Five Email Design Must-Haves

Even with the mad rush to embrace all the growing social media platforms into one’s marketing, there remains value in a good old email marketing campaign… if done correctly. The average email subscriber faces an inbox filled with clutter. Once they sort through a variety of personal, professional and marketing messages, they won't look kindly on messy or incoherent email offers. "Without a well-crafted, clear and consistent design for your brand, your email is going nowhere in a hurry," says John Murphy in an article at MarketingProfs.

Here's how to avoid such a pitfall:

Use a good balance of text and images. Many spam filters consider an email's text-to-image ratio when deciding if it will reach a recipient's inbox. If there's too much text or too many images, it risks banishment to the spam folder.

Assume that images will be blocked. There's a good chance your subscribers will only see embedded images if they actively click on a link to display them. Because of this, the text in your message has to make sense even if its images don't show up.

Provide a back-up option for image-rich backgrounds. A number of clients—Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, for example—don't support background images. But there's a workaround. HTML allows both an image and a color to be coded in the same tag, which means that if a mail client supports background images, the images will be displayed; if it doesn't, then the chosen color will appear as the email background instead.

Include a table of contents for lengthier messages. When an email has several sections, ease its navigation with a simple table of contents that links within the message to the topics a subscriber wants to read.

Remember a call to action. You've sent the message because you want your recipient to do something—so make sure they can.

How it works matters as much as how it reads. Don't sabotage your strong content with weak email design.

Source: MarketingProfs