Email Marketing: Deliverability & Design Specialist Related Pages: Skills and abilities - Key areas I specialise in Useful Information: CV | Contact

Working within the support team at smartFOCUS gave me the unique opportunity to learn about the email marketing techniques of the worlds most significant brands. I started as a design specialist but quickly moved into deliverability where I developed techniques to verify, diagnose and fix the problems some of our clients encountered.

Creative Design

Web pages and email are different mediums both reliant on HTML. But if you were to assume that everything you can put in a web page will display correctly in an email client, you'd be very wrong. Some features wouldn't work (e.g. certain styles, forms, etc), some things wouldn't display as you'd expect (e.g. spacing in tables, yet more styles) whilst some things could result in your email arrive in the junk folder.

I have specialised in researching what features do/do not work across different mail clients and developed techniques to combat these problems.

Email Deliverability

After my first year at smartFOCUS I became a deliverability specialist. I developed new ways to verify if clients were having deliverability problems, to find what caused these, to learn how to fix them, and to monitor performance.

A standard deliverability investigation would entail:

• Verify IF there is a problem;
• Learn WHY there is a problem;
  • Look at WHAT you send;
  • Look at WHO you send it to;
  • Look at HOW you send;
• Learn HOW to fix it;
• Carefully plan your next broadcast, with careful monitoring and A/B tests.

My final project at smartFOCUS was to develop documentation and training notes for the support team to conduct these investigations in my absence.

In addition to the areas I specialised in, I am familiar with list import processes, list segmentation, template design, template builds from jpeg images, testing, troubleshooting, compatibility issues, broadcasting and reporting.

My contract with smartFOCUS prevents me from providing examples of the creatives of designed or naming the organisations I've worked with, however you may like to review the smartFOCUS client list.

Email Marketing is much much more than just making a pretty looking web page- you need to understand what will work, what will get the best responses, what features each mail client will support. It's no use writing to billions of people if those billions can't read what you've written, or if your email doesn't arrive. Please see my Email Marketing and Deliverability blog for further articles I've written regarding this topic.

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