have a chance to impact your bot­tom line. (One loca­tion are noto­ri­ous “bit tor­rent” sites. They’re not just for songs and “warez.” Infor­ma­tion prod­ucts are not immune.)

When it comes to pro­tect­ing their prod­ucts, most peo­ple look within the prod­uct itself. Secur­ing the indi­vid­ual prod­uct, such as with a pass­word, may seem to pro­vide one level of secu­rity. But if this is all you rely on, then it is a some­what false sense of security.

For one, it can be cum­ber­some and annoy­ing to your legit­i­mate cus­tomers, so you’ll want to con­sider care­fully whether they are worth the effort. For another, such mea­sures are not effec­tive for long, as deter­mined hack­ers can crack pass­words in very lit­tle time.

That’s why it’s bet­ter, and ulti­mately more impor­tant, to pro­tect the source.

If you pro­tect where down­loads are com­ing from and ensure they reside in for­ti­fied, access-​​controlled or password-​​protected areas of your web­site, then you will have a bet­ter mea­sure of pro­tec­tion than sim­ply password-​​protecting indi­vid­ual files.

It may be dif­fi­cult to jus­tify buy­ing ded­i­cated soft­ware if you only sell one prod­uct. But you can use third-​​party ser­vices or install server scripts that pro­vide stronger secu­rity mea­sures, like gen­er­at­ing expir­ing down­load links or lim­it­ing access attempts.

For­tu­nately, there are some sim­ple, low-​​cost solu­tions that will at least lower your risk.

• First, don’t take the easy way out and upload to a folder with a com­mon name, like “down­loads” or “pur­chases” or “prod­ucts.” Use an uncom­mon and unique folder name. Ran­dom num­bers and let­ters can work quite nicely for this.

• Sec­ond, when cre­at­ing your folder make sure you include a sim­ple index file (i.e., a blank “index.htm” file) within it, so that some­one can’t just use the folder name and find the direc­tory list­ing of all your files ready to download.

If you’re a lit­tle more tech­ni­cally inclined and work from an Apache server, there’s the “index ignore” line-​​item in your .htac­cess file, which is simply:

indexignore *

• Third, you’ll also want to make sure you’ve set it up so the search engines do not crawl that folder by alter­ing the robots.txt file on your server.

  Also, make sure to fol­low the pre­ced­ing steps (such as using an uncom­mon name for your prod­ucts folder), since your robots.txt file will oth­er­wise be extend­ing an open invi­ta­tion to hack­ers by telling them where your prod­ucts are located.

• Next, you can add a sim­ple few lines into your .htac­cess file to pre­vent referrer-​​based access. Aside from typ­i­cal pass­word pro­tec­tion, you might want to pre­vent any­one who tries to access your files directly or from another domain.

  This pre­vents hotlink­ing and direct access to those doc­u­ments. Only links on your domain(s) point­ing to those doc­u­ments are allowed. Sim­ply cre­ate an .htac­cess file with the fol­low­ing lines, and upload it to the folder con­tain­ing your files:

  RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain2.com.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain3.com.* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/order.html [R=301,L]

  Remem­ber, this only works on Apache. Plus, be sure to mod­ify “your­do­main” with your own domains, and change the last line to any page on your site you want to redi­rect them to. You might want to push them to the order page.

• Finally, move your files, rename your files and fold­ers, and change your pass­words fre­quently. You will have to remem­ber to change your down­load links in your mer­chant account when you move the files, but the time it takes to do so is well spent.

Ulti­mately, deliv­er­ing your newslet­ter issue or spe­cial report in PDF for­mat pro­vides a high­est level of sta­bil­ity cur­rently avail­able. It over­comes bar­ri­ers to ensure your mes­sage reaches as much of your poten­tial audi­ence as possible.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
• The Real Problem With The Flaw of Attraction
• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

Other Related Posts

• Web Two-Point... What?
• Surgery, Christmas, And a Top-Shelf Newsletter
• How I Grow My Blog Organically Using These 5 Tips
• Attracting Activity to Your Blog
• Twitter Populated By Drones And Fakes?