The latest Marketing Sherpa brief arrived in my inbox today and had some great insight into sending marketing e-mail to BlackBerry and mobile device users. While marketing to users with mobile devices is still under the radar of most marketing executives, it’s prudent to know that business users are adopting these devices and reading carefully crafted HTML e-marketing campaigns on them.

Here are my takeaways from the article. Feel free to read yourself — you can access the article for free until August 1st.

• 64% of key decision makers are viewing email (and your company email marketing campaign) on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.
• BlackBerrys are more heavily used by business users than Treos and iPhones. BlackBerry users are younger (under age 45).
• You don’t have to communicate with BlackBerry users with all-text messages. While text messages are the best strategy, multipart-MIME messages (HTML and text version in the same message — the email client decides which to display) can be a good option.
• Companies should market to mobile device users separately so display issues don’t occur. The best way to do this is survey your customer base or ask for mobile preferences on a newsletter sign-up page.
• Messages should be crafted differently than traditional e-mail marketing. Message width and wording are both considerations. Displays on newer BlackBerry devices are 320 pixels wide.
• Your company name should be the first thing the user sees, followed by a short “hook” or offer. Personally, I liked the way Marketing Sherpa advises marketers to “be brief, be brilliant and be gone.” Mobile device users scan email, not read it.

The article also provides a link to download Blackberry simulators in case you’d like to see how your company’s e-mail marketing messages look on the BlackBerry platform.

Finally, I feel that while BlackBerry devices are the most popular devices right now, iPhone is sure to make a splash among a more consumer-oriented crowd in the next 6 months to a year. Now’s the time to research your customer base to see how many customers read email through mobile devices. If more than 10% do, perhaps it’s time to start a new segment in your e-mail marketing list for mobile users. Besides HTML and text, offer your customers a mobile option when subscribing to your company’s e-mail newsletter.

With tools like Instant Messenger, text messaging, MySpace and Facebook, e-mail marketers face increasing challenges in trying to reach younger audiences.

It seems hard to believe, but younger web users such as Gen Y’ers view e-mail as a pass?© communications tool. Jeremiah Owyang on his web strategy blog shared the following anecdote:

“A few weeks ago, I had a discussion with my kid sister, in a humorous way she told me that she ‘Only uses email to communicate with old people like me.’ And I‚Äôm not even in my mid 30s.”

In fact, many younger people interact more with MySpace, Facebook and their cell phones than e-mail. I asked an intern at a client of mine for his reaction to this, and he responded that he either uses IM, Facebook or text messaging to talk to friends. He only uses e-mail when at work.

With these trends in mind, it’s not surprising that companies are either experimenting with or starting alternative “online” marketing programs. The New York Times recently profiled outdoor goods retailer Moosejaw Mountaineering, which started a mobile marketing program this year.

With text messaging’s popularity among many younger folks (under 30 years old seems to be the profile of the text messager), it’s a logical choice to allow those customers to interact with companies via their cell phones. In Moosejaw’s case, they have a “texting” link on their homepage that allows text message users to interact with the company, even offering to send order tracking numbers, account information and rewards information to customers via text message.

While text messaging hasn’t reached the critical mass that e-mail marketing has (Moosejaw sends text messages to just over 1,000 customers according to the Times article), the potential is there. 115 million Americans have used cell phones to send text messages, and this number is only more likely to grow.

Moosejaw gets it — they have a well-established MySpace page as well. They seem to have struck the balance between being promotional and “hip.”

While we’re probably not talking about tens of thousands of customers using these technologies yet, it will become important that companies consider new ways to market to their customers. It will be interesting to see how the iPhone and other advanced mobile devices change trends in marketing as communication evolves.

The holidays are here, and if you’re in internet retail you’ve hopefully already solidified an online marketing plan for the holidays. That plan probably involves email marketing, so I’ve devised some reminders of what you should do and avoid doing so your email marketing is as effective as possible during this crucial time of year.

Don’ts:

• Use XHTML code in your emails (Use HTML as there are delivery errors with XHTML).
• Don’t reference external CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in your HTML email as most email clients can’t read it. Instead, use inline styles or font tags. You can also reference my earlier guide for using CSS in email campaigns to learn what CSS definitions email clients can handle.
• Send email without validating it. Make sure you close all of your HTML tags so the page renders properly in all email clients. You can validate your HTML email with the W3C Validator.
• Embed forms or surveys in your email marketing campaign. Instead, create a landing page on your web site with the form or survey and include a link to this page in your email campaign.
• Send an all-graphical email. Some email clients will hide images by default, and your customers won’t see your message at all when accessing it through a preview pane.
• Use javascript. This will trigger all kinds of SPAM filters.

Do’s:

• Include some “administrative” text at the top of your email containing your company name or web site address.
• Post the HTML email on your web site and offer a link to it at the top of your email campaign. The text should read, “View this email at our web site” or something similar. “Having trouble viewing this email? View it on our site” is also a popular option.
• Link all of your images back to your web site.
• Include heights, widths and ALT tags on all images. Some email clients that hide images by default may assign a value to the height and width of your images, pushing content further down the page.
• If you offer a phone ordering line, include it in the email campaign.
• Design all HTML email for a 500-600 pixel width.
• Include your site categories/hierarchy as text links. Again, if your customers’ email clients hide images by default, customers will still see the text links to your main site categories. My research has shown that as many as 60% of customers click the navigational links to the main categories of your site.
• Check spelling. Not only is a misspelled word unprofessional, it can also increase your SPAM score.
• Produce a text and HTML version of your email campaign. Multi-part MIME email requires both and not including a text version could increase your SPAM score.
• Make text versions no more than 60 characters wide.

If you’re looking for a good editor to create your email marketing campaigns, try Macromedia Dreamweaver. Using Word or FrontPage to create HTML email marketing campaigns is not a good idea since they do not render “clean” HTML and assign styles to your campaign that most email clients cannot decipher.

I just love this blog entry from Chris Baggott’s Email Marketing Best Practices blog. Chris tells the story of how he signed up for a small internet retailer’s email newsletter and was pleasantly surprised how helpful and relevant the communique that he received was.

There’s a valuable lesson to be learned here. Email‚Äîand all internet marketing efforts‚Äî don’t have to be terribly complex. They just need to be relevant and helpful to the customer. Sometimes it’s best to step back from your marketing program and ask yourself if the email you send or the search engine ad you write address your customer’s needs.

I like Perry Marshall’s take on marketing to consumers:

“If you sell drills, you can write about how to make better holes, and you’ll get lots more sales leads than merely advertising information about your drills.

Why does that work? Because nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Offer information about making holes and you’ll be much more successful.”

Well said.

Internet Retailer reported today on a blogworthy e-mail marketing study recently conducted by Silverpop. The study reported the following findings:

• Branding in the subject line of your e-mail marketing campaigns produced an increase of 32% – 60% in clickthrough rates. By “branding,” I assume the study refers to the web site name or company name.
• Lifestyle photography–people enjoying products–raised clickthrough rates for B2C campaigns by about 1%, while B2B marketers saw a decrease of about a percent.
• The “newsletter” e-mail marketing format yields better clickthrough rates than the “postcard” design. The clickthrough rates of the “newsletter” design were about a percent higher than the postcard design.
• Be careful not to include too many links in your e-mail campaigns. Clickthrough rates drop off after between 6-10 links per email.
• Interestingly enough, dollar-off promotions performed 45% better than percent-off promotions. For instance, consumers responded better to promotions that demonstrated savings in dollars, even for low-cost products.

These findings are interesting test variables for your upcoming e-mail campaigns.

A lot of companies use web analytics to track how many people open their emails, how many customers click and how much revenue they generate from e-mail marketing campaigns. But how many companies track creative performance of their e-mails? What in e-mail marketing campaigns do customers click on?

I recently created and sent out an e-mail marketing campaign for an ecommerce client, and we sought to measure this like I do with most of my e-mail marketing service clients. This time, I’ve decided to share the results since it is generally indicative of the kind of customer behavior we normally see.

Below, I’ve broken down the HTML version of the e-mail marketing campaign into common segments to show you how the clicks were distributed:

As you can see, over half of all clicks resulting from this HTML e-mail marketing campaign came from the left navigation containing product category links. I’ve seen this for years.

This may be a stretch, but I would correlate the willingness for customers to click simple left navigation with recent research that indicates that e-mail campaigns with fewer choices get better results. While products and offers contained in e-mail marketing campaigns often litter most retailers’ e-mail creative, the left category navigation remains the most-clicked area of the e-mail campaign.

Food for thought.