Optimize Your Email Design: 8 Quick Tips

Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels available to organizations today. We’ve spoken and presented in the past on the mistakes marketers make with email, and how to avoid them and most of those mistakes involved actually getting your email into an inbox and opened. However, once your email is opened, there are still many more problems that can arise based on your emails' aesthetic aspects. Here are our top 8 tips on how you can optimize your email's design for better conversions.

1.  Keep it simple! Emails should be relatively basic to ensure that your message gets across as quickly and with as little effort on the part of your recipient as possible. The simpler the design, the easier your email is to code, test, and the less of a chance there will be problems between different email service providers.
2. Design for preview panes. When designing an email it is safe to assume that the majority of your readers will read your email in a preview pane rather than actually opening it to read it (especially in the B2B industry). As a result, it’s important to keep your email design no wider than 600px. 
3. Include a link to the web version. Your recipients will be viewing your email in a wide range of programs, and using a variety of different devices. Some of these may have outdated or poor HTML capabilities. To avoid difficulties, adding a web version link can allow this portion of your audience to read your email as it was intended. 
4. Keep copy brief. No one likes to open an email and see huge paragraphs of text. It makes reading the email seem like too much of a commitment on the part of the recipient because of the effort involved to read the whole email and scroll down the entire screen. This is especially an issue if they are reading your email in a smartphone which has a much smaller screen resolution. 
5. Stay above the fold. This is a pretty standard design best practice whether it is for webpages or email. Keeping your key content above the fold ensure that regardless of smaller monitor size or preview panes the important content in your email will still be viewed. 
6. Keep images to a minimum. Remember, not all of your readers download the images you include in your email. It is important to make sure that your email still looks professional, and still conveys your message whether your recipient downloads the images or not. 
7. Test every time you send. Designing emails can be a long process, but that doesn’t mean you can cut corners and ignore testing. You need to make sure that every time you send your email, your links are working and your email is rendering properly in different email providers. 
8. Use a consistent template. This is a design tip that can save you time and convey your emails’ credibility. Creating a template once and using it consistently afterwards ensures that you minimize the errors that can occur (although you still need to test each time) and that your company’s branding and message are communicated properly.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at May 26, 2010 9:30 AM

Comments