Novamedia blog

Once we have designed the email piece we can then set up the campaign. This involves various steps and settings within the email campaign application that we use.

Some of the most important are settings that our client has to supply such as:

• The From Name
• The From Address
• The Reply-To address
• The message subject

I won't blabber on about the importance of the From Name mainly because I have already written a blog post on this very subject. The From Address will typically be the email address of the person in the From Name but it doesn't have to be. The Reply-To address can be different to the From Address if you wish. Then when the recipient clicks Reply in their email application their reply will go back to this person instead.

We can personalise the email and set the From Name and Address dynamically based on a column in your distribution list. For example, if you are sending a campaign from several different people such as when sending to a list supplied from various sales reps within your organisation. This example is also when the separate Reply-To address might come in useful as you may want all replies to be co-ordinated from one central address.

The message subject is important and I will be writing a separate blog post about this in due course – watch this space! Suffice to say at this stage that the subject line should trigger some sort of recognition within your recipient so that they don't look at it and immediately dismiss it as spam.

What else do we do when setting up the campaign? Well we need to make sure that we are tracking bounced emails and to that end, we set up a unique email account to collect the bounces and record these in the database so that you can see which addresses have bounced. We can set it up so that you collect bounced emails instead but we don't recommend this especially if it is a big list as you could end up with hundreds of emails coming into your inbox.

We also set up all of the click-throughs so that these too can be recorded in the database and reported back to you.

One of the things we can do is to add an attachment but we hardly ever do this unless we are sending the email to a very small number of people and the attachment is a very small file size. Adding a large attachment to an email can massively increase the amount of time it takes to send and also runs a higher risk of being rejected as spam. What we recommend instead is that the attachment is uploaded to a web server and then we add a link to it within the body of the email. This gets round the two issues mentioned and has the added benefit that we can track clicks on this slink to see who has downloaded the attachment.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 3 – The distribution list
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting