Five top tips for designing great marketing emails

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Five top tips for designing great marketing emails
Posted on September 3, 2014 by Simon Dunn

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Bang for buck email marketing is one of the most cost efficient methods of attracting attention, but only if your readers receive a professional looking and stylish email.  If you don’t want to end up in the spam folder, you need to understand some important rules. So here are 5 top tips to help the budding email marketer design their emails to be more effective:

1Never embed a single image of your design into an email.

Most readers will just see a blank page. For them to see your email they will have to download it by pressing the download pictures button in their email software. So instead use a mixture of imagery and HTML text.

 

2Images don’t automatically download.

Because most readers will not see the images in your email, use ALT tags to name the images and always include the pixel size of the image in the code so the framework of the email appears correctly sized.

 

3Keep your coding simple.

Coding for HTML email is not like designing a website, so your web developers might not be the best people to create mailers. The email should be as legible as possible in as many different email clients as possible (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Google Mail etc). This means going back to older methods of coding and using CSS sparingly.

 

4Single or Multi-column?

Think about the content of the email – should it be a single column or a multi-column layout? A newsletter would be more suited to a multi-column layout but an invitation would suit single.

 

5Follow the rules.

Keep it simple and in line with readers expectations of HTML e-mail conventions. That means a link to a web based version of the email at the top, company logo, header / introductory image and then content.  Plus a footer with address and the legally required unsubscribe option etc.

 

Hopefully you’re feeling inspired, and if you’d like some help you can always contact the professionals here.