People make quick judgements, whether you like to think you’re open minded or not, you will still make an initial judgement on something/someone new within the first few seconds of seeing it/them.

Bearing this in mind, you should really look at the impact of your email when someone first opens it. A judgement will be made almost instantaneously when the email is first opened.

You need to firstly make sure that the campaign looks professional. The best thing to do is look through your inbox and find an email you like, then set that as the benchmark for your campaigns standard. The worst thing you can possibly do is construct an email that ultimately looks no better than the junk that you receive. If your camapaign lacks that air of professionalism about it, it will ultimately fail.

Secondly, the branding of the email can have an influential effect on the success of your campaign. There is still apprehension on trusting online services (need quote from recent survey) and if you have a different branded email to your website, a recipient can be (and rightly so) untrusting of the email authenticity. Always use your own website as a base of what your campaign should be constructed around. I’m not saying copy your website, but make sure that the campaign has a familiarity about it.

A lot of people will also scan read something and not pay full attention to it. What your email design needs to do is ensure that the things they do scan over are what you want them to pay attention to the most. If there is an offer on, or you want someone to take note of a certain area of interest in the email, make sure it is prominent to a scan reader. The best thing to do is to place your main points at the top of the page, and then go into further details further down the page.

This also works well for my next point; the preview pane. This should also be thought about as you should be trying to ensure that your email fits neatly within this preview pane. There are obviously different sized preview panes, depending on the email client but a general rule is no longer than 650px wide. This should allow the whole width of the email to be viewed in the pane, meaning you can get your whole message across to them before they open. Further to this point, I tend to find myself not bother with emails when they come into my outlook and I can’t view the full width of the campaign in my preview pane.

Though most design is down to personal taste, if you follow these rules, then you will at least have a good solid foundation to work from.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under email design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.