Email Design Tips

• Headers <150 pixels deep
• Alt tags
• Key message in text HTML in upper left quadrant
• Pre-headers in text to entice opens
• Images placed outside of the prime message zone

Q:  Are there email design considerations I should make in the midst of a tough economy?

A: Since email design is the artful visualization of a business plan, marketers need to first ensure their communications strategy is solid. The focus should be on the subscriber and the financial challenges he or she is facing. Economy-induced challenges create strong emotional subscriber responses that need to be acknowledged and addressed in marketing communications.

Here are some tips:

1. Show appreciation. Customers should feel appreciated for their loyalty, so include a thank you note or email. Send holiday well wishes and request their feedback on how to better serve them in the new year. This shouldn’t be a check box survey that asks for their satisfaction level on a five point scale, but a sincere open-ended question that allows them to express their needs, concerns, and suggestions. Demonstrate that it is about them, not about you.
2. Be Patient. Your subscriber is a person facing financial challenges, not number 5,241 on your data list. Be careful to avoid damaging your one-to-one relationship by increasing the quantity – and promotional force – of your messages. Subscribers’ disposable income may be stretched, so be sensitive to your level of purchasing insistence. Remember to provide extra relevance during these times to keep brand engagement high – even if purchases wane.
3. Be empathetic. Acknowledge tough times by offering valuable product-related solutions. Think creatively about emotional solutions that may encourage a purchase when budgetary restrictions are loosened. Share stories, solutions or resourceful ideas from other subscribers who are feeling the same economic pain. Consider creating an online community for subscribers to connect with each other. Listen.

My Birthday is this month so I am starting to receive the gazilion emails I signed up for over the past year.  In all cases, the reason I provided my birthday information was because of the promise to receive a special gift.  I receive some because I am interested as an email marketer, and others because I want lots of free, good stuff for my birthday!

Like the majority of subscribers today, I view my emails in a preview pane and decide to open based on what I see in that approx. 4” (280 pixel) deep view.  Based on the sampling I have received this week, most companies seem to favor the birthday “surprise” view.  They chose an image-dominant email that requires me to open as a web page to view my present.  The wrapping paper isn’t ideal as it asks me to have a high level of trust to open. 

This may sound ungrateful, but the “gifts” are not always better than the company’s standard promotional offers.  My Qdoba “gift” is a BOGO, while Circuit City is a 10% discount ($10 off $100 purchase).  Where’s the gift!



The best gift givers offer something unconditionally.  They entice a store visit or online sale experience by offering a real gift.  Both Sephora and Victoria’s Secret are unconditional gift givers, and I feel appreciated as their customer.  There is a good chance that my store visit to pick up my gift will result in some other items in my shopping basket. 

My Birthday wish this year?

1. Respect the preview pane as images are always blocked by default.  Use web safe fonts to display your “gift’ message to entice a trusted open or click.  Subscribers are suspicious about clicking into unknown offer zones.

2. It’s my birthday!  Offer me something better than a standard promotional offer because that is not a gift.  And if you don’t have a budget for a gift, don’t promise one.  Send a nice message with a positive thought for the upcoming year.

As I continue to receive Birthday messages, and “open” my email gifts, I duly note the companies that deliver on the sign-up promise with sincere wishes and value vs. the “re-gifts” from those who check the “birthday email” box with disguised promotional offers.

Melinda Baxter, Director of Marketing Services

Melinda Baxter, Director of Marketing Services

Here’s a common question I receive. “Wow! Movies in email! Company X says it’s easy, and we should partner with them to do it.  They say our clicks and sales will increase madly!”

First, here is some clarity around the technology picture:

Our whitepaper “Email Marketing Design & Rendering: The New Essentials” talks about this directly on page ten: “Embedding Flash or video in email will cause major deliverability issues.  If delivered, these design elements will be stripped or disabled.  If you want to use rich media, use a screenshot of the media linking to the “live” version on your website.  Animated .gifs are also alternatives that work across many – but not all – email clients”

Next, I’ll focus on the impact:

ExactTarget customers (and even ET ourselves) regularly leverage videos to engage subscribers. We don’t do this by embedding the video in the email, but by linking to the video. Our own “InSight” newsletter has used this technique.  Some of our customers have found that linking to video generates the highest clicks in their email – this is an excellent thing to test! The success is generally related to the relevance of the video content to the subscriber, and it’s not always a silver bullet.

We have customers that use videos to link to product demos on their web site, fashion show footage, “how to” instructional videos, CEO messages, etc..  Some have such success with videos as an engagement technique that they tease it in their subject line to increase open rates.  Others have tested it against Q & As, with the Q & A format outperforming the video.

"How Stuff Works" features a video in prime real estate each newsletter (btw - I think this is a very fun newsletter to read!):

Advance Auto Parts also links to "How to" videos each newsletter, along with other interactive links...



Like any other engagement technique to increase subscriber interest and involvement in your email and brand, test it to learn what performs best for your subscribers. 

Got the picture?

Q: I work in the industrial b-to-b market. I have been told NOT to include graphics or photos of any kind, as these are typically caught in spam filters. Is this true? Do you have a strategy (other than the one you state here) to create more attractive emails in the b-to-b world?

A: Having too many images in an email can limit the effectiveness of a B-to-B campaign, but when used appropriately, images can improve your results. Images in and of themselves are inherently good and will not cause your email to get caught in a spam filter. Sender reputation plays the largest role in determining whether or not you end up in the junk or bulk folder. Reputation is primarily influenced by your bounce and complaint rates.

Images can be a great way to promote brand synergy. Placing your logo in the upper left hand corner of your email helps to create brand recognition and trust with your subscribers. The more subscribers trust you, the more likely they are to interact with your campaign. Your branding should be cohesive across all of your different marketing channels in order to present a consistent voice to your clients.

The effective use of background colors, borders, and varying text treatments can help make your email easier to read. This allows for an email design with visual impact that doesn’t rely solely on images. Due to the prevalence of image blocking among popular email clients (specifically Microsoft Outlook in the B-to-B space), you want to maintain a proper balance of images and HTML text. It’s better to treat your headlines and primary call-to-action as HTML text in order to ensure that information is seen even when images are not displayed.

Regardless of whether or not you have a B-to-B or B-to-C audience, I cannot stress enough the importance of relevant content. Content should be timely and add value to your subscriber’s lives. Long emails that don’t have a clear call-to-action are more likely to be ignored and deleted, and a clear and focused message will pay dividends. Instead of including the full article for a news item, use one to three sentences as a teaser and link to the full article externally. The full article can be hosted on your website, in a Word document or PDF stored in the ExactTarget document library, or in an ExactTarget microsite landing page. This will cut down on the length of your email and allow your subscribers to easily skim the content.

Performance driven email design is a combination of many factors. Your design should make appropriate use of HTML text and images, as well as have a subscriber-centric content strategy. Provide your subscribers with a relevant and valuable communication and you will be rewarded with a strong company-client relationship.

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Marketing Designer

Successful email marketing is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Every email program should have a clear goal in mind and a way to measure whether or not that goal is being met. Providing relevant content to your subscribers at the proper frequency will help you achieve those goals.

More often than not, simple open and click data is not enough to drive this level of targeting. However, combining this data with web analytics and CRM means you’ll be one step close to achieving (and even exceeding) those goals.

ExactTarget has the ability to integrate with industry-leading web analytics solutions as well as powerful CRM integrations with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. Web analytics and CRM data can flow to and from ExactTarget, providing a robustness to your subscriber information. Once you have an integration in place, you’re able to use it to really drive your email marketing efforts.

For example, you can use subscriber data to drive Dynamic Content within your email message. Instead of showing everyone a list of ten events happening across the country, you can present them with the information surrounding the event closest to them.  Or you can display products that are related to their past purchasing behavior using web conversion data.  From a design perspective, this can free up important space within your email and allow subscribers to focus on the content relevant to them.

At the end of the day, the more you can personalize content, the more impact it will have. If a subscriber has an interest in a certain type of product or a certain category of information, then use that knowledge to custom tailor your email to their interests. Including content you know they like is much better than including content you think they like.  A relevant, targeted email is a powerful communication tool. By leveraging web analytics and CRM data to drive email content and frequency, you can maximize your chances of achieving email marketing success.

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Marketing Designer

All email marketers face the challenge of getting their emails to the inbox.  The last thing you want is for your well-planned communication to end up in the junk folder.  Variables such as your sender reputation, list hygiene and permission play a huge role in the deliverability equation – but you can also use design to positively impact your inbox presence as well.

In order to increase the chances that your messages will find their way to your subscribers’ inbox, consider employing an “Add to Address Book” strategy.  This can be achieved by including a short sentence or two (typically at the top of your message) asking subscribers to add your “from address” to their white list or address book.

The benefits of being in your subscribers address book are twofold.  For starters, this will get you around most of the filters at major ISPs and desktop email clients. Secondly, the majority of email clients will automatically display images in emails that come from known senders. This eliminates the extra click subscribers have to take to manually display the images.

When implementing an “Add to Address Book” strategy, be mindful of prime placement and include this language as HTML text at the top of your email. This will help to ensure that the important information appears within the preview pane and isn’t blocked when images aren’t displayed.

To recap: improving your deliverability can be as easy as asking your subscribers to add you to their address book.  This simple action can help keep your emails out of the junk folder and combat image blocking.  After all, when it comes to getting your message delivered to your subscribers, every little bit helps.

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Marketing Designer

In today’s communication landscape, it’s increasingly common to market to your customers across multiple channels (i.e. email, website, retail store, SMS, etc).

While each channel presents it’s own unique challenges, there are certain factors that apply to all channels. Brand Synergy is one of the most important factors. You want your recipients to experience seamless recognition of your brand across all media. This brand recognition plays a key role in developing subscriber trust, particularly in email.

When your subscribers receive an email message from you, the first thing they look at is the “from name.” According to the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, 73% of subscribers click “Report Spam” or “Report Junk” based on the content in the from field. Having a clear and recognizable “from name” helps convince your subscribers to open your email. 

Once they click on the email to view the contents, you want subscribers to easily identify your brand. Immediate corporate identification in the email helps your recipients trust to engage and transact with your message. You can maximize this recognition by positioning your brand logo in the upper left hand corner of your email, where it is most likely to display in the preview pane.

You can also generate brand synergy through the use of color, imagery, and font treatments that sync up with your other marketing channels. Most emails push subscribers to your website, so you want this to be a seamless experience. That isn’t to say that your email needs to look exactly like your website, but they should look like they come from the same parents. The same goes for offline marketing channels – like direct mail or retail stores – as well. 

At the end of the day, your customers see your brand as one entity. They don’t differentiate between a retail store and your website and view them separately. Regardless of how they’re interacting with your company, your brand should speak with one voice. Having a cohesive brand experience will increase your customer’s recognition and trust. At the end of the day it is that trust that ultimately determines whether or not they interact with your email program.

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Marketing Designer

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.