10 Email Marketing Tips

1. Avoid some things Web site designers love to do: cascading style sheets, nested tables, and animation.

2. Avoid those fancy things print art directors love to do: reversed type, colored type for body copy, type smaller than 10 points, body copy justified on both sides, type wrapping around a graphic, etc.

3. Stick to the standard Web safe palette of 216 colors. (See below to a link for a list and examples of these colors.) and set the maximum width to 620 pixels, and type to a maximum of 65 characters to ensure readability.

4. Use HTML code for bulleted and numbered lists.

5. Keep the message size between 20K and 40K, or lower.

6. Don’t waste precious above-the-fold HTML real estate on an enormous graphic such as a logo or product graphic. Content filters will reject it.

7. Keep the design clean. Think postcard or billboard. Recipients may glance at your message for just a few seconds, most won't study it in detail. They are making a fast click-versus-delete decision, not a reasoned buying or other conversion decision.

Use your design to move them toward the click -- rely on your landing page to move them to the next stage in the conversion process. (You always take them to a special landing page, right?)

8. Don't be afraid to include additional navigation links, especially where these serve to segment types of response.  For example links to third party reviews, ‘find out more’ sections or case studies, or a sign up to ongoing newsletters all aim to capture interest from targets not yet ready to buy. They may be evaluating solutions, planning a product launch in the future, and for these or any number of other reasons, are potential customers, but not right now. These links should not "fight" the main message, but they should be above the fold, usually on the right.

Consider testing alternate orders of these links from message to message rather than considering the order engraved in stone the way it may be on your site.

9. Be particular about brand consistency. Use templates. Create a style guide and make sure people stick to it. This includes a standard, unchanging "from" for all brand messages.

10. Create your call to action as a graphic, not a text phrase, to avoid tripping content filters trained to spot spam-like calls to action. That said, include a text-URL and possibly a phone number as well in the text, so email programs that disable HTML links won't kill your response rates.