Guidelines for Effective Email Creative

TM
Guidelines for Effective
Email Creative
www.SubscriberMail.com
This report is provided to you courtesy of SubscriberMail, an award-winning provider of email marketing services and technology that enable organizations to create, deliver and measure email newsletters and campaigns with simplicity and sophistication.
To find out more about our unique email marketing solutions, please email info@SubscriberMail.com, or call us at (630) 303-5000.Guidelines for Effective Email Creative 2|
The growing complexity of today's email market has created a deeper need to carefully consider the creative aspects of your email messages. While the need for quality and effective design has always existed from a pure marketing standpoint, challenges unique to the email space require a different look at creative from the perspective of accomplishing specific goals via email. This white paper introduces several of the numerous critical parameters that should be given consideration when preparing email creative, and provides real-world tactics to optimize email creative for maximum results.
The factsResearch that analyzes how people view email content has shown that marketers have only three seconds to catch readers' interest. That's a very limited amount of time to make an impression, inspire readers to keep reading, and ultimately get them to complete your desired action. Compound that data with additional research that suggests readers keep at most eight brands in their inbox at one time, and it's clear that the need for great creative is paramount to your email marketing success.
Define the goal of the messageFor the most part, all email messages have one of, or a combination of, the following four goals:. Drive readers to a desired action. Set a mood/tone/expectation. Create a perception. Reinforce a brand/identity Before attempting to optimize your email creative, you need to first define the goal of your email message. This definition will drive the aspects that require optimization.
Keep it relevantThe key to engaging readers is providing relevant content. There is a plethora of opportunities to tie content to calendared events. A grand theme isn't necessary-even small tie-ins can go a long way toward creating recognition and building relevancy in the eyes of your readers. A good example of this is Google's variations of their logo on their homepage, which is sometimes changed daily. It's a small action, but widely recognized by users. The following are some ideas that barely scratch the surface of possibilities.. N ew Year's-The new year is a great time to reset expectations. What should recipients do or expect from you in the new year?. Valentine's Day-Gifts/kindness. Groundhog Day-What's to come. St. Patrick's Day-Luck/fortune/beer. Super Bowl, or other major sporting events. Major news stories. Entertainment events-Oscars/red carpet. Seasonal activities
www.SubscriberMail.com (630) 303-5000 Copyright ©2008 by SubscriberMail, LLC. All rights reserved.Guidelines for Effective Email Creative 3|
Creative consistency across different email clientsCreative that looks good does not always act good-the creative that looks perfect in your email client may look far from perfect in another recipient's email client. When designing your creative, you need to consider how the design could render in various email clients. For example, Hotmail will display a common tag you might use for a bullet point-•-as foreign characters. (Instead, you'll need to use the

tag.) Clients will display table formatting, style formatting, background formatting, etc. in different ways. Specifically, Microsoft Outlook 2007 does not support background images and does not support background colors in table cells that contain nested tables. In general, be sure you test your design on a number of email clients, especially the major ones.
DimensionsAnother consideration is the width of your email messages. Depending on screen resolutions, the email message that fits nicely on your screen may require horizontal scrolling on someone else's screen. Besides the annoyance factor, if any of your important content is hidden by the scroll, your readers may miss it and not read further. If you keep the width to 600 pixels or smaller, the vast majority of readers will see your full message within their screen.
Although it is possible to use a va... [download for more]