Designing for Email - Important Guidelines for Success

 

The email marketing landscape is constantly changing, but the following guidelines have held fast amid the storm. Use them to help create campaigns that will render correctly and be enjoyed by readers.

 

Permission is very important.

One of the universal rules of email marketing is that you must have permission to send to each address. Also, since people often forget where or why they signed up to receive emails, it's helpful to insert a line or two into your email reminding people how they came to be on your list. If you're mailing to your customer list, that reminder could be as simple as "You're receiving this message because you are a current or recent customer of ACME Printing." In terms of permission, a "recent" customer is defined as within the last two years.

 

 

Unsubscribing should be simple.

If a contact on your list is not interested in what you have to say, you're wasting both time and money trying to reach them. ezMail will not allow a campaign to be sent without an unsubscribe link, but it is always best to clearly design one into your emails. Most people expect to find an unsubscribe link plainly marked in either the header or the footer of the message. Attempting to hide or obscure the link will only frustrate subscribers and prompt them to register a SPAM complaint.

 

 

Keep your message relevant and concise.

There's a lot of content in today's email inbox competing for the attention of recipients. You can't afford to waste readers' time with content that doesn't interest them. This may mean limiting your articles to 100-150 words or segmenting your list so you're only sending to a targeted group. A table of contents can also be a great way to show right away that your content is worth reading.

 

 

Anticipate blocked images.

Several of the major email clients block images by default, relying on readers to click a button if they want to see the full content of your message. Depending upon how much your design relies on images, this could be a major roadblock for the effectiveness of your email marketing. Although there is no "magic bullet" to solve this issue, there are several steps you can take to help your campaigns look as good as possible, even with images disabled:

 

• Don't use images for important content like headlines or links.
• Always have a "view in web-browser" link at the top of your campaigns.
• Ask your recipients to add your sending address to their address books. Many email clients give priority treatment to email from recognized senders.
• Always specify "title" and/or "alt" tags for your images. These tags add descriptive information to the code that most email clients will display as a backup if images are disabled.
• Define the height and width attributes of images to keep design structure intact even if the images don't appear.
• Test your design with images turned off before you send it.

 

 

Code like it's 1998.

Unfortunately, email has very little respect for current web standards. Because email clients are so varied in the HTML and CSS attributes they support, designing for email becomes a matter of coding to the lowest common denominator. That means using tables for structure and inline CSS for styling. For detailed information about standards support in email clients, visit the Email Standards Project.

 

 

Always include a plain text version of your campaign.

No matter how hard you work to make your HTML email look perfect, there will always be a subscriber that can only view plain text emails. Not to worry, ezMail has a button that will automatically extract the text content from your HTML email and create a plain text version. You'll still want to review it and make some adjustments, but the hard work is done for you. Another benefit to including both a plain text and HTML version of your campaign is increased deliverability. SPAM emails are more likely to be missing the plain text version, so filters give preference to messages that carry both.

 

 

Follow CAN-SPAM regulations.

• Adhere to unsubscribe requests.
• Use a real "from" name and email address.
• Do not use misleading subject lines.
• Use a real and working reply-to address and process unsubscribe requests received via reply email.
• Include your actual street address and contact information, or that of the client you are sending on behalf of.

 

 

Test your campaign before sending.

ezMail has a built-in inbox preview function that simulates what your campaigns will look like in different email clients, but that's not enough. Before sending to a live list, send your campaign to a test list and see how your messages render on a few different email clients. Testing not only prevents wasted email credits, it can save you the embarrassment of a public mistake.