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MARKETING STRATEGY : Email Marketing : Email Newsletter DesignBelow is information you need to planning and building an email newsletter design that renders well and is actually useful to recipients. Email Design Tip #1. Respect your reader. Don’t waste their time or attention. The email inbox is a busy place for a newsletter to land. Hundreds of other emails are already on the pile, with folders, calendars and notes on all sides. The typical user is probably not waiting with bated breath for your email to arrive. When your email newsletter does arrive, make sure it doesn’t waste their time. Get to the point quickly, instead of burying the value under a mountain of greetings and headers and hilarious photos. Figure out why someone would want your email, and then tell them what that is right away. Email Design Tip #2. Ask nicely first. When you are excited about something, you want to tell everyone. Clients often assume that everyone they have ever met, and many they have not, would love nothing more than to receive their latest news. Of course, this is not the case, and laws are in place to back them up. If you are using an external email service, it will have it's own policies on what permission you need in order to email people. Know which policies apply to you and your clients before you "send" your email newsletter out. Explicit permission is best : ask people directly if they would like to receive emails about your topic. If you can show an example of what they will get and let them know how often they’ll get it, all the better. People might forget actually asking to receive your email, particularly if they don’t send emails very often or signed up as a result of entering a competition. A short message at the top of your email header will help people remember and make them more likely to read on. Email Design Tip #3. Focus on relevance. Even if you have met your legal obligations and have the explicit permission of your recipients, they don’t necessarily want to read your emails. Sending valuable, relevant information to your subscribers is vital. You might not want to send information to everyone on your list just because you can. Consider carefully whether the information is useful to them and what they expect from you. Email Design Tip #4. Make unsubscribing easy. We’re all tempted to hide the dull disclaimers and terms and conditions in Tiny Gray Font Land at the bottom of the page, but putting the 'Unsubscribe' link there is a bad idea. There’s no point in emailing people who are not interested in your content any more. If your content is no longer relevant to them, let them unsubscribe easily. Making it hard will likely only lead to complaints of spam and leave people with a bad impression of your company. It's much better to make it clear and prominent; that way, if they decide in future that they would like to receive the information you’re offering, they will be confident in signing up. Email Design Tip #5. Code like it’s 1999 ( literally ) and use inline CSS. While most of us have put down our tools of trade from the browser wars, the fight goes on in the jungles of the email client. Instead of a handful of browsers, we find more than a dozen major email clients, with HTML and CSS rendering ranging from great to appalling. To get decent results across a lot of email software clients, we’re back to using HML tables. Some email clients strip CSS out of the head but leave style blocks in the body. Gmail goes further and strips out all CSS from the head and body but leaves inline styling. Email Design Tip #6. Always include a plain text version. Some people just don’t like HTML in their emails. They might be using older systems, or their system is locked down and they just can’t view HTML. Provide a plain text email alternative, so that the reader’s own email server or program can choose which version to display. Again, your email service probably provides that capability. Plain text can be hard to read, so spend some time making it scannable and useful. Email Design Tip #7. Don’t assume that images will be viewed. If you have used Outlook or Gmail, you’ve seen that “Images in this email are not displayed” message many times. In many of the major email clients, your images will not be shown by default. Readers have to click a link or button to download and display them. Here is a recent email we saw. On the left is the intended design (well, the top half of it), and on the right is how it appears in Gmail by default. Not exactly clear! Always ensure that your email has HTML text as well as plain text. Many people might not realize they can choose to show images, and some just won’t bother. So you can’t assume that people will actually see your images at all. - Avoid images for important content such as headlines, links and calls to action. - Add a prominent text-based link to a Web version of your newsletter. - Get recipients to add you to their address book or whitelist. - Use the alt attribute for all images to give Gmail users a better experience. - Specify height and width for images to ensure that the blank placeholders don’t throw your design off. - Test your design with images turned off before sending. Email Design Tip #8. Follow the law. Review any relevant commercial email regulations for your country. The best known of course are the US CAN-SPAM laws, but there are many others. Email Design Tip #9. Test everything before sending. Once it's sent, it's sent. While reviewing current email client standards is a great start, nothing beats actually testing an email newsletter in as many clients as possible. Several services help with design and spam testing, and the service you use may already have this built in. Make sure every link is working and that any personalization appears as expected. We always spot problems two seconds after hitting "Send," so send some test emails to people who can give you feedback, and save yourself the despair of sender’s regret. Choosing email marketing softwareWhen choosing email marketing software is important to know what to look for in a software package. The basic and substantial features that you should look for include the following...Email Newsletter DesignBelow is information you need to planning and building an email newsletter design that renders well and is actually useful to recipients...How important double opt in email can beWhat is double opt-in email? It is a way to ensure that the person who opts to join an email marketing list truly does want to join it...Email Marketing Tips – How to Design and Send EmailsDesigning your email - Email Marketing Tips 1 – Use Plain Stylization of Links... |
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