Marketing Guides

Ten Tips To Optimize Your Email Marketing And E-Newsletter Design

1. Do not use too many graphics in your email marketing. Ideally you would have about 60 text and 40 graphics in your emails. It is never a good idea to send an email that is one giant image. Keep in mind that many email clients have images turned off by default so in text you have to give your recipients reasons to open the emails.
2. Provide a link to allow people to view your email as a Web page. Some people just prefer to look at things in a browser and your HTML email may not render perfectly in every email program out there. Most Email Service Providers ESPs include a forward to a friend feature.
3. Use the HTML alt tag for important images. If images are turned off the alt tag will provide a text description of the image so the recipient will know what the images are which can be an incentive to turn on images.
4. Tables are important component of email design and have made a come back as email marketing usage has increased. Make sure to use the table attributes to maximum advantage.
5. If you do use Cascading Style Sheets CSS which many people do in their Web design keep in mind that only inline CSS works with email marketing.
6. Be sure to send a text version along with your HTML version. Many ESPs have a sniffer that can detect if the email client of the recipient can render HTML or not. If the email client cannot render with the HTML then the text version is sent to that recipient. If you neglect to do a text version you could be missing some of your subscribers.
7. Test your emails against a list that includes a variety of email clients including things like Yahoo Gmail Outlook and so on. Do this before you send out your production email.
8. Do not rely on background images. There is no guarantee that your background images will display properly on all the different email programs out there.
9. Don’t forget that you are designing for email programs so be conscious of file sizes of graphics and try to keep the width of your emails to about 600 pixels.
10. Avoid things like flash javascript etc. as many email clients do not support these things properly. Keep it simple.

About the writer:  Neil Anuskiewicz is the Director of Business Development for the StreamSend Email Marketing Service.

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