We are a silent and confidential digital media partner exclusively for creative agencies throughout the UK

We have been doing e-mail marketing for our creative agency partners for some time now, and as more and more end user clients are realising the benefits and ROI of e-mail marketing, this is fast becoming one of our most popular services.

The only trouble is, sometimes, creative agencies that have not had much experience in designing e-mail campaigns, are a little confused about the standards and creative limitations of e-mail designs.

So here is a little ‘E-mail Design 101′ for anyone that wants some tips on how to create effective e-mail campaigns.

1. Width
The first thing that you need to be aware of is the width of the design. Normal website can vary in width from around 750px wide up to 1200px wide. We don’t have this luxury in e-mail campaigns because the visible viewport of a users email client is normally quite small. Also there are so many e-mail client applications, we have to be as sure as we can be, that the e-mail (from a width point of view) will fit into the users viewport. The recommend width for an e-mail campaign is between 500-650 pixels wide. Try and stick to this whenever possible or you will find a portion of your content is not viewed by your audience (people hate using horizontal scroll bars in e-mail)

2. Creative Design
Another aspect is to make your e-mail design as simple as possible. A good proportion of your e-mails will be delivered into users inboxes with the images turned off, so if you have relied on an image heavy e-mail to get across your ‘call to action’ you will have failed immediately.

My regular clients will have heard me say ‘Content is King’ often enough, but in e-mail design, its twice as important. Capture your users with good copy not fancy design. This does not mean you can only design boring black and white e-mails, just be aware, a lot of users will, initially, see your e-mail with no images downloaded.

3. Multiple Email Client Support
Microsoft Outlook is not the only e-mail client you know. Your e-mail could be viewed in Outlook (2000, 2003 or 2007), Lotus, Gmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird, ISP Webmail and a whole host of other e-mail clients. The trouble for us developers is that all these e-mail clients render e-mails in different ways and in most cases, lack the type of support of basic coding that websites employ.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one of the worst offenders with e-mail now being rendered by MS Word rather than Internet Explorer in Outlook. This means that most of the fancy coding we put into websites are completely useless in e-mail read in Outlook 2007. The overall objective should be to keep it simple.

4. Embedding Multimedia
You cannot embed Flash movies into an email. Full stop. The best you can do it create a link to a flash movie hosted on the web. You can include really simple animated GIF’s but even that, don’t expect them to show up in all e-mail clients.

5. Don’t waste peoples time
An email inbox is a very noisy environment, with calendars, notes and folders all competing with the actual emails for space. Given that a reader may only ever see your subject line before deciding whether to read your email, you can’t afford to waste time.

Make sure that your emails show right away why they are worth reading. Consider starting with a succinct table of contents to help decide whether they should read on. This is particularly important when you consider preview panes, which may only show the first few lines of your message. You might even be able to get your key point into your subject line.

6. It’s all about the permission
There are many different laws that apply to commercial email in different locations. One rule that applies almost everywhere is that you absolutely must have permission to send people bulk email. In most cases, it also makes sense to remind people about how they gave you that permission. The laws regarding how you get their permission are steeped in shades of grey. One train of thought is that if someone puts their e-mail address in the public domain (such as on Facebook or LinkedIn, then they automatically waive their right not to receive bulk e-mail. At the other end of the scale some companies go for the double opt-in policy, where not only does someone have to ‘subscribe’ to receiving a marketing e-mail, but they also have to click a confiirmation link they get in their inbox.

In short, as long as you are sending an informative and targetted e-mail to your users, it is unlikely they will hit the ‘Mark as Spam’ button in their e-mail.

If you have any queries about e-mail marketing and the law, please call us to discuss your individual circumstances.

7. Get me out of here
Give people an easy way to unsubscribe to your e-mails. This makes is less likely you will be marked as a spammer. Include an unsubscribe link at the top and bottom of your design.

8. Include a plain text version
Although shiny happy HTML e-mails may be beautiful, not everyone can view HTML emails, or wants to. Blackberry users, for example, will mostly see your plain text version. So make sure the text is readable, concise and relevant.

Finally…..
Dont worry to much about remembering this stuff, becuase that is what we are here for. We will give you all the help and advice you need in designing your e-mail campaigns and you can send us drafts of your design for review and we will come back to you with suggestions on how to improve the campaign.

We actively manage a large number of e-mail campaigns on behalf of our clients on a weekly basis, so you can be assured that we know what we are doing, and we keep and eye on all the latest guidelines and recommendations so you don’t have to.

Before I finish, I also want to make you aware of another service which is becoming very popular. SMS Text campaigns are very popular if your target market is at the younger end of the scale. We now manage outgoing and incoming text campaings for a number of high-profile customers and the feedback on a SMS campaign can be much quicker that a standard e-mail campaign.

If you want to know more about SMS Text campaigns, please call us on 08450 580586 or contact us here.