Your Success Is MTD s Success! These guides and requirements have been created by MTD to help ensure greater success in your email campaigns. Please have all team members read their relevant section below: IT Personnel Section 1: Preparing Your Domain Content Writer Section 2: Planning the Content Graphic Designer Section 3: Creating the Design HTML Editor Section 4: Coding the HTML
Section 1 Preparing Your Domain This update to your domain can take as much as three days to propagate throughout the system. SPF Record Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will check a file on your domain called an SPF Record (Sender Policy Framework Record) to verify that an email campaign is being sent by the domain from which it claims to be sent. If the sender in this case, MTD is not listed in the SPF record, then the email is more likely to be flagged as spam and routed to the recipient s junk folder. To add MTD as an authorized sender from your domain, you need to create an SPF Record (if you don t already have one), or add the MTD sending IP address to your existing record. Example SPF Record: v=spf1 ip4:208.85.48.122 ip4:yourmailserveripaddress -all ( ip4:yourmailserveripaddress is where you would list your own mail server IP address. If you have multiple mail server IPs, simply add them in succession.) Please check with your domain support to be certain of the proper settings. Otherwise, your company email could be interrupted.
Section 2 Planning the Content 1. Make a legitimate offer of value. Simply announcing your presence is one effective way to remind your current customers to place an order, but in prospecting, it means very little to the recipient. Offer an incentive to take a closer look at your company or product. 2. Plan a landing page relevant to the email message placed on your web site where recipients can investigate your offer further, place an order, or contact you for more details. 3. Plan to have at least one link above the fold in your message (visible in the screen without scrolling down). Many people will make a decision about your offer without even scrolling down to the end. Make sure they see a link! 4. Avoid using spam trigger words in the copy: guarantee or guaranteed one-time no obligation risk-free celebrity 5. NEVER require a recipient to register on your web site in order to get content promised in your email (such as helpful tips or an article). When someone clicks through to your site, they should be able to get what you offered without having to first give up information. 6. Streamline your message. Recipients are not nearly as enthralled with your brilliant sales copy as you think they should be. TIP: The goal of your email is to get recipients to your website where they can find more information about your offer not to convey every possible detail in the email, which only diffuses your message. Less is more! 7. Don't rely solely upon images to convey your message. That may look great in print but it is likely to get your email routed to the junk mail folder. Rule of thumb: 30% images to 70% text. (MTD will not send an all-image email.)
Section 3 Creating the Design 1. Design with Responsive Design in mind! A design that looks great in a desktop or webbased email client may cause the reader frustration on a mobile device. Plan ahead of time how your email will reformat for mobile viewing. More on that at the end of Section 4. 2. Do not create an all-image design! Rule of thumb: 30% images to 70% text. Because of our commitment to the highest deliverability for our clients and to maintaining a high sender reputation with the major ISPs, MTD will not send an email comprised of all images or of mostly images. 3. Limit email width. 600 pixels is recommended (click here to see a 600 pixel example). This is based on what can be easily viewed in most email preview windows. TIP: As we said in the previous section, the goal of your email is to get recipients to your website where they can find more information not to convey every possible detail in the email. 4. Use only the fonts common to most browsers: Arial Impact Arial Black Comic Sans MS (only Normal works in Mac no bold or italic) Courier New Georgia Tahoma (include Geneva for Mac) Times New Roman (include Times for Mac) Trebuchet MS (include Trebuchet for Mac) Verdana 5. Avoid using background images in your design they don t display properly in many email clients, and not at all in Outlook.
Basic HTML Requirements Section 4 Coding the HTML 1. Please do not submit HTML files created with FrontPage, Microsoft Word, Publisher, etc. These programs bloat the code with useless tags. Use a true HTML editor. 2. If you are submitting an email template created in another email provider such as Emma, Constant Contact, etc., please first convert all URLs back to the original URL in other words, without the email service's tracking code. If not, we will do the conversion and you ll be charged for the time. Example: change href= http://m2a.com/as9f789e90pu8rj39pr=#sjkd %)adjkfgj=308450-8f888d90f0ef8 back to href= http://yourdomain.com If you d like us to extract the HTML from a test mailing created in another ESP, include a view in your browser link. We cannot extract clean code from a forwarded email. Also please be aware that we frequently have to clean up templates created in other email services because a WYSIWYG editor can create very messy code. 3. Do not place background color codes in the <body> tag. Place background color codes in a table wrapper. 4. Format your message so that it will still display well and make sense if the recipient does not have images enabled. For instance, use background colors behind images as well as font formatting (to format your alt text). This is especially important if your Call To Action (CTA) is an image link. For more on alt text formatting, see this page of examples. 5. We do not attach files of any kind to email campaigns because of deliverability. Host video, audio, PDF files, etc. on your website and include a link in the email. 6. For your convenience, include a name= tag in all anchors (<a>) so that you can more easily identify them on the click-through report. 7. You can decrease your costs by submitting a plain text version of the email along with the HTML version. Otherwise, we will create a plain text version and include that time in the charges.
Responsive Design Section 4 continued Simply put, a Responsive Design is a template design which automatically re-formats depending on the size of the output screen meaning your template will display one way for desktop viewing, and another way for mobile viewing. Our analytics to date show that almost 30% of our audience (performing arts teachers and administrators) open emails on a mobile device. You need to be using Responsive Design NOW! Note: in the Design step, you will need to keep in mind which elements will stack and in what order. For this reason your designer needs to have a basic understanding of how Responsive Design re-formats a template layout. There is a virtual treasure trove of tutorials and templates available online for Responsive Design, but our favorites are found at Email on Acid. Here s a great blog post on the topic: http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/c13/a_responsive_design_tutorial If no one in your organization has the time or ability to learn coding with Responsive Design, MTD can create a template for you at the standard design rate. However, the initial design must still be compatible with mobile-responsive reformatting of the layout. MTD 2910 N. Powers Blvd, Suite 352 Colorado Springs, CO 80922 800-320-7507 info@mtdresearch.com