For many small businesses, email communication is a key marketing tactic used to generate leads, engender customer loyalty and share important news. We asked Melinda Baxter of ExactTarget, a leading provider of on-demand email marketing software solutions, to share tips on how your marketing emails should be designed to achieve maximum results.



Whether you are new to email marketing or hope to optimize your current program, I’d like to start by asking you a very basic question: “Are you designing your email for the email environment or are you merely repurposing a direct mail or print piece?”

A common mistake most marketers make is to add email to their marketing program without developing creative that takes full advantage of its very unique, very interactive, viewing landscape.

Historically, upon introduction of a new marketing medium, the marketer’s first inclination is to bring old creative tactics to the table. Radio’s immobile talking heads dominated early television until some daring producer recognized that the camera and its subjects could move. Now, nothing ever stops moving on television.

Similarly, early direct mail efforts were dominated by envelopes stuffed with print ads. Then, somewhere along the way, an enterprising marketer began to test copy and other creative elements until direct mail evolved into the data-driven medium it is today.

Email is not television. It’s not direct mail. Heck, it’s not even a website. Rather, email is its own unique medium with rules and regulations all its own. To create results-driven email marketing programs, you must optimize your content and design for the inbox.

Imagine your own cluttered email inbox filled with your folders on the left and lots of emails identified only by “from” name and “subject line” stacked up on the right. Unlike a website that someone goes to from a search engine or a bookmark and within seconds arrives at the information they desire, an email needs to cut through a lot of clutter to get attention. Once it has received that attention, the subject line needs to be compelling enough to inspire the subscriber to open it. A majority of email inboxes have a preview pane that makes or breaks the decision to continue – before the subscriber even opens the email. Once an email is opened, the average subscriber spends less than a minute reading the message.

An analysis of this staged viewing process indicates that there are five key areas that should be optimized to get attention, hold interest and elicit a desired response: 
 

• From Name & Address – Are you using a “friendly” from name and return address that clearly states your company or brand name and inspires confidence rather than confusion? If not, why would anyone open your email?
• Subject Line – Most ISPs only show 60 characters in a subject line. Does your subject line fit the bill? Does it inspire an open? Does it create interest or intrigue? If not, why would recipients open your email over the 100+ that they receive every day?
• Preview Pane – The preview pane is commonly defined as the top 4 or 5 inches of your email—the area that displays in the inbox before opening an email. Your brand should be visible in this area to affirm trust. Moreover, since images are blocked by default in a majority of viewers today, you should make sure that you provide HTML text that provides viewers with the motivation to open and read the full email with images turned on.
• Open View (without scrolling) – This is where design needs to artfully path the subscriber eye throughout emotional and rational reasons to continue to read. You have seconds, not minutes, so use borders, buttons, background colors, images, charts and Q&As to highlight relevant messages that will elicit the desired response from your subscriber. Keep it simple and streamlined, avoiding unnecessary content and too much design distraction.
• Full View (after scrolling) – At this point you are into secondary messages, so keep the design simple and focused on the key call-to-action. If you have kept the subscriber interested this long, they are truly intrigued so don’t let this view fizzle out. Deep dive information links back to the web site are well placed here.

Great email design respects both the email medium and the subscriber. Even the greatest email design will fail to motivate a desired action if the content is not both relevant and requested by the recipient. Permission is not merely an email marketing best practice; it is a mandate for marketers looking to optimize performance. 

So is there a “magic bullet” to ensure that all your email designs perform optimally? No, but the good news is that by designing for the medium and measuring performance at each viewing stage through to conversion, you can constantly test and improve your email design performance—and that’s something that even the direct mail gurus will respect!

Once you’ve implemented the getting started tips listed above, you’re ready to take on more specific email marketing design challenges, such as email design & rendering, email design for Outlook 2007 and email marketing for the mobile web.

About
As Director of Marketing Services for ExactTarget, a leading provider of on-demand email marketing software and solutions, Melinda Baxter has helped design email marketing communications for hundreds of B2C and B2B companies. The company’s suite of on-demand one-to-one marketing applications enable clients to send business-critical and event triggered communications to increase sales, optimize marketing investments and strengthen customer relationships.