Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog

Seven Tips For Good Email Creative

by David Baker

Hoping to hit the jackpot with an e-mail program that makes all your hard work behind the scenes worthwhile? Of course you are. Then you need good creative execution. However, the definition of “good” is often in the mind of the beholder. With so many options to test and so few good creative strategists in the space, where do you start? Here are seven areas of focus to improve your e-mail creative.

1. Simplicity. It’s the old KISS metaphor (Keep It Simple, Stupid). E-mail has an attention-capturing window of opportunity that is greatly diminishing. Some say three seconds, some five, but either way, it isn’t a lot of time.

Nielson Norman Group produced a newsletter usability report in June of 2006 (“E-mail Newsletter Usability’) which indicated an average newsletter has the reader for up to 40-50 seconds, while a marketing or promotional e-mail retains the reader for less than 5 seconds.

How To Increase Conversion Rates

Laurie Hood answers the question "How can I increase conversion rates for my e-mail newsletter content?" here. This is what she says:

We know that buyers at the early stages of the buying process are most often business or IT professionals conducting research about the different offerings in the marketplace. For these buyers, marketers need to clearly set out in their e-mail newsletters what the buyer is going to learn by reading the content. You can do this by clearly defining the nature of the content in the title and have the content written in simple terms and with an easy-to-follow layout.