I would be quite rich now if I had a £1 for every time I’ve received a piece of email marketing and thought, “Stupid people, don’t they know? Lots of little red crosses where the images should be, and no readable text, why should I waste my time. ” I often delete emails like this because I don’t have the time or inclination to download a load of images to view or, more importantly, to read an email.
The obvious conclusion is that I’m subscribing to the wrong lists I hear you cry, but no, companies that I am potentially interested to hear from, blogs I read, and websites I visit regularly are sending me information in a format that is not “working” for me or for them.
This is an example of a beautifully laid out image rich email from a company I have subscribed to, I can’t read any of it without downloading images!
So how as email marketers do we grab people’s attention in the right way in their email preview pane, during the half a second they glance at the email with their finger over the delete button? 1. Target your audience
I keep reading that the most important thing about email marketing is “Targeted Emails”, but what is a targeted email? If I have subscribed to your mailing list, or I’m a customer of yours, then I have an interest in you or your products, and that makes me part of your target audience. This is not the same as sending a “Targeted Email”. Think carefully about every angle of what you are sending; is the content interesting and valuable to the people you are sending to? Think about the layout and design; use cell background colours, and good clear headings that are meaningful and interesting. Think carefully about how your email will look in the Outlook preview pane, I know I’m not the only person who makes that critical delete button decision based on what I can see in the preview pane every morning!
2. Make sure that it can be read
If you’re going to the effort to send me something make sure it’s interesting enough to get me to read the email, more importantly make sure I CAN physically see and read the email content. All too often the content text is locked up in images, yes I could turn on images, but that’s not how I want my email set up. Make the content visible with images off, and make it worth my time.
Here’s a good example that I received recently of how not to do email marketing...
Being inbox-tastic
When tasked with designing an email template for the Noko Newsletters I spent almost 2 days carefully working out the design which might sound crazy when in the end it was such a simple design. Make sure you take your time testing in different email packages and spam checkers, and remember in the case of email marketing ....less is more.
The new template is a very basic table with text content - carefully written and informative content, I hastily add. There were only 3 images, one logo, one strap-line image, and one narrow header image for those people who do work with their images switched on. The design was kept to a narrow width (to fit in most preview panes), a clean content rich design that still works without any images switched on.
The resulting feedback has been fantastic, all of it positive, with requests to be added to the newsletter mailing list from people who were forwarded the email from colleagues who weren’t on our original mailing list.
This design worked well for a B2B communication, but you can still apply the same principles for an ecommerce email, you may need more images to back up your text, but let the key message be exactly that - TEXT!
Noko newsletter with images switched off, and with the images downloaded. The message is clear in both versions.
It’s all too easy to press the delete button – or worse UNSUBSCRIBE!
If I want something, anything from reference material to goods I’ll Google for it. When you make a decision to send me an email please send me some valuable information I can read without images switched on and don’t send emails just for the sake of sending them.
Remember : Why are you emailing? What is your message? Is it valuable information? And make it easy to read!
If you would like my help with your next campaign, please feel free to get in touch.
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