MustangList.com Blog

In the last blog, we talked about how challenging good email design can be. Here are a few more things to keep in mind when designing emails with images.

• Use your company logo. Place it at the top of the email, and design it so that it doesn’t take up valuable space, but still has visual impact. Keep this logo and its placement the same from email to email. By using this consistent placement, if you switch up other aspects of the email from mailing to mailing, the email is still quickly recognized as being from your company.
• Image to text ratio. 30/70 images to text is a good mix. If you create image heavy emails, or emails comprised of a single large image, you increase the chances you’ll end up in the junk folder. Also, single image emails work very poorly when images are turned off…the recipient basically gets a blank email.
• Keep the images under 25k. Larger images take longer to load and you might lose your more impatient readers who will skip to their next email.
• Use moving images sparingly or not at all. Moving images pull focus—this is great on a busy website, but on an email it’s distracting and can make your email look like a circus. Either use the moving image carefully or design your email so focus goes where you want it to go without having to resort to an image that moves.
• Make images clickable. People expect to go somewhere when they click an image. Fulfill that expectation; put a link behind your images. Put your homepage behind your logo.
• Use call to action buttons. In addition to having embedded links in your text and links from graphics, include buttons like: Buy Now, Click Here, Sign Up, Check Availability. These create a more compelling call to action and can increase your click through rate.

Good email design can be tricky. There are many email providers and email readers on the market, not to mention different browsers, making designing an email that consistently looks good (i.e. how you designed it) can be challenging. It also requires quite a bit of time and testing. Mustang List takes some of the guesswork out of email design by offering many templates suitable for a variety of email communications free of charge. Or you can engage Mustang List’s design services to create an email template that matches your website. But if you want to design your emails in-house, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Images Off. Remember to take into account Images Off when designing your email. See past blogs for design tips for Images Off.
• Create a positive impression. Remember that your design should be welcoming and that it represents your company. You want it to reinforce your brand and compel subscribers to read the email further or take action.
• Design around an obvious focal point. Make this focal point “above the fold” and viewable in the preview pane so that your offer appears even to readers who don’t scroll.
• Use tables. You must use tables in your email if you want it to look like you designed it to look. The various email readers your subscribers use can render your email wonky if you don’t use tables. Plus, when the images are turned off, the email still renders properly and looks good.
• Make the email easy to read. Keep the fonts legible, not fancy. The email should be easy to scan and quickly read. Add white space between elements. This helps give the eyes a rest and gives the mind a micro-pause before moving onto the next idea.
• Keep the font for your company name the same. Just like you keep your logo the same from email to email, keep the fonts for your company name the same.
• Consider the amount of copy. Use more copy for newsletters as people sign up for newsletters to read and learn. When you’re sending an email about a sale, special promotion, or an invitation to an event, keep the copy short and to the point with a strong, clear call to action.
• Avoid using too many exclamation points. Spam filters don’t like exclamation points and the likelihood of your email going into the spam folder can increase.
• Avoid red type. Although red is a good color for call to action buttons, red text can be difficult to read.
• Avoid white letters. Using reverse type in small graphic elements can look good and be very useful. But it’s very hard to read white letters on a black or colored background, so it’s best to avoid using reverse type throughout your email. Plus if the background color is stripped by the email reader or browser, your readers will be looking at white text on a white background.
• Use color for emphasis, not because you can. Color should draw attention to an offer or focus the reader on a call to action.
• Use colors that support your brand. This doesn’t mean you have to create an email that matches your logo, but using colors that look good with your logo and using a logo color as an element in the email creates a visual connection between the email and your company. Can you imagine Southwest Airlines sending an email that doesn’t include red and/or orange? No.

In the last blog we discussed how to use alt tags to optimize your email for when images are turned off in different email services. Here are a few more tips:

• Don’t create Image-Only emails. Include some text copy. Emails that are comprised only of images (or that have very little text) often get tagged for junk mail. This is partly because the spam filters can’t “read” the content and protect the recipient by automatically sending the email to the junk folder. A ratio of 30/70 text to images is a good balance to keep in mind. Plus, when images are turned off, there’s some text in the email to go along with your alt tags so content of the message comes across more clearly.
• Add the height and width to all images to ensure that the size of the blank placeholder images doesn’t throw off your design.
• Make sure the offer is above the fold. If you use a big image, it can push any copy below the image further down the email. Your readers will be looking at a large empty space where the image is blocked. So be sure to use Alt Tags, and consider putting some copy above the image. Also test your email design in a Preview Pane.
• Make sure your images are clickable. People expect to go somewhere by clicking an image: fulfill this expectation. When images are turned off, your alt tag will be clickable, so make sure the image, the alt tag, and the landing page all make sense together.
• Consider your background color. If you make an image clickable, but that image is turned off, the alt tag will be clickable. And if you use a background color, you have to be careful that the hyperlinked alt tag will show up against this background color. If it’s hard to read, your subscribers miss your message and you’ll have wasted your time writing alt tags.
• Alt tag product names and prices. If your email features images of products, don’t forget to alt tag the brand, the name, and the price of products. If images are turned off, this will make the product more clickable. And when images are turned on, it’s great for readers to see the name and price of a product when they hover their mouse over the image.

Have you considered what your email looks like when it arrives in a Gmail account with Images turned Off? Or when images are blocked in Hotmail? Did you know that the default view in Gmail is to have Images turned off—even if your email address is added to the customer’s address book? Sure, recipients can turn the Images On, but what if they don’t? Make sure that your emails look good whether images are on or off by using Alt Tags.

When you mouse over an image text pops up for the image: this is an alt tag. And when images are turned off, the alt tag appears as text in place of the image. It’s basically a text description of your image. But using alt tags effectively means reinforcing the image’s purpose or message, not merely describing what the image looks like. For example, the company logo that appears in an email could have an alt tag of “MustangList logo.” But the more effective alt tag would be “MustangList—Easy and Cost Effective Email List Management.” When the images are off, this reinforces the company sending the email, and it reads well to the subscriber—it doesn’t look like some weird back-end of things meant for the designers.

Because it’s this text description that displays when images are turned off, you can use the alt tag to reinforce the message or the call to action of the image. Say you have an email promoting a big Memorial Day sale, and the email is comprised mainly of graphic banners. In the banners you convey the details of the sale (where, when, what, why). You could have alt tags that say “MemDay Sale image1,” “MemDay Sale image2,” etc. Or you could choose some of the more important images and use alt tags to describe the details of the sale: “Huge Memorial Day Sale: Save 20% on all items with this promo code: memday08.” You can choose just one image’s alt tag in which to convey this information, or choose a few images and separate the information among different alt tags.

Be sure to consider the placement of the text when the images are turned off: if you provide alt tags for every image in the email, the text could be redundant and difficult to read. Based on the location of the images within the email, carefully choose which images you will leave blank and which images have the best placement for displaying and reading the alt tag text when the images are turned off. And if the images are more ornamental and don’t convey important information, then leave the alt tag blank— there’s no reason to make an alt tag that’s purely descriptive (“girl reading a book”). In this case you’ll have adequate text copy in the email to get your point across and it will be safe to leave the alt tag blank.

By making sure the alt tags are very descriptive and contain all the information communicated in the images, you can ensure the message of your email comes across even with images off.

Think having emails with compelling content requires spending hours writing content for it? Thing again. Here are some ideas for creating email formats that are sustainable and don’t require a lot of writing.

• A picture can be worth a thousand words. Design an email template that employs images and banners that reinforce your brand and has a limited amount of space for writing.
• Let your products do the talking. If your products comprise most of the content, there’s little for you to write. Have several product sections in a publication. Here are some examples: sale products, seasonal products, featured new products, favorite or most often purchased products.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Get content from your website. Rework a webpage of content to suit an email and you’re good to go.
• Let others do the writing. If you find a great article online write a little review of the article and why you think it’ll interest your readers. Then provide a link to the actual article (you can’t paste the content in your own email—you need to link to it to avoid copyright infringement).
• Tips and Hints. You are an expert at your business. Talk about what you know and do best. It doesn’t need to be long; sometimes just listing tips is enough. Break down what you know into bite-sized chunks and you might find you have enough content for several emails. For example, a real estate agent could fill several emails with tips for selling a house: how to spruce up the outside of the home, how to arrange the furniture inside the home, fix-it jobs that should and shouldn’t be done before selling, etc.
• Customer driven content. You can get your customers to provide content for you. Use customer reviews of products and customer testimonials to promote your products for you. Run a contest for images or articles provided by your customers.
• Run a Survey. Create a survey to help you get to know your customers better or to get their feedback on something you’re considering implementing. Explain the purpose of the survey in an email with a link to the survey (you might consider incentivizing responding to the survey with a discount code or an entry into a contest). After the survey is over, the questions in the survey can provide content for future emails, as you can share the responses and findings with your readers.

You work really hard to get a reader to open an email: you think of the perfect offer, the perfect subject line, and with the best of luck, your subscriber opens your email. Don’t risk losing them once they open your email by making them scroll to find the information that interests them.

If your emails are jam-packed with information and tend to be a bit long (maybe you only send once monthly or you just have a lot of information to communicate) you might want to consider using anchor tags. Anchor tags allow your readers to jump right to the information they want to read and skip the information of less interest to them.

You can implement anchor tags in many ways. You can use them as a sort of a table of contents for an email newsletter. If you send out a newsletter comprised of regular features (such as a Tip of the Month, Calendar, etc.), you can create a newsletter “highlights” box with anchor tags linking to the articles for each of the features. Or, if you write an introductory paragraph in your emails, you could mention the features of the current issue and use anchor tags to link directly to the content further down in the email.

Whatever you do, remember the purpose of anchor tags is to provide readers with a quick way to link to the content further down the page. They should be short and appear above the fold—remember, you’re trying to cut down on the need to scroll.

Maybe your creative could use a face-lift. Maybe your offers have become stale and predictable. Don’t underestimate the difference an update to your email design can make. With a fresh design and some new offers, you might find you can keep your new members engaged longer and you can re-activate some members that seem to be losing interest.

If you tend to offer the same kind of special from email to email, try mixing it up a little. See how a Free Shipping offer performs. Try a dollar off with minimum purchase offer vs. giving a percent off the total. Changing the nature of the deal can catch your reader’s eye and elicit a click-through. If your emails are not offer-based, but are rather content-based, work on having clear subject lines that give readers a hint as to what’s in store for them if they open the email.

If your email design hasn’t changed in the last year or so, consider a redesign. You could freshen up the color palette and adjust the font or it could be a complete overhaul—changing the concept and even the name of the publication as well as the design.

Another thing to consider is re-working the layout. For an email that is text-heavy, you might try putting the content on your website so you can shorten the email by providing links to the “full story” on your website. If your email uses a lot of graphics, make sure that the graphics are not pulling the eye away from your main message.

Come up with a few options and test the different designs and/or offers to random samples of your list. See which emails get more clicks and trigger more members to spend time and money on your website after clicking. If you’re testing creative, you’ll probably want to keep the subject lines the same, so all else is equal.

And remember, since you’re trying to get members who haven’t recently opened emails to open this new email and see the new design, you’ll want to carefully strategize the subject line. You might even want to target the least active members with the new creative and an extra-special offer, whereas for your more engaged members, you simply ask them to check out your new design. You’ll have to decide which approach is more likely to be successful with your customers. Whatever you do, try a few different things with different subsets of members so you have some results to compare.

A recent subject line research study identified that “click-through rates (CTR) for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.”

Before you start chopping your subject lines down in size, be aware that a short subject line alone won’t guarantee success. And, what works for one list may not be as effective for another. You’ll have to monitor subject line response rates to determine what works for your list.

HTML e-mail is used to bring life to e-mail communications. Originally, e-mails were restricted to plain text; now, new e-mail programs allow users to see more vibrant and dynamic content. These e-mails can now include colors, links, and images, making them as attractive and visually stimulating as web pages.

HTML e-mails are created by including HTML tags into the body of the e-mail and then inserting a special MIME type that tells the program to render the content according to HTML rules. It’s important to include the MIME type; without it, the e-mail is displayed in plain text only, and the HTML tags become visible to the reader.

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME types are used to send non-ASCII information, and this is what allows e-mail programs to realize that it’s an image instead of a garbled series of characters.

MIME types are specified in the header of the e-mail, which is where the program also finds the “To”, “From”, and other display or encoding information. Typically, when an e-mail is sent, it includes the line

Content-Type: text/plain

This notifies the program that a plain text e-mail has been received. To send HTML e-mail, the Content-Type should be modified. Depending on the situation, one of the following will be used:

Content-Type: text/html
Content-Type: text/x-aol

Most HTML e-mail capable programs understand the first Content-Type, including AOL 6.0. Older versions of AOL, however, require the second Content-Type to be used.

Does an e-mail program support everything? Not at all. These e-mail programs are often only able to do a simplified amount of rendering. They certainly are not able to perform on the level of your average Internet Explorer or Netscape browser.

One reason is because of the security hazards involved with sending HTML e-mails. These e-mails can expose the unwary user to hostile viruses or other intrusive programs. Starting with the AOL 6.0 client, the e-mail program will render nearly all HTML tags but will exclude several pieces of functionality typically found on websites.

• Scripts (e.g.. JavaScript, VBScript)
• Java
• Frames and IFrames
• Tooltips
• Active X
• Video
• Audio
• External Style Sheets
• Meta Refresh

The common theme here is end-user security. Malicious e-mailers can bury a wide variety of harmful actions within the HTML e-mail, including programs that activate upon download. Also, as is the case with Meta Refresh, a user can be sent to another web site automatically. It is important to AOL that the end-user be protected from these potential security hazards.

On AOL clients older than 6.0, the MIME header should be MIME/X-AOL. This allows the e-mail to be translated using AOL’s Rich Text Format. RTF is not as full featured as what is available from AOL 6. HTML tags that are not supported by RTF will be displayed as plain text. Additionally, no tables are supported. Users should be careful to only use the following tags when sending HTML e-mail to clients older than AOL 6.

If you’re looking for a way to increase your response rates, you should definitely consider personalization of your creative. Email marketing programs such as Mustang List [www.MustangList.com] can automatically compose and send mass email messages with personalized fields and content, driven by a subscriber information database.

Personalization can help you speak directly to your customer or prospect and achieve the much-sought-after goal of one-to-one marketing. However, in some ways personalization can work against you. Keep in mind the following three issues:

1. Garbage in, garbage out. If some records in your database have missing or mixed-up fields, you can end up with very odd looking messages, such as:

Dear ,
I hope you have been enjoying the product you purchased from us back in …

2. It’s best to avoid personalization in the Subject line; it often comes across as artificial. And, if you use an informal Subject like “Hi, John!” the recipient will expect to find a note from a personal friend. He’ll be annoyed when he finds instead a commercial message from your company.

3. Be sensitive to privacy concerns. Don’t overdo it. An email with too much of the recipient’s personal information might seem like an abuse of privacy.

Whether you personalize your email marketing messages or not, it’s important to make them sound personal, like a one-to-one communication from one friend to another.