However, when done incorrectly, email marketing can be destructive, erode brand equity, and turn your happy clients into unhappy ex-clients. Since the goal of all marketing efforts is to attract interest and build a desire to purchase your products or services, it is important that e-mail marketing incorporate best practices — practices that will lead to sales.

To help you make sure your e-mail marketing campaigns conform to best practices, I am attaching a white paper that outlines making sure your campaign does not fall short. The white paper was published by iContact, an excellent e-mail marketing management service which I use in managing my clients e-mail campaigns.

Email_Marketing_Best_Practices_iContact.pdf

Although these two traits might seem to address the same issue, they actually are different. Legibility refers to the design of the typeface, while readability refers to how the typeface is set.

The factors that affect legibility include x-height, character shapes, stroke contrast, the size of its counters, and weight. All of these factors relate to the ability to differentiate one letter from another. This is an extremely important consideration in text designs where a more legible a typeface holds the reader’s attention for a longer time.

A display typeface may have a poor legibility, but in the small number of words for which it is used, it is meant to convey a mood or a feeling. In these cases, legibility may not be important.

Figure 1. ITC Johann Sparking, a powerful handwriting design, is not the most legible of typefaces, especially when set for blocks of copy in small sizes, but its readability increases when set larger for just a couple of words. From the Gettysburg Address.

When setting type, a designer must adjust size, line spacing, letter spacing, words spacing, line length, and alignment. If the type is poorly set then even a legible typeface can be made unreadable. Conversely, a typeface with low legibility can be made more readable through careful typesetting.

Figure 2. Even a legible typeface, such as ITC Flora, can lose readability when set too large with a tight line-spacing. Readability is further hindered by the relatively short line length due to the large size. By setting the type smaller with more line spacing, readability is dramatically improved. From Peter Pan by J. Barrie.

Before the advent of desktop publishing tools, type was set by a specialist called a typesetter. These people understood all of the rules necessary to make sure that type was properly set to maximize readability and in the selection of appropriately legible type. It is now important that your designer understand these same skills so that your message is read and not discarded in frustration.

Read “Type Talk: Say What?” at CreativePro.com

Your ideal target may be making dinner, talking with his or her spouse, or cleaning the house as your ad airs. Your direct mail piece may be set aside and only passively viewed. These are important considerations during the creative process.

ALL MARKETING is subject to the circumstances your target audience may be experiencing as they view your message. These circumstances will likely dilute the effectiveness or responsiveness of your piece. To counteract this, it is important to think about how they will interact with your ad or mailing package during the development.

Make sure that the most important point has prominence, and that it will draw them in. Don’t overwhelm them with too much to look at. The more time it will take to review the piece, the more likely that the majority of your target audience will tune out your advertisement or set your direct mail piece aside — later to be dropped in the waste basket. 

Also, remember that “Once, Twice, Three Times a Customer!” For maximum success, campaigns are necessary for maximum returns. Each contact builds brand recognition and reminds them that you exist until they are ready to buy.

Don’t forget to continue marketing to your current customers. Once you have a customer, keep selling him or her something! The best prospect is a satisfied customer.

To achieve success, keep it relevant, keep it simple, engage the audience — REPEATEDLY — and make it easy for them to respond or get more information.

Great marketing is visceral and then supported by facts. To craft a message that will achieve results, use the following formula: 

1. State the biggest BENEFIT (not feature)
2. Define the problem and show your solution
3. Support the claim and make the offer
4. Give value to the benefits
5. Show the results
6. Build credibility
7. Minimize or eliminate the risk
8. Create an urgency to respond
9. Ask for immediate and decisive action
10. Repeat the offer or the biggest benefit (or both) and request action again

Your marketing will be most successful when you creat a connection between a problem your potential customer wants to solve and your product — a connection they can feel. 

Think about the last time you purchased a computer. On the box was a list of features that read something like this: 3.2 MHz Intel Core2 Dou Processor, 2 Gb RAM, 320 Gb Hard Drive, DVD-R, etc.

Unless you are a computer geek, most of these numbers may not even mean anything to you, except, perhaps that they sound really big. What every user does want to know is how those features are going to benefit them. Think of the marketing for Apple® computers, iPod®, and iPhone®.

It is the power of FEELING that will draw the customer in to your message so that you can support that feeling with facts. This is why features don’t sell products — benefits do.

If you think VDP means a mailing that simply mentions a person’s name, think again. VDP has come a long way since the “Dear [Name]” mail-pieces of the last 20 years. By knowing a little about the consumer’s purchasing history, successful VDP can create customized messaging for print, personalized Web pages, e-mail campaigns and mobile phone offers.

“Anyone can do a mailing with custom labels and addresses,” said Adobe Certified Expert, Kelly McCathran, who spoke at a Webinar sponsored by the Printing Industries of Northern California (PINC).

The key to successful VDP is two-fold. First, you must have a database. The more information you have about your contacts, the more customization can be made to your piece. Data for VDP can be collected from many sources including mailings, business cards and from Web sites and surveys. Once the data is collected, the magic rests in the hands — and mind — of a skilled designer. The unique part is — and this is where design is so important — the personalization has to skillfully and subtly become part of the message.

For example, let’s imagine a company that sells uniforms and has a database that includes the names of high school coaches, their teams colors, demographics about the racial make-up of their school, and other information. The designer of their catalog can utilize this information to automatically swap the photos to include players that fit their racial make-up and all the uniforms would be in the team colors. Perhaps the team name even appears on the uniforms. Finally, a personalized ordering URL is created with the coaches name.

When McCathran describes the effectiveness of VDP, she says it’s like “shooting 1 or 100,00 arrows from a single bow simultaneously and having each one hit its intended, separate target.”

The options for VDP systems range from small copier-like devices to full blown digital presses and the quality of digital equipment is continually improving and the cost is dropping. McCathran points out “More people are going to be making the decision to do shorter runs,” she says adding, “we’re already seeing that now — digital printing with as good quality [as offset] without having to run plates.”

With higher response rates and the ability to target your message to the reader — reducing waste — VDP is a marketing tool that can no longer be ignored.

To work around this limitation and to incorporate non-standard fonts into their website, many designers have resorted to a variety of workarounds. These have included: replacing HTML text with graphics, replacing entire Web pages with PDF or Flash, and using CSS font family selectors to inform the browser of a series of font choices. 

Each of these techniques has one major flaw. None of them safely render live HTML text in a non-standard font. This limits the ability of search engines to index the content of a site and reduces the ability of people to find the content.

This is what made me so excited to learn about a new method that has recently come on the scene — sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (after original creator Shaun Inman). sIFR replaces HTML text on the fly with dynamically generated Flash text. In other words: your site uses plain old HTML text but visitors see Flash text. It works through CSS selectors (tags used to describe what the text is).

sIFR can be used to style headings, captions, navigation items, and even short paragraph text like block quotes, pull quotes, or what have you — but it wouldn’t be practical to use this technology to style entire pages of text. It provides an elegant method for customizing the look of web pages while keeping the content accessible to search engines.

To achieve the best results, it is important for the designer and production professionals to work together so that the file the printer receives is properly prepared to achieve the expected results. Over the last thirteen years, I have made it a point to become an expert in working with the production professionals who will be printing my designs. This allows me to achieve maximum results for my clients.

Some of the things these professionals have taught me, apply to all print jobs sent to any printer. Other requirements are specific to that company and to the particular production method. Each requirement is incorporated as part of our design process and before sending a job to production, we conduct a detailed production review.

Just recently, a client asked me to send a job to production with a printer whom I have not worked with. We made contact with the printer to discuss their preferred specifications. The letter of thanks we received back from the printer was similar to notes and comments received from others over the years.

“In a world where I see lots of artwork, (mostly bad) I find it a ‘breath of fresh air’ to get some easy to print work. THANKS.”

—Bill Wilkin
Red Star Printing, Inc

When a printer becomes confident that the files they have been handed have been made “Bullet Proof” for the production process it saves the client money. “Bullet Proof” designs take less time in prepress, use less materials, and take less time on press. All of this reduces production costs. These savings are passed on to the client in lower production rates. 

Process printing, using the familiar CMYK inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) makes it possible to create the illusion of photographic colors from the use of four translucent inks. As the inks are laid down in different densities overlapping each other, they mix to form the variety of colors which we see. However, the CMYK color pallet has a limited gamut (the range of colors) which it can produce.

Spot color printing, involves specifying a particular color, or colors, to be printed. These are selected from a color matching system. The most popular system is the Pantone Matching System (PMS). Each color in the system is assigned a PMS number. For example, PMS-185 is a bright red. By printing a spot color, you can be assured that the color on the final piece will match the color that was specified.

Process printing can often be more cost effective when a large range of colors are needed, because all the colors can be created by four printing plates. With spot colors, a printing plate must be created for each color used.

When cost is an important factor and many colors are required, process printing is the right choice. If, however, it is critical that a color be consistent across a variety of pieces, then specifying a spot color is the only way viable option.

Times when you would want to use spot colors

• When you want to assure consistent color for corporate logos, etc.
• When you want amazing BRIGHT colors which exceed the capability of CMYK Process Colors.

• When you need three or fewer colors and you will not be reproducing full color photographs.

• When you want clarity in text and crisp lines.

The world of design is teeming with a myriad of techniques, processes and technologies. One such technique that I recently became aware of is HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. Now, HDR is not a new process — it dates back to the 1930’s, but it has in recent years become more popular in creating photographic images with an extremely high tonal range.

Originally used in 3D, HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) is now in popular use in photography. At it’s most basic level it is the process of taking multiple exposures and merging them together into a single 32-bit image — normal photographs have an 8- to 16-bit depth.

The human eye can see a larger range of tones than the camera can capture on the chip or film in a single photograph. Typically, we must sacrifice elements in a photo when we press the shutter. The solution is to take more than one photograph using a technique called bracketing — shooting a photo at normal exposure, then under-expose a shot to capture highlights and over-expose a shot to capture shadow detail.

FIGURE 1: An Example of Bracketed Exposures

HDR allows a photographer to capture difficult shooting situations such as a powerful cloudscape and some cliffs. With traditional photography, if the clouds are properly exposed then the cliffs become dark. If exposure is set to capture detail in the cliffs, the brighter sky is blown out and detail is lost.

By taking a bracketed set of photos of the scene and then using the HDR tools found in the latest versions (CS2 and CS3) of Adobe’s Photoshop, a photographer is able to merge the photos to produce a single image with the larger range of tones that are required to show all the details in the shadows and highlights.

The Sydney Harbor Bridge from Kirribilli at night