Email Design
Spam complaints… ish
I know a lot of folks working at ESPs. For those I know well, I will usually send in reports. Sometimes they’re not spam reports per se. Often it’s just “hey, this sender shouldn’t have my address, might want to poke them.”
Sometimes it’s even more specific. A few years ago I spoke at a user conference for an ESP. I stayed at the hotel for one night, and the hotel now has my email address. Not a big deal, they’re on the coast and an easy drive from here. They’ll run specials for the locals, and I like it.
Enter in hotel B. I’ve never stayed at hotel B. I’m not sure who hotel B is. They’re also local and may be the same management. I don’t know. They sent me email to the address I’ve only given to hotel A. Not only that, the message is completely unreadable. Dark blue on brown… not exactly a great design choice.
I wasn’t going to send anything in to the ESP, but then I noticed that at the bottom of the email there is a notice that says “This email was sent to: %%emailaddr%%.” That looks suspiciously like this was an accidental send. The ESP folks there are colleagues, so I sent them an email into abuse@.
Creating emails
Email is, still, primarily a written medium. This means that good copywriting is crucial. Today I opened up an email and the pre-header says:
Laura, should have get your Naturals Sample Bag.*Web Version
Wait. What?
Maybe they mean “should have got”? But that’s implying they’re sending out free sample bags to everyone. That can’t be right. But I can’t tell because with images off that’s the only text in the mail, except the footer and legal information.
When you load images you get a little more clarity. Apparently, making a big enough purchase trigger a bunch of samples to be included in your delivery. So the line possibly should be “Laura, get your natural samples bag.”
Maybe it was intentional. After all it did get me to load images to see what the email was about.
Email templates
SendwithUs is crowdsourcing and open sourcing email templates. These are tested templates submitted by the SendwithUs community and run through the Litmus testing suite.
If you’re in the market for a template, or want to share a great template you’ve designed, check out the SendwithUs project.
Creating effective links
CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter.
Read MoreHTML in email
Steve and I were talking this afternoon about HTML in email. He wanted to know what headers I looked for in the HTML portion of an email. A good question, as I’ve seen everything from a full doctype declaration through to just <body> tags.. All of them seem to render OK in various mail clients so I don’t spend too much time worrying about the specific HTML header elements. I do look for invalid tags and comments, but I check those whether they are in the header or the body.
Those of you that design HTML emails, what are your experiences with headers? Are there specific HTML headers that you always include? Do you skip the header portion of the HTML document and just use body tags? How do you test? What do you think is important?