E-mail Marketing Design
Sending out high quality branded e-mails to customers and prospects has become very popular recently and Beach Software can help send out such e-mails.
Creating a marketing e-mail is very different from normal web design and unless the company that creates your e-mail knows what they are doing, it will probably never arrive to the recipient and even if it does, it probably won’t look as it was intended to.
There are at least seven major e-mail clients available and in use which need to be to tested against, compared to the four browsers to test a website against. Marketing e-mails need to consist of an HTML part (the pretty bit) and a Plain Text part (the ugly bit), they have to use a low number of external images, absolutely referenced URLs, inline styling, no scripting or animation and worst of all really should use tables (these are hated by web designers) to reach it’s full audience.
We test all our marketing e-mails in HTML and Plain Text on the following e-mail clients (when possible) using their standard SPAM and security settings (i.e. Outlook blocks images by default and you have to click to show them) to make sure that on arrival, your e-mail looks adequate until the user recognises the sender and shows the e-mail in all it’s glory. The web based e-mail clients (e.g. Hotmail) strip out a lot of standard formatting for security purposes, so your e-mail could look vastly different on these clients compared to PC based e-mail clients (e.g. Outlook).
- Hotmail / Yahoo / Gmail
- Outlook / Outlook Express / Thunderbird / Lotus Notes
The design guides for e-mails are very different to websites; the width of your e-mail is about 50% less at around five to six hundred pixels wide. The Plain Text version of your e-mail can only be around sixty characters wide and any links have to be fully typed out as they won’t be clickable normally. Good e-mail campaigns have a clearly identified sender (i.e. the company name), a strong subject (i.e. the company name and the purpose of the e-mail), and the addressees’ full name, strong company branding immediately at the top of the body of the e-mail (even if images are blocked) and full contact information including the legal stuff.
SPAM is so annoying – people hate getting it, and you don’t want your e-mail being treated as it and it’s very easy to get marked on the internet as a spammer. We’ll review your e-mail content and advise you on where it needs to be revised. Some useful tips are to avoid phrases like ‘click here’, avoid crazy fonts, colours and capital letters, control your punctuation (i.e. don’t use ‘!!!!!’ or ‘???’) and most importantly, your e-mail designer must use correctly formatted HTML – we always do.
One final thing to remember is the legalities. Your e-mail must contain unsubscribe links, you should provide links to your Privacy Policy, you should keep your old e-mail campaigns (perhaps even put them on your website), and you have to have proof that the recipient originally said, ‘yes I am happy to receive your marketing e-mails’.
Our prices start from £70 to design and build your e-marketing campaign. We can also send out your e-mail and track the results for just 1p per recipient and can provide approved marketing e-mail lists.
