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.

Here’s why you shouldn’t
1.  Google can’t see it.  Bing can’t see it.  Yahoo can’t see it.  You’ve just stopped yourself from being found on all three of the major search engines.  Not only that, as you navigate from page to page on a flash website, that title of the website doesn’t change, so you can’t even try and get different keyword phrases to show up in Google.

2.  Cell phones can’t see it.  What the people who view it on a cell see is a big gray box.  Not very impressive.

A flash element here and there like a small banner is fine, but don’t go crazy and design the whole thing in flash.  If you do, you will have to redo it very soon, unless you want to spend a lot of money on google pay per click campaigns.

Another problem website designers often find is the speed of the hosting companies.  One of the factors that influence how well your site ranks in Google is how quickly it loads.  If you offer website design, AND also offer Search Engine Optimization, which we do at MK Interactive, we don’t recommend second rate companies for website hosting, because it can hurt what would be a well optimized site just because the hosting is not high enough quality.

When we refer to high quality website hosting, we do not mean $50 a month.  We are referring to sites that offer sound hosting solutions, which a high response time, and offer excellent customer service for around $10 a month.

What I saw when I got the website was a black screen with the Flash Player Missing icon that you will of course see if you are trying to view a website in flash.  They lost me, and I never went back to the site.  What they should have done was have a way to detect that I was using a mobile device, and redirect me to a page where I would be asked to sign up to use this awesome game that they really wanted me to play, and then invite me back to play it on my computer when I got home.

Moral of the story: if you are utilizing advertising where the majority of the people who are going to see it are mobile, then design your websites for use on those kinds of devices.