I’ve been an email marketer for 6 years now.  Long enough to know what works and what doesn’t.

I constantly get the request to have a prettier font, or a background image throughout the entire email.

Here is why you shouldn’t do that:

Many email applications, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Entourage block those pretty pictures.  What your audience then sees are a bunch of boxes with blue X’s through them.

Instead of it being all pretty pictures, divide it up.  Get the content that you really want people to see the most up to the top of the email, not in an image, but in text.  Many people view their emails using the preview pane so they will only see the uppermost part of your email at first.   Make the links to your website and your contact information in a text format instead of in a picture.

Subject lines:
Never use an exclamation mark in a subject line.  Spam filters are watching closely for it, and will catch you most of the time.

Body copy:
Avoid very large font sizes.  Spam filters also look for this.

Giving everyone the option to opt out of your emails:
It’s the law.  You have to.  Don’t make it hard for them to do it either.  It should be one click and they are done.  Don’t make them sign in to your website to manage their subscription.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.