The importance of email design

So the 'western' part of the world might be going into a recession or perhaps not. We might be going into a period of poor economic growth or not. Whatever we're going into and winter seems the only real certainty at the moment, it’s going to get tough at the top, mean in the middle and crowded at the bottom. In order to get ahead and in some cases just to stay afloat, many companies are going have to turn their marketing budgets towards the online market place and like any market place, there are traps, pitfalls and ne'er do wells aplenty. It's not just that there are more shiny things on offer to spend your money on; it’s that a lot of the time the shiny things are not designed well.

Let’s take email design as an example. There are some very basic mistakes that get made time and time again which are wholly avoidable. The first thing to consider is that most people who design emails are not email designers. They are either web designers or people who design for print and are largely unaware of the thought processes involved in designing emails which not only look good, but more importantly work.

Most designers do not take into account that different email programs have different sized preview panes. Mozilla Thunderbird's viewing pane is horizontal whilst an Outlook 2007 preview pane can be both horizontal and vertical. These are just two of many many email programs so it's important to make sure that your 'catch their attention' phrase is visible - the top left hand side works well most of the time.

Balance is important when looking at text vs. images within an email. Many email programs have a fascist (from an email marketeer’s point of view) approach to unsolicited mail and block most if not all images. So it’s not normally advisable to combine your core marketing message with an image as it just won't get through. It’s also important to include alt-text for all images. Alt text? What this means is that even if the image is blocked it will preview a brief description of the image. It’s also a good idea to create a text version of your email so that no matter what happens one form of your marketing communication will get through. This brings us neatly onto email copy and those pesky spam filters.

Avoid using the word free and any phrase which has the word free in it. In fact just don't use it ever! Apart from the fact that its jelly tots to spam filters, it's also lazy copy writing. Other phrases to avoid include cash bonus, do it today, don't delete, subject to credit, supplies are limited, take action now - yada yada. I will post something more comprehensive on spam copy at a later date. A point to remember on email copy though is that you have, on average, less than 3 seconds in which to get the reader’s attention before your email makes a gentle whooshing noise at it gets filed in the folder market J for Junk. So attention grabbing headline and then get to the meat of the message quickly. It is also important to include a call to action near the top of the creative, but more on that in a later post.

Unsubscribe links are not only important they are now the law. They are normally included as part of the footer, however at Data Media and Research we have even started to include an unsubscribe mechanism at the top of all our B2B emails as well as part of the footer. It has not affected our unsubscribe rate but it does make us uber compliant with any legislation. You should also always include you physical mailing address as well as any permissions you might have gained in order to do the mailing within the footer.

Lastly, it is important to test everything and I mean everything. Test how the creative looks in different email programs. Test your copy against spam filters test your image to text ratio and test how it looks. A good email creative is a beautiful thing and hopefully, by observing what I've mentioned in this blog, you can have a beautiful thing that works for you.