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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