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Sometimes Less Can Be More Effective

I see hundreds of advertising pieces in any given month that companies are looking to send out via email. They range from really slick, graphically dynamic pieces to straight-forward text information. Each has its purpose—and what that purpose is can sometimes be where the problems arise.

Email marketing is a very unique way to promote your brand or products to a consumer. When designing your email message, you have to keep that in mind as there are many issues with filtering, and various things that can cause a spam trigger. So the design always needs to focus on one critical item—what is the point of the message and how clearly defined and visible is the call-to-action?

We recently did some acquisition work for a large well-known company that sent over one of the slickest looking advertising pieces I have seen. Great images, great colors, lots of product shots—you could tell the agency put a lot of work into it. However, it was for those same reasons that the creative piece was not going to work.

First, you can’t send out, via email, a marketing piece that is one big image, or multiple images. That undeniably will lead to a lot of blocking/filtering issues.

Second, specifically identifying over 10 products in the advertising piece will lead to a little confusion or indifference on behalf of the consumer. For optimal results, there should be one call-to-action and focus on one product. I think consumers generally like the online shopping and checkout process to be easy. So focus on one thing, and put all your efforts into that one item.

And lastly, there was a phone number for the recipient to call in their order, but the company did not track where the calls came in from. So they couldn’t tie back the calls to the email campaign itself.

Ultimately this particular campaign didn’t perform as well as it should have.

On the other hand, we did another acquisition campaign for a very well-known cataloger. Their advertising piece was straight to the point. It had one very nice image, a little text, a clear reference to the apparel offer, and a well highlighted promotional offer for free shipping. Short, concise, to the point. It was one of the best performing campaigns we have run all year.

Some general HTML design guidelines and recommendations:

1. Use fonts that are universal on the internet such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and New Times Roman so the message doesn’t default to a different font if the user does not have one of these installed on their computer.

2. Use alt tags in the HTML code for each image used in the design.

3. Use headers, especially those that feature the brand/logo

4. Minimize the amount of graphics/images used. Don’t rely on them to be the main content of the message.

5. The subject line should be less than 49 characters, including spaces.

6. Do not use comments in the HTML code of your email as they flag spam triggers.

7. Keep the message size under 50KB for consumer emails and under 75KB for business.

8. Lastly, keep the width of the HTML message under 650 pixels so the design does not potentially get cut off in the preview panels for the recipients.


We’ve all heard that “beauty is only skin deep”; I think the same thought can apply to the way we put our advertising pieces together. We need to focus on what really matters in the end—response/conversions/clarity of message.

—Rob Fitzgerald

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Welcome to the Email Experience Council's blog, a forum for the email marketing industry's leading voices. On these pages, you'll find the opinions and thought-leadership that's driving the next evolution of email.

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the voices of email

The Email Experience Council's membership includes many of the brightest and most committed email marketing experts. We're pleased to have some of them share their insights here on these pages. Our blog contributors include:

Jordan Ayan is the chairman of Create-It!, a technology consulting organization, as well as the CEO of SubscriberMail, one of the leading email marketing companies. A two-time book author, a patent holder and a frequent speaker, Jordan has more than 20 years of experience in direct and database marketing. Read more.

Nicholas Einstein is director of strategic and analytic services at Datran Media. Specializing in email and CRM strategy, he helps some of America’s top brands leverage online channels to communicate more effectively with their customers and prospects.

Lisa Harmon is a principal at Smith-Harmon, a creative services consultancy dedicated to email marketing strategy and production. She works with marketers to increase clickthrough, maximize revenue, and infuse delight into their email creative. Lisa is also the blogger behind edm.smith-harmon.com, an ongoing commentary on the best (and worst!) in email marketing creative. Read more.

Chip House is ExactTarget's VP of marketing services, leading the teams responsible for client success. He was named to BtoB Magazine’s 2005 “Who’s Who in B-To-B,” for being a vocal proponent of legitimate commercial email and an active lobbyist regarding spam and privacy issues. Read more.

Marco Marini is the CEO of ClickMail Marketing (CMM) and an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over a decade and half's-worth of experience in the field. Before taking over as CEO, he was CMM's VP of Marketing & Operations. Marini has also held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada.

Stephanie Miller is VP of strategic services for Return Path, the leading email performance company. She works with marketers to earn a higher ROI and response from their acquisition and retention email programs—developing content, contact and segmentation strategies, along with testing, measurement and production programs. Read more.

Erick Mott is communications director at email service provider Lyris. He has 20 years of experience from enterprise, SMB, agency and start-up marketing, communications and innovation roles at companies including Habeas, Nokia, MarkMonitor, GlobalFluency, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Philips Electronics and two of his own start-ups. Read more.

Jeanniey Mullen is the Email Experience Council's founder and the global EVP and CMO of global online publishing company Zinio. She is a thought leader and visionary in the email and digital marketing field. A columnist for ClickZ, she has published numerous papers and is a frequent speaker. Read more.

Kevin Senne is the Strategic Deliverability Director for Premiere Global Services. Kevin has been heavily involved in all facets of email marketing for more than a decade and he previously managed Email Operations for Travelocity.com. Kevin specializes in deliverability, strategy, and social media integratio and he focuses on helping marketers become permission-based one-to-one marketers. Read more.

Charles Stiles is the VP of worldwide business development at Goodmail Systems. In his role, Charles is focused on helping generate a better understanding of the email environment and potential solutions for a better consumer experience. He currently serves as the chairman for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Work Group. Read more.

Jeremy Swift is director of client relations for email service provider BlueHornet. He helped form BlueHornet’s founding team in 2000 and has been responsible for client services and marketing strategy since the company’s inception. Jeremy is known for his ability to articulate technical information in ways that clearly resonate with today’s online marketer.

Kara Trivunovic currently serves as the senior director of strategic services for StrongMail Systems, where she is responsible for helping marketers optimize their email marketing programs for greater returns. Most recently Kara was founder and principal of The Email Advisor, a respected email marketing consultancy. Prior to launching The Email Advisor, Kara led strategic services for the email division of Premiere Global Services. Kara brings a unique perspective to the space having worked on the client, agency and provider side for 10 years.

Chris Wheeler is the director of deliverability at Bronto Software. He is leading the charge for ensuring both Bronto's customers and staff are well informed about email marketing practices and technology as well as being the face of Bronto deliverability externally. Previously, Chris created the internal deliverability program at Amazon.com alongside program managing the operations of the email team and was at an ESP leading a team of deliverability consultants. Besides being a frequent contributor on Deliverability.com, Chris is a part of many email industry forums, both business and technical. Read more.

Chad White is the research director at Smith-Harmon, an email marketing strategy and creative services agency. He is the founder of the Retail Email Blog, a blog dedicated to tracking the email marketing practices of the largest online retailers. Chad regularly writes major research reports on email marketing and is an Email Insider columnist for MediaPost. Read more.

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