Common Content Practices to Avoid

Single Image Campaigns

A Single Image Campaign is an email campaign that does not contain any text, links or call-to-action buttons. It contains just a single image, usually a flyer that was created in a 3rd-party application. 

This is very quick and convenient method of creating a campaign but is also considered a bad practice for multiple reasons:

1. The majority of SPAM filters will classify this email as a BULK or SPAM message and may not deliver it to the inbox of your recipients. Thus reducing your deliverability without even notifying you of a problem.
2. For those who do receive the message, it could end up being truncated or they might not see the image similar to this:

^Ex.

This comes across as very unprofessional and a deterrent from the recipient reading the actual message.

Best Practice

Create a summarized version of the campaign and use one of the email builders to construct it. Add a Call-to-Action button that links back to your website. For Clubhouse Online websites, this campaign should be linked to either your club's Member Central page or to an event within the Event Calendar.

Learn to Link to Events

Excessive Content Length

When drafting a campaign, it's always a good idea to keep in mind who the target audience is. It is almost a guarantee that all of your contacts do not have an interest in all club topics. There are only a select few topics they will be interested in staying informed on. With that in mind it is always a good idea to try and separate topics as much as possible. Lengthy campaigns that require excessive scrolling to read, will incur the following reactions from your recipients:

• Missed Content - If there is large amount of content in the campaign, users tend to only read a quarter to half way down and then stop. Thus, missing content that would have interest to them.
• Decreased Open Rate - If the recipients become accustomed to not reading the campaign because the majority of the content they aren't interested in, they will gradually stop opening a campaign altogether.
• Increased Unsubscribes - The other option when becoming accustomed to not reading a campaign is to unsubscribe completely. This action will not just unsubscribe them from that type of campaign but from your email marketing account as a whole. 

Something to always remember is that the majority of your contacts are opening/reading your campaigns on a mobile device. Excessive scrolling will lead to disinterest. Here is an example of excessive content within a campaign. 

Best Practice

Separate the content into individual campaigns. If a contact is mostly interested in Golf they may not care to see the results from the latest Bridge Night. It is best to have separate campaigns for different content categories. That way your contacts can choose which content they wish to receive. It also provides some easy feedback on what your members are and aren't interested in. 

Learn More about Contact Preferences

It is also best, as previously mentioned, to link your website whenever possible. This is where the majority of your content should reside thus increasing traffic to your website.

Text Only Campaigns

Similar to a campaign that contains a single image, a campaign that only contains text is also strong candidate to be flagged as SPAM email message. There are times when the content does not warrant any images or links to other sources. 

Best Practice

Ensure your campaign has a banner, some form of personalization or even linked contact information for the club or the person sending the message. This will encourage SPAM filters to treat the campaign as a legitimate message.

Copying Previous Campaign Content

A common practice especially for recurring campaigns is to copy a previously sent campaign and update it accordingly. Weekly, Monthly or Semi-Annual campaigns will often display similar layouts which is acceptable. Copying a previously sent campaign and then updating the content with more recent information may appear convenient but it can incur issues the more iterations of the copied material there is. All campaigns are constructed in HTML, including the templates from the Smart Builder.

When copying a campaign and editing the content, it may appear that you've removed all the unwanted content from the new iteration but in fact, HTML code from the previous content can be left behind. Even when previewing the content, the extra code may appear to have no adverse effects but when delivered and opened within various e-mail clients, [Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail etc..] that code can still be read and rendered. Not all email clients follow the same guidelines for rendering HTML So it's always a good idea not to have hidden code left behind in your campaigns. The more times a campaign is copied, the greater the potential for irrelevant HTML code to be left behind.

Best Practice

If campaign is going to be subject to recurring deliveries, create a template out of that campaign that can be used to start a fresh each time. If there is content that won't be updated for each iteration of the campaign, it should be included in the template so that it doesn't need to be re-entered each time.

For information on Creating a Template from a Campaign:

Click Here