Campaign Monitor's 2008 Email Design Guidelines

In this article Mathew Patterson discusses the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful HTML email.

Here are the quick and dirty guidelines:

• Don’t waste your readers’ time — An email inbox is a busy place, you won’t get much attention.
• Permission matters — Not only do you need to have permission to email people, but it helps to remind them of how they gave you permission, as specifically as you can.
• Relevance trumps permission — Just having permission is not enough, the content you are sending must also be relevant.
• Make unsubscribing easy — There’s no point emailing people who are not interested.
• Image blocking is common — You can’t rely on people actually seeing your images.
• Bring back tables — Structural tables are still often necessary for creating columns.
• Add inline styles — Gmail removes anything else.
• Don’t forget your plain text version —  You can make blocks of text more readable.
• Meet your legal obligations — For example, CAN-SPAM for US senders.
• Test, test, test — It’s the only way to be confident about your design working.

Read the full article on the Campaign Monitor blog.

Comments

[Tamara Gielen]

Hi John,

That's really good advice. Thanks for sharing!

Tamara

[John W. Furst]

Nice post.

I want to say something about testing. Many marketers work with follow-up sequences or automatically sent emails triggered by RSS feeds... Features which are offered bt sophisticated email marketing services providers.

However! Watch out when testing or messing with those features. It happens very easily that a little test message gets sent to your entire list or when messing with your Blog the RSS feed might trigger 10 messages in no time.

It just happened to me (Luckily my readers were forgiving). I learned: As important as testing (those technical features) is, have a seperate email list for test purposes only. That way it's much safer.

With your 'real' list focus on split testing.
Yours John