Designing and creating your email to not only look good and to be functional but also to have great inbox deliverability and be CAN-SPAM compliant can be a challenge. However, a good email marketing platform will offer you features that make email template and individual email creation not only easy but also effective and in-line with privacy and ISP regulations. Here’s what you should be looking for in an email sending platform.
1. Ability to Modify “From” and “Sender” Information
There are some very basic things that any email sending platform should be able to do, and among them are providing you with the ability to modify both the “From” field (the field that shows your subscribers who the email is from) as well as the email address that you are sending from.
2. Ability to Modify Subject Line
Another extremely basic but absolutely required feature is the ability to modify the subject line of your email. You, obviously, want to have control over that!
3. Ability to Instantly Add Unsubscribe Link
Not only is it required by CAN-SPAM that you provide an easy way for users to unsubscribe from your email, but having an easy-to-use and easy-to-spot unsubscribe link in your emails reduces your overall spam complaints. Not only, as a function of list management which we’ll discuss shortly, does your email provider need to be able to effectively remove people from the list, but it should also be able to instantly and regularly insert an unsubscribe link into your email. We’ll discuss the best location for this later on in this book when discussing email template design.
4. Ability to Regularly Provide Your Physical Mailing Address in the Email
Your email sending solution should instantly and persistently place your physical mailing address in the footer of the email. You don’t want to be responsible for having to remember to manually do it over and over again and potentially forget once. After all, your physical mailing address is a CAN-SPAM
requirement.
5. Ability to Serve HTML Webpage Version of Your Email
Not all subscribers will be able to see your email in their inbox no matter how well the email is put together. Sometimes, an email service provider or software just garbles and email and there’s nothing you can do about it. When that happens, you’ll want to be sure that your email sending program both
provides and serves an html webpage version of your email and offers users the ability to click through to that webpage if they can’t see the actual email.
6. Ability to Send Both Text and HTML Version of Your Email
Not all email clients support html email, and this is particularly true as more and more people read their email on their mobile devices. In a best case scenario, your email sending platform will send both an html and text version that is automatically created and will identify which email addresses should receive which. At a minimum, however, you want the ability to be able to send a text-based or html-based email. 7. Ability to Edit an Email in Either HTML or Wiziwig Format
This may vary depending on your in-house staff and skill set. However, ideally you’ll have the flexibility to either edit your emails in pure html code for ultimate control or via a Wiziwig. A Wiziwig is essentially an “editor” in which you can do common editing tasks such as inserting images, bolding text, adding links, and defining styles without having to know html code. A solid, robust email marketing platform should give you both options as, occasionally, you may want to make a change to an email template that can only be done via html.
8. Ability to Choose Between Premade Templates, Upload Your Own Template, or Modify Premade Templates
Again, this will vary based on your in-house staff and skill set. However, you may want an email marketing platform that provides you with premade templates that you can simply change the images and text on so that you do not need to find html coders and designers to create templates. Alternatively, you may want to be able to simply upload your own, entirely branded template. Finally, you may want to take a pre-existing template and modify the code on it. Either way, a solid and robust email marketing platform solution will offer you the ability to do any of the above.
9. Ability to Load Images and Assign Alt Text behind Images
While you may not want to use too many images in your email (we’ll discuss the use of images when discussing email template design later in this book), your email marketing and newsletter platform must not only allow you the ability to upload and use images either in a supported file format or as an image url, but it’s essential that you be able to apply “Alt” and “Title” text behind the images for times when your subscribers’ email service providers don’t’ load images.
10. Ability to Format Text and Links
While it may seem like an obvious statement, don’t overlook the fact that you’ll want to ensure that your email marketing and newsletter platform supports the ability for you to format text and links, in font, size, color, and style.
There are some other email creation features that you may want to check for and which may be
important to you. We’ve covered these later on under the final portion of this chapter. However, in order to send effective emails, you’ll absolutely want to have the above listed components.