Building Email Marketing Trust Through Appearance (Part One)

Appearance is everything, even in the success you can achieve through email marketing. Your branding, and the trust you gain through recognition, is gauged by the appearance of the messages you send to subscribers. The design you utilize, projects your quality and distinction.

Many email users consider commercial messages as spam partly because they look like spam. Marketing messages sent out with little attention to branding, layout, and design details will likely be considered spam and quickly ignored or deleted. To avoid portraying this image and to gain trust from your subscribers, you need to pay attention to the appearance of what you send out.

Here are my tips to help you build trust through the appearance of your emails and, allowing your email marketing campaigns to achieve success.

1. Make sure the ‘from’ line is recognizable.

Recognition is important in gaining trust from subscribers. This makes it crucial to use a recognizable name in your ‘from’ line. Use your real name, an online alias, or organization’s name, product or service. Obviously, you should choose whichever name your subscribers are most likely to recognize as well as respond to positively.

2. Optimize the preview pane.

Apart from your sender and subject line, what appears in recipients’ preview pane is what many people first encounter. The content seen through the preview pane, helps recipients decide whether or not they want to read the entire message. To keep your subscribers from ignoring or deleting your emails before receiving your message, make sure that what appears in their preview pane is recognizable and attractive. Try using your logo, a masthead, and an attention-grabbing headline.

3. Encourage subscriber communication.

Many Email Marketers use "Do Not Reply" accounts because they don’t monitor communications sent to the address they use to send out emails. This is often used when emails are sent by third party suppliers or email marketing companies.

However, this can be detrimental to the success of your email marketing campaign. You should actually encourage your subscribers to connect with you with comments, suggestions, or questions. By doing so, you gain insights from your subscribers and inspire trust through your interactions.

Check back next week for three more tips for building Email Marketing Trust through Appearance. Meanwhile, please share your comments or questions regarding the design aspects you follow to create success in your email marketing campaigns.

Find out more about our February Elite VA Insider session – What You Absolutely MUST Know About Design featuring expert VA, Jan Wlodarski of Inspired Design (www.inspireddesignexperts.com) on my teleseminars page: http://bit.ly/CrHSM

Jeannine Clontz, owner of Accurate Business Services, a VA practice, is an author, writer, speaker and VA Business Coach specializing in providing professional business coaching to established and start-up virtual assistants (VA’s). For her FREE audio CD “What’s Holding Back my Business Success?”, a 2-month trial in her Insider group coachingprogram, or 1-month trial of her coaching club visit: http://www.VAbizcoach.com; or contact her at: coach@VAbizcoach.com.

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