E-mail creative is often considered an afterthought: Take what works on the Website, tweak it a bit for the inbox, and hit the “send” button. But e-mail is its own medium, and its design should be approached with as much care and consideration as the design of a landing page or a catalog cover. We asked Susan Tull, vice president of marketing of Digital River’s BlueHornet e-mail marketing services division, for some dos and don’ts.
E-mail Essentials: What are some of the most common errors people make when it comes to e-mail creative?
Tull: One of the most common errors we see is a failure to consider e-mail design best practices very early on in the planning process—all the way back at the concept stage. A lot of designers treat e-mail creative as if it were the same as a Website or a print piece, instead of approaching it as a unique medium. If e-mail considerations are accounted for during campaign conceptualization, it can help eliminate common errors like relying on background images or designing the e-mail as one solid image.
Another common error is putting too many calls to action into a single e-mail. Many e-mail marketers achieve better results by creating an e-mail with one clear call to action, which may be to visit a landing page that provides a better opportunity to promote multiple offers.
E-mail Essentials: Are there any guidelines regarding the proportion of images and graphics to text?
Tull: In the early days, spam filters would trap e-mails comprised mostly of images. Today spam filters are a bit more advanced and use a combination of other criteria, which allows e-mails from being pegged as spam solely based on the image-to-text ratio. This gives marketers an opportunity to proportion images and text based on their audience. For example, enthusiastic brand followers will be more likely to unblock images. We highly recommend using HTML text to deliver the main content of the e-mail alongside images with alt text.
E-mail Essentials: Image rendering seems to throw a lot of people. Large images can pull better response, but they often don’t render properly. How can mailers resolve this?
Tull: Consistent rendering across all e-mail platforms can be achieved if you code your HTML specifically for e-mail and cater to the rendering lowest common denominators. In general, this means nested tables and inline CSS. If your e-mail is properly coded, the size of the images shouldn’t matter, although an e-mail will generally load faster if larger images are cut up into smaller slices.
E-mail Essentials: Should you stick to a template so that all your promotional e-mails or all your newsletters look the same, or should you vary it so that recipients don’t get bored?
Tull: Having a consistent design is key to keeping your brand recognition strong. But just because certain design elements such as fonts and colors are consistent, that doesn’t mean you can’t use a modular design to accommodate a variety of different messages. Many of our retail clients in particular like to take a strategic approach to varying their e-mail creative, reserving the option of delivering a different design only for special offers or programs.
E-mail Essentials: Should you create an HTML and a non-HTML version of each?
Tull: Always. Creating a plain text e-mail along with HTML should be standard practice. In addition, a mobile version may be just as important, depending on who your subscribers are and the type of message you are intending to deliver.
E-mail Essentials: Any other key best practices?
