And I tried to put email marketing in context by pointing out this juicy statistic from the Direct Marketing Association: For every dollar the average business invests in email marketing, it gets $48 in return. Today we’re going to discuss the following: optimizing your layout for the preview pane. As you read this post, keep that $48 figure in mind!

Let’s back up. So far, you’ve gotten the green light from the spam filter and made it into the inbox. Your ‘from’ and ‘subject’ lines were either familiar or enticing enough to prompt the person to open your email. While these are great victories, you’re far from done!

Designing for the preview pane

What’s the ‘preview pane’? It’s the user-interface that most email applications, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes and Apple Mail (pictured), use to display email. And most users—people like you, your customers and me—typically stick to the default preview pane settings: horizontal alignment with email images blocked.

What does this mean for your email marketing message? For one thing, no matter how much time you spend making your email visually appealing, it’s going appear fragmented to the average recipient, especially if you have a lot of graphics at the top.

I don’t suggest that you ditch all design in favor of plain text emails. Most users will unblock images once they’re comfortable that your message isn’t spam. But you’ve got only a fraction of second and a tiny sliver of screen space to earn enough trust/interest to get the person to keep reading and possibly unblock your images.

Alt text to the rescue!

Alt text is what shows up when an email client blocks images, so it acts as an image description. (Alt text is intended to describe images to Internet users who are visually impaired.) Alt text gives you the opportunity to communicate to the recipient. It’s important to use alt text to reinforce who you are and why prospects should care about your email.

Here’s an example of an image-heavy email that doesn’t use any alt text. As you can see, Sam’s Club is missing a big opportunity here—all that canvas and not a single word about their great holiday deals!

This is what the email is supposed to look like:

In this example, J. Crew does a marginally better job, at least getting their name in the alt text. But think of how much more effective it would be if they included the offer as well.

We can give points to J.Crew and Sam’s Club for at least having header text that encourages people to view the email in a browser. But the text is small and doesn’t reference any of the content in the email.

Depending on the email marketing tool you use, you can typically add alt text when you’re uploading an image. Some tools, Kutenda included, make it very easy to add. (If you’re in the market for new email marketing software, be sure to ask how easy it is to add alt text to your photos and graphics.)

The preview pane typically hides a large chunk—the middle and bottom—of your email, so it’s important to put key information in the top inch or two of your email. By ‘key information’ we mean your business logo, which creates recognition, and your messaging, which creates interest (we hope). The more compelling the introduction, the more likely the reader will engage further. Remember, most people are flooded with email and will look for any reason to ignore yours; by getting to the point quickly, you have a better shot at drawing prospects deeper into your message and closer to your conversion point.

It’s no secret that email is a great way to draw large numbers of leads down your sales funnel. Not only is it easier and cheaper than other lead-nurturing methods, it’s incredibly effective. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email returns $48.56 for every $1 you invest.

But great ROI is not automatic. To fully realize the potential of email as a sales tool, you need two things: (1) knowledge of email best practices and (2) a well-reasoned strategy for success. These are the things we’ll cover in this two-part email series.

First let’s make sure we’re on the same page: We’re assuming you already have a targeted list of leads that you’ve collected yourself (as opposed to a list you purchased). If you’re not at this point, don’t worry: Robin’s post on building your opt-in list is a great place to start. Read it, start implementing it, then come back here. (We’ll wait…)  OK, let’s go.

1. Deciding on an emailing schedule
Consider the game of chess. A chess master isn’t thinking about how his next move will get him to check mate—he’s thinking about how his next 15-25 moves will get him there. Same goes for email. One email won’t do the trick, but a carefully constructed sequence of emails will.

How many, how often and what time to send?
Extending the chess analogy further, I regret to inform you that here is no rule of thumb for designing email campaigns, just like there’s no foolproof series of moves that will bring you to checkmate.

When creating your campaigns, you’ll have to make judgment calls based on a variety of factors, including your audience type (demographics, needs, wants, habits, etc.); what you’re selling (is it something people want to think about frequently?); the content of your emails; and your relationship with your audience.

An example
If you sell auto insurance, a monthly email is probably the right frequency, since people have only so much desire to think about their insurance. However, certain content may dictate a more rapid-fire approach: People are always eager to save money, so if your campaign centers on an irresistible offer, you may have success with more touches at a higher frequency.

To reiterate, there’s no formula for constructing an effective email nurture campaign. We could lie and tell you to send X emails at Y rate on Z day of the week, but that advice wouldn’t be very helpful. If you want to produce results with email, you need to do your research, think critically, test multiple strategies, monitor your results and keep striving for perfection.

2. Getting your email through the spam filter
At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s impossible to nurture leads if they don’t see your email. It pays to take every precaution to avoid spam filters. Start with your subject line.

Subject line no-nos

• excessive punctuation!!!!!
• ALL CAPS
• missplleed words
• w0rds sp&lled wth $pecial ch@r@cters

Message body no-nos

• Email messages that contain images but little or no text could be labeled as spam. (Spam filters suspect that senders of image-heavy emails are trying to hide their content.)
• Messages that use colored backgrounds or numerous font styles. (If possible, use a simple stylesheet to format the message text rather than excessive font tags.)

3. Getting recipients to open your email
So you’ve successfully avoided the spam filter. Good job. But you still have work to do: You’ve got to get prospects to actually open your email, and yours is just one email among many clamoring for attention.

So you have to stick your subject line.

Any tennis players reading this? Yes? Then you know that getting your serve in play is one of the most important elements of the game. You have zero chances of winning the point, much less the match, if you don’t get the ball in play. Same goes for subject lines. If they don’t entice people to click, your email campaigns won’t get off the ground.

Here are some tips for your subject lines:

• Tell readers who you are up front. There is no need to try to hide your identity, so make sure your company is easily associated with your subject line.
• Entice with your subject line, but don’t give everything away. You want to give recipients a reason to open the email.
• If your message contains an offer, be sure to include it in the subject line. People are always looking for a deal!
• If you can, split test your subject line to find out which is the highest converting for your business. (You’d be surprised which subject lines perform well.)
• Don’t get carried away with writing enticing subject lines or you’ll risk alerting the spam filter. What’s more, you don’t want to overpromise in the subject line and under-deliver in the message body.

According to research from Epsilon, the from line is now nearly as important as the subject line when it comes to getting fickle people to open emails. Faced with too many emails and not enough time, people use the from line as a filter. If they don’t recognize the name, they skip it, delete it, or mark it as spam. The upshot is that your “from” line should include your company name and/or other markers that the recipient will recognize.

That’s it for part one. In future posts, we’ll discuss the remaining four elements of a successful nurture campaign: Optimizing your layout for the preview pane, applying the WIIFM method to content, issuing calls to action and using landing pages to improve conversion rate.

Read part two here

Last week at the ConnectWise Summit in Orlando, I had many opportunities to talk to MSPs about how they use ConnectWise to close sales. As this was the first time many MSPs had ever talked to us about how Kutenda helps grow their businesses, it brought up a good question that many of you asked: How do you use Kutenda to uncover sales opportunities if you also use ConnectWise Tracks to do the same thing?

Kutenda is a great tool to help you manage the front end of the sales process, because it helps you to automate that long sales cycle familiar to most managed services providers. Let me explain what I mean.

When a prospect for one of your services expresses interest, one of three things might happen:

1. You call/meet, write a proposal and they sign up (best-case scenario)
2. You call/meet, spend time with the back-and-forth negotiation, the deal dies for any number of reasons
3. You call/meet, realize that the customer doesn’t have a need or doesn’t have the budget

How do you manage the people in scenario two or three? Continuing to call or meet with them might very well be a waste of time for right now, because they may not be ready to buy. Or, maybe they expressed interest in data recovery services, but won’t actually buy data recovery (they might be a better candidate for Help Desk services, for example). If you’re scheduling activities in Tracks for these two prospects, your salespeople are spending time on prospects who aren’t ready to buy.

Kutenda helps you to move those prospects into a ready-to-buy position by giving you a way to automate your follow-up. Here’s what that process looks like:

1. Educate your prospects: Your prospects and customers aren’t spending hours reading your web site to learn about all the other wonderful services you offer. So, you need to let them know—regularly. First thing to do is send them monthly e-newsletters that position you as the expert in managed services, so they know to think of you when they have a business problem you can solve. Kutenda writes a regular e-newsletter for managed service providers—all you have to do is send it.

2. Tell them how you can help them: If a prospect expressed interest in one service, he or she may not know what else you do (I hear this all the time from MSPs—they sell a customer on manageConnectWise services, and the customer buys a VoIP system from someone else, because the customer doesn’t know they offer VoIP). You need to tell them AND make attractive offers to generate interest in those other services. How? By sending them regular offers through email so they understand the other ways you can solve their business problems. Kutenda helps you do this too: We’ve got ready-to-launch campaigns for BDR, Help Desk, Network Management and more, updated monthly, which you can set up to  go out automatically.

Once someone has expressed interest in starting a conversation, that’s when you move them into ConnectWise and psuh them through the last parts of the sales process. Using Tracks to help your sales team manage follow-up tasks toward the end of the sales cycle (the last 20 percent) and Kutenda to automate the lead-up (the first 80 percent) makes the entire sales cycle—from initial prospect to closed sale—easier to manage and more efficient for your sales team.

In part two: How Kutenda helps you generate more leads to put into your sales pipeline.