Complete guide to_email

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO

B2B EMAIL

MARKETING
Six Steps to More Effective
Email Marketing Campaigns

Table of Contents
Introduction..............................................................................................3
Step 1: Authentication & Deliverability.............................................4
Step 2: Template Design.........................................................................7
Step 3: Email Content............................................................................11
Step 4: Testing & Optimization..........................................................13
Step 5: Sending Best Practices...........................................................15
Step 6: Tracking & Reporting..............................................................17
Worksheet: Warming Up Your IP Address......................................19
Email Template Checklist...................................................................20
Call to Action Tip Sheet......................................................................21
The Pre-Flight Email Checklist...........................................................22
Worksheet: Finding Your Perfect Send Time............................23
Worksheet: Email Reporting..............................................................24
About Pardot...........................................................................................25

Introduction

................................................................................................................................

Email is at the heart of your online marketing efforts, so
it’s important to take the time to make sure that every
aspect of your strategy is optimized.

With all of the changes in today’s
marketing world, one thing remains
certain: email marketing isn’t going
away anytime soon. In fact, in a 2013
study conducted by ExactTarget, 77% of
consumers chose email as their preferred
channel for receiving permission-based
promotional messages.
Still, email marketing is changing.
Today’s marketing tools can make your
email efforts smarter, more efficient,
and more targeted than ever before. The
Complete Guide to B2B Email Marketing
will walk you through the entire process
of creating effective, targeted emails —
from planning and designing to sending
and optimizing — in six straightforward
steps:

Step 1: Authentication & Deliverability
Step 2: Template Design
Step 3: Email Content
Step 4: Testing & Optimization
Step 5: Sending Best Practices
Step 6: Tracking & Reporting

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We’ll also provide six printable worksheets,
tip sheets, and checklists at the end of the
guide to help keep your efforts organized
and on track. Let’s get started!
A FEW TERMS TO KNOW
eblast: A widespread electronic
blanketing of your customer or
prospect database
Deliverability score: The percentage
of emails sent that reach an inbox
and don’t bounce.
IP address: a number assigned
to each device participating in a
computer network
ESP: Email Service Provider
blacklist: A list of email addresses
that are deemed unwanted and
blocked from inboxes
CAN-SPAM: Controlling the Assault
of Non-Solicited Pornography and
Marketing Act of 2003; enforces
tighter regulations on email SPAM
spam traps: an email address created
to lure spam and identify spammers

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The Complete Guide to B2B Email Marketing

3

1

Authentication & Deliverability

..........................................................................................................................................................

Deliverability should be a consideration at every stage of your email
marketing efforts, starting with the initial set-up of your system.

If you’re just getting started with email
marketing, it can be tempting to jump
right in and begin building the perfect
campaign. But there are a few things that
need to be considered before you even
think about composing your first message,
and one of these things is deliverability.
Few aspects of email marketing are as
important as deliverability. After all, even
a perfectly crafted email is rendered
worthless if it never reaches its mark. Taking
measures to protect your deliverability
score before you start emailing can keep
you from accidentally triggering spam
filters — or worse, landing your IP address
on an email blacklist and thwarting your
email marketing efforts before you even
get started.
Let’s take a look at a few ways to make sure
you’re optimizing deliverability right from
the start: by setting up email authentication,
warming up your IP address, and compiling
good lists.

Setting Up Authentication

Setting up email authentication is the single
most important step you can take to avoid
spam filters and ensure that your message
is delivered. This step is sometimes ignored
by marketers since it’s not required to send
emails and can often require the assistance
of the IT department. But because such

measures are a reflection of a company’s
integrity, the price for ignoring
authentication is really too high for
marketers to bear.

Authentication Standards

Email authentication involves equipping
automated emails with enough authentic
information so that recipient mail servers
can recognize the nature of each incoming
message. This differs from content
filtering, whereby an email is blocked or
allowed based on an analysis of its content
rather than its source (this aspect of
deliverability will be discussed under step
three). Authentication standards attempt
to separate the unethical “black hats”
(spammers and phishers) from “white hat”
marketers who operate legitimately.
There are no universal authentication
guidelines, but there are some widelyadopted standards used by a growing
number of ISPs and other mail servers.
The most commonly accepted standards
are SPF, SenderID, DomainKeys, and DKIM.
Let’s take a quick look at each on the
following page.
..........................................................................

Download our free Email Deliverability
Handbook for hints & tips on increasing
your deliverability score, complying
with CAN-SPAM laws, & avoiding spam
folders.

4................................................................................................................................................................................
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Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
authentication
allows
network
administrators to specify which internet
hosts can send emails claiming to originate
from that domain by adding a specific
SPF record to the public DNS record. Mail
exchangers can then verify the sender’s
identity against the list published by the
email administrator.
SenderID authentication validates the
origin of email messages by verifying the IP
address of the sender against the alleged
owner of the sending domain. Sender ID
is the email authentication tool supported
by Microsoft, while DomainKeys (below) is
Yahoo!’s tool.
DomainKeys is a Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
protocol for authenticating email that
employs a public and private key. Senders
publish a public key for their domain, and
all outgoing email is signed using the
corresponding private key. The advantage
of DomainKeys is that it protects the
integrity of the sender and the message.
This method not only verifies the validity of
the sender, but it also allows third parties
to relay or forward the message without
breaking the authentication.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is
Yahoo!’s and Cisco’s combined attempt to
enhance the DomainKeys standard. This
protocol bases acceptance of messages
on the sender’s overall reputation
and trustworthiness. DKIM uses the
cryptographic validation technique of
DomainKeys to evaluate whether to accept
email from the sender’s domain.

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The major ISPs and many corporate spam
filters check for one or more of these types
of authentication when deciding whether
or not to allow emails into a recipient’s inbox. A solution like marketing automation,
which allows you to send emails from your
actual domain and automatically authenticates using these four commonly accepted
standards, will go a long way in ensuring
that more of your emails get delivered.

Warming Up Your IP Address

All IP addresses start out “cold,” and need
to be warmed up by gradually increasing
sending volume, usually over the course
of two to six weeks. This is an extremely
important step in your email strategy: if
you send out an email to every prospect in
your database right off the bat, you’re going to raise some major red flags for spam
monitors.
The key here is a gradual and steady rampup to final sending volumes. Start off with
only your best lists to build up your reputation, and try to keep it under 5,000 emails
a day for the first week. Starting out at this
rate allows you to monitor for issues that
arise from initial sends on cold IPs without
having all your emails bounce. From here,
form a plan for slowly increasing sending
volumes until you reach your goal.
...........................................................................

Want more help with warming up your IP
address? Use the worksheet on page 19
to map out your strategy and make sure
you’re staying on track.

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5

Compiling Good Lists

It may sound like common sense, but
before you start sending out email
communications, make sure your
recipients want to be contacted. After all,
you’re not doing yourself any favors by
sending messages to people who don’t
want receive them, and you’re placing
your email reputation on the line. Here are
a few ways to make sure you’re compiling
the best lists possible.

Don’t buy lists. First and foremost, if

you’re buying lists, stop. Even if these lists
aren’t chock-full of invalid email — or spam
trap — addresses, they’re likely to result in
a high number of spam complaints and put
you on the fast track for being blacklisted.

Use active opt-ins or double opt-ins.

When it comes to obtaining permission,
it’s a good idea to go beyond CAN-SPAM
laws — meaning passive opt-in doesn’t cut
it. Whenever you’re collecting information
for the purpose of sending email, include
a checkbox and clearly outline what type
of communication can be expected. To
thoroughly cover your bases, consider
using a double opt-in process, where
recipients confirm the opt-in via email
after the initial form submission or
contact. Double opt-ins confirm that email

addresses are valid, keeping bounce rates
low and safeguarding against spamtraps
being added to your permanent lists.

Make opt-outs easy and fast. This is

one of the best ways to ensure that you
don’t get reported as spam. Remember
that an opt-out won’t hurt your reputation
but being reported as spam will. With
many marketing automation platforms, a
recipient who opts out will automatically
be removed from your list, but if you are not
using a system that does this automatically,
make sure you are regularly updating and
quickly getting opt-outs off of your lists.

“

An opt-out won’t hurt
your email reputation,
but being reported as
spam will.

”

...........................................................................

Looking for more information on
maintaining your email reputation?
Check out 5 Questions That Can Keep
You Off Email Blacklists on our blog.

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2

Template Design

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The look and feel of your email template can grab your reader’s
attention and engage them with your message.

The foundation of any good email
campaign always lies in the design of the
template itself. Spending sufficient time
laying the groundwork for an effective
email template will pay off later in the form
of greater response rates, better branding,
and stronger customer relationships.

friendly messages — all without requiring
any knowledge of HTML. But even with
the most powerful tools available, there
are still a lot of factors to consider before
hitting that “send” button. Let’s take a look.

Planning Out Your Template

Marketing automation platforms with a
“what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG)
editor make it easy to design and author
professional-looking HTML emails. The
WYSIWYG editor:

When it comes to designing email
templates for the B2B audience, it can be
tough to know where to start — especially
when you consider all of the factors that
go into planning: deciding what types
of email you’d like to send (drip emails,
autoresponders, webinar blasts, etc),
which images to use, whether to use HTML
or plain text, and more.
Having a marketing automation platform
with a WYSIWYG email editor can make
the process considerably less tedious
and time-intensive while also enabling
the customization, or tailoring, of email
campaigns for more personal, customer...........................................................................

Consult our full Email Design Lookbook
to see examples of email templates that
work for each.

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ABOUT THE WYSIWYG EDITOR

• Provides a user-friendly editing
interface that resembles familiar word
processing applications
•
• Approximates how the page will
actually be displayed in a web browser
•
• Eliminates the need to learn HTML and
• allows for fast editing of content that
• can be tailored to your desired
• messaging
•
• Facilitates the easy insertion of images
• like headers or logos, as well as custom
• HTML code for further tailoring to your
• brand

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7

6 Questions to Get Started

An appealing, easy-to-read email template
can make the difference between your
email being read, skimmed, or deleted.
If you’re looking for some guidelines for
email template design, like where to place
your call to action or what elements you
need to include, start by consulting the
following six questions.

to HTML, while drip emails and webinar
follow-ups might be more effective as
simple plain text emails. Still not sure which
format will be more appropriate for your
email? Consult the chart below to compare
the benefits of each.

1. Is HTML or plain text better suited for
your email? Many emails like newsletters
and event invitations lend themselves more

Remember: If you do choose to create an
HTML email, it’s good practice to create
an alternate, plain text version as well, so
that readers have options if the email isn’t
rendering properly for them.

PLAIN TEXT

HTML

Universal readability. Every email
client can render plain text emails, so
using it means that you never have to
worry about your formatting being a
stumbling block to deliverability.

Better click-through rates. The clickthrough rates of HTML emails are close
to twice that of plain text emails, largely
due to the visual appeal of HTML over
plain text.

Higher deliverability rates. Plain text
messages generally achieve a slightly
higher deliverability rate, since they’re
smaller and require less bandwidth to
deliver than HTML emails.

Tracking codes. HTML offers the ability
to place tracking codes in links to help
you determine the effectiveness of email
offers. Also, while plain text emails don’t
allow you to track open rates, HTML
makes this possible.

Consistently accurate rendering. Some
ESPs routinely strip out HTML elements
from incoming emails to protect against
viruses, causing such emails to display
improperly.

Enhanced aesthetics. Your message’s
attractiveness and readability can
be appreciably improved with color,
graphics, and font choices.

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2. Does your email have an obvious call
to action that’s set apart from the rest
of your email? If your call to action isn’t
distinguished by color, placement, or text
treatment, it will be hard for your readers
to understand the purpose of your email.
Even more importantly, it will make it that
much more difficult for them to act on it.
3. Have you broken your email up into
smaller sections and used bulleted text
as much as possible? Today’s consumers
are pressed for time, meaning that they
have a tendency to scan emails for any
important points that pertain specifically
to them. Use bulleted text and short
paragraphs as much as possible to cater to
these preferences.
4. Have you taken advantage of using
images wherever possible? Including
visuals in your emails can break up the
monotony of text (especially if there is a lot
of it). Just make sure to have a reasonable
image-to-text ratio; far more images than
text could serve as a red flag to spam filters.
5. Did you include contact information,
social sharing buttons, and unsubscribe
links? You’ll want your email recipients
to be able to share your content, or
communicate with you should they have
any concerns or wish to unsubscribe.

Design Considerations

The components that you choose to
emphasize in your email, along with the
format, will largely depend on the type
of email that you’re sending — such as
a newsletter, webinar follow-up, event
promotion, drip email, or training email.
Use the chart on the following page as a
guide to some important best practices
for each type of email template that you
create.
If you’d like to see a collection of example
email templates that cover everything
from newsletters to event follow-ups,
download our full Email Design Lookbook,
which features 10 stellar email templates
provided by Pardot clients. Remember,
sometimes the best way to learn is through
imitation (although we encourage you to
exercise your creativity!), so if you ever
find yourself searching for inspiration, try
implementing a few of the things that catch
your eye in any example email templates
that you come across.
...........................................................................

Print out the checklist on page 20 to make
sure you’re optimizing your templates as
you design.

6. Is your email template clean and
uncluttered? This is perhaps one of the
most important things to pay attention
to when designing your email templates.
Information in your email should be as
easy to read and digest as possible.
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9

EMAIL TYPE

DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

New Feature Launch

Include only the essentials in the copy to provide
recipients with exactly what they need to know,
quickly. Consider including simple visuals and/or a
video link to increase engagement.

Plain Text

These emails won’t require much design work, but
make sure plain-text emails are short, conversational,
and include a personalized signature to enhance the
impression that the email is coming directly from a
sales rep or manager.

Training and Events

With this type of email, readers want to be able to find
the information they need (most likely a schedule or
calendar) at a glance, so make sure your template is
simple, appealing, and easy to scan. Also feature a
prominently placed call to action if appropriate.

Newsletter

Newsletters often have poor open rates compared
to other types of email content, so you want to make
your template as fun and appealing as possible. But
it’s even more important to make sure it’s organized
logically and includes plenty of options for recipients
to click through to additional content on your site.

Event Follow-Up

Many people enjoy seeing pictures from an event they
attended, so this is an opportunity to create a highly
visual template. Also be sure any links are prominently
featured and immediately grab the reader’s attention.

Holiday

Sending out a holiday ecard to clients is a great
way to show appreciation and establish a sense of
community. Even if you’re just sending an email about
your company’s holiday hours, don’t miss the chance
to show off your brand’s personality and culture with
a fun, visual layout and pictures.

................................................................................................................................................................................
10 The Complete Guide to B2B Email Marketing
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3

Email Content

....................................................................................................................................................

The winning formula for great email copy is a perfect combination
of conversational tone and informational substance.

The copy of your email is critical to how it
will be perceived by its recipients, so from
your subject line to your email signature,
put careful consideration into both what
you say and how you say it. Make sure
that your messages are informational and
conversational, and avoid blatant sales
pitches whenever possible.

Content Best Practices

To get the best results, your emails must
distinguish themselves from the typical
generic sales pitch, and with today’s
overcrowded inboxes, this task is more
challenging than ever. Let’s look at a few
ways that you can make your email content
more persuasive.

Know your audience. This is the cardinal

rule in any marketing initiative: know your
audience thoroughly, from their needs
and wants to the kind of language they
use. What are their pain points? How can
you help address them? Consider using
dynamic content to create separate emails
for different segments of your list (see
more on dynamic content on the following
page). This extra effort shows your reader
that you’ve taken the time to really get to
know your readers and their needs.

Consider the buyer’s journey. Different

content is appropriate at different stages of

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the sales cycle. With the lead nurturing
capabilities of marketing automation, you
can build a nurturing track and gradually
and automatically send content over time
— ensuring that readers not only get the
right content, but get it at the right time.
...........................................................................

Want to learn more about lead nurturing?
Check out our Lead Nurturing Lab.

Avoid meaningless superlatives and
sales buzzwords. Savvy consumers can

see right through overblown hype, and
will interpret outrageous claims and overthe-top testimonials as overcompensation
for an insubstantial product. Adopt a
conversational tone, not a promotional
one — flowery language and pretentious
jargon isn’t just a turn off, it can hurt your
company’s credibility.

Keep it simple and get to the point.
You certainly don’t want to patronize your
recipients or dumb down your message,
but prospects don’t want long-winded
emails that seem to have an ulterior
motive. Keeping your messages simple
and straightforward will make them seem
more genuine, and including elements
of your brand’s culture and personality
through your tone, style, and graphics can
make your company seem more human
and trustworthy.

....................................................................................................................................................11


Carefully choose your wording. From

your subject line to your call to action,
wording matters. First and foremost, avoid
using words and phrases that can be
interpreted by spam filters as “spammy,”
especially those related to money,
discounts, or free offers. Make sure that
your subject lines are informational and
compelling, and that your calls to action are
persuasive and optimized for conversions.
For help crafting the perfect call to action,
use the worksheet on page 21.

Back up your claims. The cardinal

rule of persuasive writing is being able to
back up your argument with evidence.
A successful marketer should be able to
provide concrete examples or hard data to
support the claims they make. Remember
that ultimately, you want your emails to
prospects to be persuasive enough to
lead to a conversion, and the best way to
persuade these readers is to give them the
proof they’re looking for.

Personalizing Email Content

If the least effective email marketing
campaign is the generic, widespread
eblast, then it stands to reason that the
most effective campaign would be a
personalized one-to-one message sent
thoughtfully to each of your prospects.
It may not always be possible to achieve
true one-to-one messaging, but marketing
automation tools make it easier than ever
to customize your content to make emails
more upfront and personal.
...........................................................................

For more help with email subject lines,
check out 12 Dos and Don’ts of Email
Subject Lines on our blog.

“

There’s no better way to
impress your prospects than
by creating a personalized
sales experience with your
email marketing.
Dynamic Content

”

There’s no better way to impress your
prospects than by catering specifically to
their needs and creating a personalized
sales experience with your email marketing.
Dynamic content is messaging that can
be changed based on preconditions
you determine. The dynamic content
made possible through marketing
automation allows you to further tailor
customized prospect messages and cater
to individualized needs. This functionality
can be set up to perform a variety of
customizations, such as displaying unique
content to different demographics or
market verticals.

Personalized Signatures

These days it’s not so much the “To” variable
of an email message that gets our attention,
but the “From” line. In a constantly flooded
inbox, a generic email address is likely to
be ignored, but an email from a specific
name (and particularly a recognizable
name) has a far better chance of being
opened. This is why the ability to tailor reply
addresses can have a powerful impact on
open rates — rather than seeing an email
from marketing@yourcompany.com, your
recipients will see an email from a sales rep
with whom they’ve already been working.
Since B2B marketing is about building
relationships, this seemingly personal
contact can make all the difference.

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4

Testing & Optimization

....................................................................................................................................................

Don’t let your hard work go to waste; make sure your email reaches
your reader’s inbox and renders perfectly.

Once you’ve crafted the perfect email, you’ll
want to make sure that all your hard work
will render perfectly for your recipients,
and that your content is optimized to avoid
spam filters. Monitor your campaign’s look
and feel by testing it in several different
email providers. It’s important to see how
your email will look, not only in different
readers like Yahoo!, Gmail, and Outlook, but
also in mobile environments like Blackberry
and Windows Mobile.

testing technique will also help you detect
whether the problems are with links, poorly
formatted HTML, or a high concentration of
“spammy” words and phrases.

Using Campaign Preview

Test a text-only version of your
message. This will help you diagnose if

Although some marketers have numerous
email accounts set up for testing purposes,
the easiest way to view any email in the
50+ email clients available today is through
a campaign preview feature offered by
many marketing automation platforms.
This integrated rendering and email spam
analysis engine allows users to quickly and
easily view how your email will look across
the leading email clients and browsers,
ensuring that your email renders exactly as
you intended.

Outsmarting Spam Filters

The best marketing automation platforms
also allow you to test each email against
the top spam filters to make sure your
emails will get through to the inbox. This

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Spam filters are always changing, so it can
sometimes be difficult for marketers to get
legitimate messages delivered to prospects
and clients. If you find that your test emails
are getting sent to the “Junk” folder, follow
these steps to remedy the issue:

the issue is content-related or code-related.
If the text version gets through to your
inbox but the multipart version does not,
the issue may be with your images or the
source code for the HTML. Make sure you’re
not using external Cascading Style Sheets
(CSS) links. All styling should be inline.

Check your image-to-text ratio. Too

many images or images that are too large
in comparison to the amount of text in an
HTML email can be considered spammy.
Adding more text or reducing the number
and size of images may help. Also, make
sure that your images include alt attributes
that contain the alternate text that should
be displayed when the images don’t load.

....................................................................................................................................................13


Check your text styling. Excessive use of

all-caps text, too many different font colors
(especially red, green or blue), or smaller- or
larger-than-average font sizes (10-12 point
fonts are standard) can all be interpreted by
filters as spammy.

Make sure your content does not
include styling from Microsoft Word.

If you are pasting in content from MS
Word, use the “Paste from Word” button (if
available) in the WYSIWYG editor to avoid
having extra styling tags pulled in, which
can make the HTML spammy.

Check for SenderID and DomainKeys
records. As a final precaution, verify that

you’ve added SenderID and DomainKeys
records to your Domain Name System
(DNS), as discussed on page 5.

and buttons are large and visible, you can
greatly increase the odds that your mobileoriented readers will be able to read and
navigate your email.

“

More than 59% of
B2B purchase decision
makers and influencers
use their smartphones to
gather information when
purchasing products or
services.

”

Optimizing for Mobile

According to a 2012 eMarketer study, more
than 59% of B2B purchase decision makers
and influencers use their smartphones
to gather information when purchasing
products or services — so, as a B2B
marketer, you can’t run the risk of not
having your emails display properly on a
mobile device. Luckily, some simple design
choices can help ensure that your emails
are mobile-friendly. By sticking to a onecolumn format, making text stand out as
much as possible, and making sure images
...........................................................................

Think you’re ready to hit the send
button? Double-check that your email is
optimized with the checklist on page 22.

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5

Sending Best Practices

........................................................................................................................................................

Don’t let your emails get lost in today’s cluttered inboxes: send email
at the optimal time to make sure they get the attention they deserve.

You’re almost there! Now that you’ve walked
through the entire process of putting
together the perfect email campaign, it’s
time to make sure that sending it goes off
without a hitch. Let’s take a look at a few last
minute considerations.

Clean Lists

As we mentioned earlier, deliverability
should be a consideration at every stage of
the email marketing process, and choosing
a list to send your emails to is no exception.
High bounce rates caused by invalid or
misspelled email addresses can hurt your
email reputation, so make sure you’re
regularly maintaining your lists and cleaning
out email addresses that aren’t valid.
............................................................................

be dealing with a stack of weekend email;
you don’t want your best efforts to get lost
in the shuffle.

Avoid sending emails over major
holidays or typical vacation times.

Email tends to pile up during these periods,
so be sure to time your message so that it
doesn’t get overlooked.

usual barrage of early-morning email.
What makes you think your message will
stand out?

It’s a question as old as email marketing: what
is the best time to send emails to prospects?
And the answer is simple (if somewhat
frustrating): it depends. For instance, if
you’re a B2C marketer, nights and weekends
are a far better time to reach out, when your
readers won’t be distracted by work emails.
For a B2B marketer, these hours probably
couldn’t be a worse time to communicate
about a business-related product or service.
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Don’t send emails over the weekend
or on Mondays. Prospects will already

Don’t send emails first thing in the
morning. You’ll be competing with the

For more tips on list maintenance, check
out How to Keep Your Email Lists Sparkling
Clean on our blog.

Timing

There are always exceptions, but in most
cases B2B marketers should follow these
general rules of thumb about timing, in
order to increase the chances that their
messages get the attention they deserve:

Don’t send emails at the end of the
day. They might get brushed aside as your

prospects knock off work and go home for
the day. Then you’re back to square one,
and your email must compete with the next
day’s inevitable early-morning deluge.
..........................................................................

To figure out your optimal sending time,
use the worksheet on page 23.

....................................................................................................................................................15


Frequency

One final aspect of timing marketers should
consider is the frequency of your contact
with prospects via email. You should be
sending emails frequently enough to stay
top of mind with prospects, but not so
often that you become an annoyance. Three
emails per year is probably not enough;
three per day is definitely too many.

Find your sweet spot. The nature of

your product or service and the campaign
tracking data you gather will help you find
the sweet spot between too often and not
enough. Marketing automation tools help
you strike this happy medium by automating
campaign actions based on decisions you’ve
made ahead of time regarding timing and
other variables such as prospect behavior.
A marketing automation solution offers
considerable time and labor savings by
allowing you to create emails and schedule
them for future deployments, ensuring that
your campaign is timed right while requiring
minimal investment from you.

“

The nature of your
product or service and the
campaign tracking data
you gather will help you find
the sweet spot between
sending emails too often
and not sending them
often enough.

”

Be consistent. This may seem like

common sense, but don’t go two weeks
without sending an email and then send
three in one day. If possible, let your
recipients know upon signing up what you
will be sending them and when (better yet,
let them choose how often they receive your
emails), and stick to this schedule. Not only
does this make your business seem more
organized and credible, it makes it far less
likely that a recipient will get fed up with an
inbox clogged with your emails and hit the
“Report as Spam” button.
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6

Tracking & Reporting

....................................................................................................................................................

Your email strategy can always be improved: today’s tracking and
reporting tools can help you see what’s working and what’s not.

Don’t rest easy once you’ve put together a
great email campaign. Today’s marketing
world is all about measurement and
improvement, so figure out how to track
and measure your email marketing
success and determine what’s working
and what’s not, then adjust and optimize
your efforts to truly get the most out of
your campaigns.

Tracking Methods

Email tracking helps you learn whether
an email reached its intended recipient
and whether it was opened or not. Most
tracking tools record when the email was
received as well as when it was opened.
Tracking tools also note the recipient’s IP
address and let you see which links the
prospect clicked on after opening the
email.
Email success can be tracked through
web bugs. A web bug is a piece of code
that is embedded in an email or webpage
to track user behavior. Also called web
beacons or pixel tags, web bugs are
invisible to the user because they arrive as
small, transparent GIF files. Web bugs can
track the IP address of the computer and
the type of browser, as well as the time it
was viewed, the URL of the web bug or
the page on which it was located, and a
previously set cookie value.
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Most marketing automation solutions
include built-in tracking features that
measure things like open and clickthrough rates, as well as bounced (not
received) messages and unsubscribe
messages.

Reporting: What to Measure

Email tracking yields a number of helpful
metrics that can be analyzed to measure
the success of a marketing campaign or
webpage, but how do you know what
to measure? Here are a few important
metrics to keep an eye on.

Hard Bounces. Hard, or permanent,

bounces can occur for a number of
reasons. Maybe the domain does not exist
or the recipient is unknown, or perhaps
the receiving mail server is refusing mail
due to a network failure or some other
technical issue. This is often an indication
that you have a bad or invalid email
address that needs to be scrubbed from
your lists.

Soft Bounces. Soft, or transient, bounces

result from a temporary failure to deliver
an email. Soft bounces don’t necessarily
indicate a bad or invalid address, and are
often the result of sending an email to a
full mailbox or trying to send a file that’s
too large.

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Many marketing automation platforms
offer features that help users maintain
bounce rates and catch both soft and hard
bounces. For example, some platforms
automatically scrub an invalid email from
your list after the first hard bounce occurs,
or after a certain number of consecutive
soft bounces.

Click-throughs. Click-through rate

(CTR) is most commonly calculated by
dividing the total number of clicks by the
total number of impressions. For example,
if an email offer was delivered 100 times
(total impressions), and its included link
was clicked only once, this would result in
a 1% CTR.

“

You want to know
more than how many
recipients opened your
email — you want
to know how many
recipients are engaging
with your marketing
message.

”

Engagement statistics. You want to

know more than how many recipients
opened your email — you want to know
how many recipients are engaging with
your marketing message. With some
marketing automation solutions, you can
delve even deeper into email reporting
and see a break down of how many
recipients pened your email (loaded
images), skimmed your email (opened
for between 2 and 10 seconds), read
your email (opened for longer than 10
seconds), forwarded your email, and
printed your email. If you’re not using a
marketing automation solution, consider
including tracked URLs in your emails to
see how many recipients are engaging
with your links.

........................................................................

Don’t have a marketing automation
solution to generate reports on your
email campaigns? The worksheet on
page 24 can help you organize your data.
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19

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EMAIL TEMPLATE

CHECKLIST
There’s a lot to think about when you start designing a new email template. Use this
checklist to make sure you’re not skipping any vital steps.

1

Decide between Plain Text and HTML

This will depend on the type of email that you’re sending. Drip emails and webinar
follow-ups work well as plain text, while other emails are great for HTML.

2

Create a Clean Template Design

3

Add Some Color

4

5

6

7

8

9

The information in your email should be uncluttered and easy to find. Make sure
that it’s always obvious where readers should be focusing their attention.

Emails aren’t always exciting, but they can be with just a little extra color! Including a
few splashes of color can really help your email stand out from the crowd.

Break Text into Bullets and Small Paragraphs

Readers love to scan. Break your text into bullets and smaller paragraphs so that your
emails are easier to read at a glance.

Craft Your Call to Action

Set your call to action apart using colors, a button, or text treatment so that readers
will know what action is expected of them.

Leverage Images

Add some visual interest to your emails by including images. You can often cut down
on text if you have an image that can say the same thing.

Add Social Sharing Buttons

Make it easy for your email recipients to share your content. Add social sharing
buttons so they can distribute it across their networks with the click of a button.

Include Contact Information

You want your readers to be able to contact you if they have any questions. Place
your contact information in either the header or the footer of the email.

Don’t Forget Unsubscribe Links

Your emails need to be CAN-SPAM compliant. Make sure your unsubscribe links are

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FINDING YOUR PERFECT SEND TIME
FINDING YOUR PERFECT SEND TIME

WORKSHEET
WORKSHEET
STEP 1: DAY OF THE WEEK
STEP 1: DAY OF THE WEEK

Analyze send times and open rates from the email campaigns you’ve sent over the past six months and create
a quick scatter plot to find the day of the week where your emails have historically seen the best open rates.
Use the graph below.
__%

OPEN RATE (%)

__%
__%
__%
__%
__%
__%
__%
MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

STEP2: TIME OF DAY
STEP 2: TIME OF DAY

Now that you’ve found your optimal day of the week to send emails, use this same data to find the best time
of day by creating a scatter plot of open rates vs. time-of-send.
__%

OPEN RATE (%)

__%
__%
__%
__%
__%
__%
__%
12AM

4AM

8AM

12PM

4PM

8PM

STEP3: SEGMENT YOUR LISTS
STEP 3: SEGMENT YOUR LISTS

Now put this information to use! Try segmenting your lists by time-of-open (e.g., Opened between 10:00 a.m.
and 1:00 p.m. vs. Opened between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.), and you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to
determine the best send-time for each grouping.
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23

EMAIL REPORTING

WORKSHEET
Marketing automation makes reporting easy, but if you haven’t yet invested in a platform, you still
need to keep an eye on your email marketing success. The following worksheet can help you organize
your data. Take a sampling of email campaigns over a given period of time & record hard bounces,
soft bounces, opens, clicks & click-through rates, keeping an eye out for interesting patterns.

Month 1
Email:

Sent:

HB:

SB:

Opens:

Clicks:

CTR:

Sent:

HB:

SB:

Opens:

Clicks:

CTR:

Sent:

HB:

SB:

Opens:

Clicks:

CTR:

Month 2
Email:

Month 3
Email:

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Complete guide to_email

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