Guest comment: Email Design Made Easy
- Added:
- Feb 24, 2010
Great email design is key to a successful email marketing campaign. Andy Thorpe, email expert at Pure360, outlines his top design tips for an effective email campaign.
Rendering Perfection
Despite sounding a bit like a form of building work, rendering simply means the way in which the images load in an email. Well-designed HTML emails get higher open and click-through rates than text-only email, therefore HTML knowledge is essential to understand the design differences between building a website and building an email letter.
Outlook is one of the main email clients that people will receive your campaigns in, so if you get it right with them, you are halfway there. Keep in mind that rendering will be affected by various factors including webmail services and browser preference.
Do not use unnecessary background images, unless they are essential to the design (very few inboxes will render background images, including Outlook 2007), and always make sure you put images inside <body> tags.
Finally, consider the effects of elements such as cell spacing, margins, borders and bullet lists on the final version of your email when it’s loaded in your recipient’s inbox.
Test Obsessively
Designing an HTML email that looks wonderful on your screen and in your own email inbox is just the starting point. You can’t possibly test for every email application in existence, but you should definitely test as many of the major email clients as possible to ensure the recipient will view your email the way you intended.
Many email service providers (ESPs) will give you the chance to preview your message in multiple inboxes from inside your account. In addition, most ESPs provide some form of spam and format checking, that will highlight any spam-like content or HTML formatting that could cause rendering issues.
Test and test again; as emails render differently in each email client you should send multiple test emails to as many test accounts as possible. If you are using an existing template and changing the body copy each time, make sure you rigorously test the template to identify any issues.
Creative Design Checklist
- Whether working with a designer, or designing the email yourself, you should follow the golden rules below, to produce emails of excellent design quality that will not only look good but achieve the desired results.
- When enlisting the help of a designer it’s important to highlight that you will need a creative designed specifically for email. Ensure that your designer adheres to XHTML coding standards.
- If you’re not going for a full HTML job, keep it simple by using web friendly fonts and only a few images, but avoid importing text from Microsoft Word.
- Keep the text to image ratio to a basic 60:40 split. This will also help prevent them from being caught in the spam filter.
- Don’t use CSS in the head of the file and take time to design your email for situations where images or CSS may be turned off.
- Make sure that your image files are saved as the correct size, rather than being large files that take a long time to download only to be artificially shrunk by the html.
And there you have it. Follow these simple rules for each of the three stages and you will be able to create emails that form an effective campaign that delivers results.
Andy Thorpe is an email expert at progressive email marketing provider Pure360. Founded in 2001, Pure360 provides big brands and small companies with the technology, know-how and support to run effective email marketing campaigns that have a measurable, positive impact on business for more information, please visit www.Pure360.com
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