I love email marketing. Getting a well crafted e-mail campaign in the inbox of your potential client is a wonderful thing. In the past we have talked about building your list, not getting blacklisted as spam and why it is an important part of your overall marketing plan. This month I want to give you some tips on bad vs good email design.

You may be doing all the right things in terms of list quality, consistency and e-mail services and still not be getting the open rate that you hoped.  Here are some pitfalls that a lot of people don’t even consider when designing their campaigns.

Subject lines

Think hard about your subject line; often it is the only thing that your recipient will see. If they have the preview pane turned off in their email client (like I do) your subject line IS the headline that will have to grab their attention. Be sure to reference your business name in some way and give them a reason to open it. Tease them. Stay away from spammy words like Free. Click here for a great list of tips on writing good subject lines from the e-mail wiki.

E-mail Length

Longer is not better. In today’s world people want fast e-mail. A couple of paragraphs with links out to more information do the trick better than trying to explain everything in the text body.  Another reason to think short is the growing numbers of people that read their email in hand held devices like Blackberries or iPhones.  No one wants to have to scroll through 4 screens to get to what you want them to read. In fact, most people won’t even bother.

All Images

An increasing number of e-mail clients have the defaults set to NOT display images. If your entire email is an image all you recipient will see is a blank box with an X in it. If you are luck and have included an alt image tag at least they will see that, maybe. Some e-mail clients like Yahoo and Hot Mail won’t even display the alt image tag. A better plan is to use mostly text in your email (especially in the upper left quadrant) and add images sparingly. Any image you do include should carry an informative alt image tag so at least your readers will know what they are missing.

Plain Text

I’m guilty of this one and I  overcame it in 2009. Once you have designed you e-mail in HTML with all its lovely pictures and links be sure to check the plain text version. The system I use allows me to edit the plain text version separately from the HTML version. Take a look at yours. A lot of times what happens is all those links and images end up looking to the untrained eye as lines of gobbledygook.  So just get rid of them. If there are links that absolutely have to be there, write them in plain language.  Ditto the images. Just get rid of any links to outside images since they won’t show up anyway. Next, take a look at the layout. There really isn’t any way to make it pretty but at least strive for clean.  Why is this important?  It’s important because about 50% of e-mails open in plain text. I thought that number was a little high until I considered the number of people viewing their e-mail on mobile devices. Sadly, I expect the number to grow.

These are just a few tricks of the trade. The other thing you absolutely must do is preview and test. Then do it again.  I test every campaign in at least 3 different e-mail clients. I send it to my Outlook acct, my Thunderbird account and my gmail account.  You can set up free accounts on Yahoo and Hotmail as well and then just add those addresses to your test account. Most bulk e-mail programs don’t charge you for your test emails so there isn’t any reason not to test like crazy.

Put these tips into practice and watch what happens to your open and click through rates. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

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