Question: What are tips for designing a triggered welcome email?

Answer: Welcome emails are a great example of a triggered marketing message. When a subscriber signs up for your communications, sending them a welcome email shortly after signup can be very beneficial.

Welcome emails often have higher open rates than your typical campaigns (due to being highly anticipated by new subscribers) so it is important to take advantage of the increased “face time” you have with your audience.

As such, you want your welcome email to make a good first impression and effectively set expectations for the future communications a subscriber will receive. Here are a few tips to get you pointed in the right direction:

Include your brand name in your subject line.
Aside from the “from name,” the subject line is the second most important factor in getting your subscriber to open your email. Seeing your brand name will help them recognize that this as a communication they’ve asked to receive.

Be honest and upfront about mailing frequency.
If you’re going to send a weekly email, make sure new subscribers know this (and that they aren’t expecting to only hear from you once a month!).  Sending to your subscribers more than they expect may cause them to unsubscribe or mark your email as spam.

Re-emphasize the benefits of being a subscriber.
Communicate your value proposition with a short paragraph of text or a bulleted list. This should be the focus of your message placed in the upper left portion of your email to optimize for preview pane viewing.

Keep it short and simple.
Your welcome email should include concise and relevant copy. Don’t include elements that detract from the primary message and make your email unnecessarily long.

Use images wisely.
Since the majority of email clients block images by default, it is important to use HTML text for your welcome email copy. You want this information to be seen by as many people as possible, so only use images for your company logo and supplemental imagery.

Tell them what to look for in the future.
New subscribers should be reminded to add your email address to their address book or safe senders list. This will help to ensure inbox delivery for future communications and in many cases by-pass image blocking.

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Marketing Designer

Melinda Baxter, Director of Marketing Services

We talk about email design as the seamless merging of design and technology to deliver powerful business results.  A few of the Designers at ExactTarget sat down to answer some questions about the “day in the life” of an email marketing designer that loves the challenge to deliver business success through design.

What is the background of an Email Marketing Designer?

I have always been a “visual” person, graduating from I.U.’s Herron School of Art and Design with a degree in Visual Communications. I am a designer of brands, print ads, logos, and all types of marketing communications.  My inner geek loves to bring my design skills to pixel perfection.
- Justine
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I have been designing since I was a kid – illustrations, characters, computer graphics, and animation.  I studied Animation at Purdue’s school of Technology bringing my love of design to computerized mediums. Since then I have been addicted to moving innovative design into powerful interactive media.
- Tim
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I have designed since birth – never without a sketch pad, moving from crayons to oils to Adobe Creative Suite. I have a fine arts background that enables me to design convincingly and artfully to deliver business results.
- Lacey
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My background is in graphic design - print, web, motion graphics, video editing.  I have a good aptitude to learn new media and skills and love the challenge each new media offers. I have always been customer-facing in my career, so understand how to focus on the business opportunity the design needs to solve.
- Chris
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So, why did you choose to become a designer for email marketing?

I love to solve customer business challenges through visual communications.  Taking my love and appreciation of design to build an intelligent, highly motivating communication is a blend of my passions.
- Justine
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I am a problem-solver.  The opportunity to master the ever-changing email marketing landscape through a combination of design and html coding nuances is a great daily job for me.  I have the tenacity to keep trying until the email is the best it can be.
- Tim
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Email is the most pervasive and impactful communication medium today.  For a designer the palette is rich with creative opportunity to explore and test its potential.  It is an entrepreneurial dream that continues to expand as the environment changes constantly.
- Chris
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As an artist, I thrive on exploring new ways to express ideas in design that create a response.  I have the opportunity to design for numerous small and large companies, across a wide range of industries to keep my talent fresh and evolving.
- Lacey
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What skills do you think serve you best as an Email Marketing Designer?

Definitely design skills.  Working for top companies across the world, they expect great design interpretation of their brand.  It is really important that my designs are synergistic with their web site and offline communications to build trust in email.  Yet, email is its own unique medium with a very different design strategy to be successful.
- Lacey
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Agreed. Design skill is really the starting point.  Every medium has a unique environment to take into consideration, and email is certainly challenging due to the lack of standards around how the email will display from one email client to another (AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook, etc...).  Understanding how HTML renders – and taking this into consideration as you design - is a necessity.
- Justine
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Hunger and persistence to find solutions to design and build emails in this standards-free environment is really important.  It isn’t an afterthought, but an integrated part of the design process.  Testing is an on-going process, for each and every email design.
- Tim
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There is on-going need for retention of cumulative knowledge to stay best-in-class in this constantly changing environment.  Knowledge from testing results, changes in the industry, consumer trends and design trends need to be incorporated into all designs.  It’s about results, not just attractive designs.
- Chris

The number of people using a preview pane to view their email has grown in recent years.  So considering what your readers see in that preview pane has become an increasingly important aspect of planning an email campaign.

The challenge of not knowing whether readers are using a vertical or horizontal preview pane makes the information placed in the upper left region (which will be visible in either layout) of an email vitally important. Combining the viewable area of horizontal and vertical preview panes at common sizes, we find there is a square of overlap that will be visible to most preview pane users.  That’s good news.

As a quick rule of thumb, a square of approximately 4-5 inches (288-360 pixels) is a safe size to plan for this commonly viewable area. This space should be used to quickly establish the brand and primary call to action alongside standard email strategies, such as accounting for image blocking by using HTML text and ALT tags.

Optimizing for the preview pane in this way helps ensure readers will see the most important parts of your message immediately and will engage further by opening your email.

What’s the best way to integrate multi-media and video into my email program?

While support for various HTML and CSS features varies widely across email clients, their stance on video and Flash media in email remains surprisingly unanimous – and that answer is “not supported.”

Only one email client, Mail (Mac), will even display this kind of media at all. Every other client will either strip out the video as if it was never there, or treat it as a blocked image that can never be displayed.

It is possible to introduce a small amount of motion or animation to email with animated .gifs, but even these images aren’t fully supported by some major clients, such as Outlook 2007 (which will only display the first frame of the animation).

With this information in mind, the best way to integrate multi-media content into your email program is not to embed the media in an email, but rather to link to a web-based version that’s hosted outside the email.


Chris Studabaker
Email Campaign Manager

The best advice I can give email marketers to start their year is to craft emails that are optimized for the inbox.  Email needs to be given the same attention that is placed on your web and print marketing efforts  It simply cannot be an afterthought or a “digital version” of your print campaign – email is too powerful and has too many variables to be treated as such.  To attain maximum design success this year, marketers must recognize that email has a unique set of challenges and principles that need to be taken into account.

1.  Your email design needs to take into account image blocking, preview pane viewing and the unique nature of the various email clients. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your design is if your subscribers can’t see it!

2.  Make sure your primary call-to-action can be seen in the preview pane by including it in the upper left quadrant of your email. 

3.  By using HTML text for your call-to-action message, you will avoid the image blocking issue as well.  And by seeing a relevant call-to-action, your subscribers will be more likely to download the images, add your email address to their safe sender list, or interact with your email.

4.  Test your email in as many different email clients as you can. This can be accomplished using a service such as Pivotal Veracity or by signing up for free email accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, etc.) and including them on a test list.Despite their differences, you can develop a version of your email that functions well across all the major email clients.

By taking these factors into consideration and giving your email design the attention it deserves, you will increase your chances of email design success.  So take a deep breath and repeat after me: Design with the inbox in mind!

Tim Siukola, Senior Email Campaign Manager

Question: How can I save time when testing my email designs?

Answer: We’ve all heard about how important testing is when it comes to the design and layout of emails.  But the reality is that in order to benefit from design testing, there’s a large amount of time that must be invested. Unfortunately, the commitment required to successfully test design discourages many marketers from doing it.

I’ve got good news, though.  There are features in ExactTarget that help you save some time in your testing process. 

Whether you’re performing a simple A/B split test or a complex multivariate test, you still have to create multiple versions of a particular email.  But using a combination of templates and stored content in ExactTarget will help you to cut a considerable amount of time out of email creation.  To truly take advantage of these capabilities, I’d recommend that you start by  developing a plan for all of the different email versions that need to be created.  This will help you stay organized and keep track of your testing progress.

Once your testing plan has been set, you can analyze the similarities that exist between the different design versions.  For example, your emails may be using the same creative shell with a different content layout – or the same layout with different elements present and not present.

Take these similarities into account when creating your templates, and code them to be scaleable to fit a number of different content possibilities instead of creating a separate template for each layout.  Keep in mind that there will always be occasions when you need a separate template, but you can save time by having one template that will work for multiple emails.

Once you have created your template(s), the next step is to build out your content boxes. This can be done from within an email, or from directly within the Content Library.  In ExactTarget, any pieces of content that you need to include in multiple versions can be created once, saved, and then retrieved later on.  To store a content box in an email you can click on the “Store Content” button. You can then bring this stored content into an empty content box by clicking the “Retrieve Content” button. Using this method you can create additional email versions considerably faster than by populating each box one at a time.

Another time saver is to create emails using the “Revise Existing Email” option, which creates a copy of any email you have already created. You can then add, remove, or reposition elements to generate you next email version to test.

Through careful planning and employing the methods mentioned above, you will be able to design and create multiple emails in far less time than creating them one by one.  And at the end of the day, the more emails you have to create and test, the more you stand to benefit!

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Campaign Manager

While there isn’t one silver bullet, I suggest a design checklist that covers the six significant contributors to a high performance email. These are indeed iterative, so a smart designer will address in order.

1. Brand Synergy
Seamless visual recognition and essence of the brand across all media creates consistent brand impact. Immediate corporate identification in the email transfers this recognition into trust to engage and transact.

2. Intelligent Visual Organization.
Organize content to ensure primary engagement and response actions are visible above the fold and in preview panes.

3. Engagement Techniques.
Use graphic design techniques to engage the subscriber through a mix of emotive and rational imagery and layouts. Smart use of images, borders, buttons, links, charts, color backgrounds should be applied and tested.

4. Response Maximization.
Graphically entice the subscriber eye throughout the selling process, capturing their eye at the primary call-to-action.

5. Rendering Results.
Ensure your design efforts are viewed in the subscriber inbox as intended. Emails that are designed and coded with image-blocking, preview panes and email client/reader differences in mind will succeed.

6. Tested Quality.
Only comprehensive testing will validate successful rendering of design and ensure functional performance prior to sending to the subscriber inbox.

My advice for the holiday season is to design with your strategic program goals in mind, following these six steps to ensure the subscriber experience is fully-focused on delivering long-term value. There are no short-term silver bullets that bring sustainable riches if you compromise your subscriber relationship or marketing plan.