HTML email design mistakes, you really should avoid.

Design your campaigns for preview panes

It’s a common mistake for people new to email marketing to design their email just as if its for the web. It’s a fact most people read emails using their preview panes, so you really need to ensure your key points are visible within this pane.

Top tips

• Design your emails for a maximum width of 600px 
• Make sure your key points are visible within the preview panel 
• Ensure your company logo is aligned to the left

Assuming images will work

More and more email clients are disabling images by default, requesting that their subscribers activate the images by clicking on a button or right clicking. When designing your emails you should assume that your images by default will not be displayed.

Top tips 

• Include alt-text for your images 
• Don’t put your most important content in images

Too many images and too little text

As well as looking for spamming keywords, some spam filters also look out for spam only emails. When you design your email marketing campaign always ensure you have some text.

Top tips

• Use lots of small thumbnails rather than a few large images 
• If you can’t include lots of text, just add one or two graphics instead 
• If you do send an email with very little text, make sure your HTML code is absolutely flawless

Email not tested using different email programmes

There are a number of different email clients out there all of which render HTML emails differently, so test your email before you send it out.

Top tips

• Use Gemmail’s built in email client compatibility test to ensure your email looks picture perfect in every email client

Don’t forget the footer

Your email marketing campaigns should always include a footer that will:

• Allow subscribers to opt out of your lists 
• Enable subscribers to manage their mailing list preferences 
• Provides information about why your subscribers are receiving your email 
• Provides your contact details and address 
• Provides a link to your privacy policy

Remember it is very easy to break the law if you do not provide your email recipients with an option to opt out of your email campaigns. However if you use Gemmail then we will have automatically set up your footer to adhere to the best practice guidelines.

Top tips 

• Use a solution like Gemmail that will ensure your footers are added 
• Also use your footer as an opportunity to provide users with the ability to forward to a friend or virtual link so they can see your email in the browser window.

Keep it simple, stupid

Many email applications support things like flash, javascript, etc, however the problem is thats how many email clients get infected with viruses. So don’t risk your email recipients anti-spam software stopping your recipients from receiving your email... keep it simple.

Top tips

• Remove the flash – just use a simple graphic that will turn heads 
• Link your images to your landing pages (and put the fancy stuff there instead) 
• Spend more time on the landing pages then the email – this is where the real fun happens, your emails are just a vehicle to getting it all to work, so should be quick to send, built on great content.

Category: Email Design

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