News
 7
Ways to Make Marketing Emails More Readable
The effectiveness of email marketing campaigns
depends more and more on the inventiveness of
marketing and creative teams, according to a white
paper by Performance Communications Group (PCG),
which suggests seven ways to help emails keep their
impact.
PCG, a US-based interactive marketing agency, has
developed a set of guidelines that aim to help email
marketers retail the impact of their
e-communications without running into display
problems when they're received and opened.
The company suggests seven best practices for
composing high impact e-mails without being
restricted by blocking features. To briefly
summarize them:
1. Don't rely on images or multimedia for primary
messaging
Many emails include images to ensure fonts are
rendered as the sender intended. Instead of text,
the reader may only see the dreaded "Red X."
2. Manage your visual assets
When building an HTML e-mail with images or
multimedia, combine as many objects as possible into
one to reduce the total number of Red Xs seen by a
viewer with images turned off. That way it looks
less "broken."
3. Trim down your tables
Don't use HTML tables for large header images or
media, as pre-allocated table space will be
maintained causing the text to fall below the
visible screen area. Even though multimedia should
not be in a table, you should always force the table
cell height and width settings for each object, as
scaling to 100 percent may reduce the actual size,
making it too small to view in a preview window.
4. Keep the code simple!
Complex JavaScript and CSS (styles) for formatting
are often not supported by HTML e-mail viewers.
Instead, use inline style code, multimedia, or
standard HTML code to achieve the desired effect.
5. Don't hide the URL
Always present the URL to which a link will go,
rather than hiding the URL behind a "click here"
statement. The more open and clear you are about
what a link is, and where it will take the
recipient, the better. Many e-mail service providers
change links for tracking purposes, so the
replacement links will expire over time.
6. Remember the fundamentals
Make sure you include a link to allow recipients to
"View this message as a web page" and preferably
also add an "Add to address book" link within the
copy (which will get your sender address effectively
white listed within their e-mail software).
7. Reduce the animation
When using multimedia, file size is of the essence.
Reduce your HTML source code, optimize any embedded
objects, and avoid attachments. Embedded sound also
takes up unnecessary space, and can be highly
annoying if it plays automatically whenever the
message is opened.
Remember, if an e-mail is in any way annoying, the
'Report Spam' button is only a click away.
---Source:
Performance Communications Group (PCG) at (www.epcg.net).
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Melissa Data
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