Design your email for optimum Delivery and Response
26/08/2010
There is no one-size-fits all approach to designing a great email but there are some general tips and best practices that you should always keep in mind when building your
email campaigns.
The From and Subject Line
The
From should almost always be the name of your organisation. It’s important that your recipients be able to immediately recognize the email is from a person or company they know - otherwise they’re likely to glance right over the email without opening it or could potentially even report it as spam.
Don’t be fooled into making it more ‘personal’ and address it from senior members of the organisation because if the recipients don’t know who they are, they are less likely to open the e-mail.
The Subject Line is essentially the headline for your email. Keep it as short, descriptive and interesting as possible. Here are a few tips:
- Try to keep it under 45 characters long. Many email systems cut the subject line off at or around 45 characters, so going over this number can lead to many of your recipients not being able to view your entire subject
- The subject should describe the actual content or purpose of the email.
- Don’t use ALL CAPS or overuse punctuation!!! This makes it look like your email is screaming for attention, which can both annoy your recipients and make your message more likely to get picked up by a spam filter
Plan for the Preview Pane - Make sure that your call to action or some of your interesting content will show up if the recipient views your email in their preview pane. So plan to have easily digestible content at the top of the page that will drive the recipient to take action or read more.
Message Content
Use Short Blocks of Copy - Avoid writing long paragraphs that are difficult to scan through. Use short paragraphs and bullets to make your points and call to action stand out. If it is absolutely necessary to write long paragraphs, highlight words and phrases within each paragraph that highlight what you’re talking about. That way a recipient can quickly scan your message and determine if they want to take action with it.
Always remember that - in most cases - recipients aren’t going to sit down and read your entire message. They need you to show them where, why and how they should take action – and as quickly as possible.
Provide Numerous Links - Don’t just link back to your website once or twice - make it easy for people to take action by sprinkling links throughout the message. Turn all your images into links, too. Images are big and pretty, making them tempting to click on.
Follow the 80 / 20 Rule - This is a simple rule of thumb that says your email content should generally be no more than around 20% images and no less than around 80% text.
Why should you follow this rule? Mainly because many email clients initially block images when an email arrives in the inbox, requiring the recipient to click a button or a link to turn the images on. Relying too heavily on images can mean much of your content will be initially invisible to many recipients. A very image heavy email can also be more likely to end up in a spam folder.
Optimise Your Images for Email - The smaller the file size of your image, the faster it will load. Be sure to save your image for web use using an editor like Photoshop for example.
You should also provide alt-text for all of your images. This back-up text will display in place of the image in some e-mail systems.
Test - Not sure you’re getting the most from your email campaigns with the content you’re using? Test! Try different kinds of layouts and content to smaller segments of your list to see if you get higher response rates. No form of marketing, including email, has a one-size-fits-all approach, so you can’t determine what will work absolutely best for you without trying different approaches.
Need help with designing your email campaigns? Get in touch today by clicking here and filling out our form and we will call you right back!
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