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- Creative Graveyard… all I see are tombstones
- Headless e-mails
- Calls-to-action buried alive
- Clean up the dead… addresses
- Scary trips to lands unknown
Creative Graveyards...all I see are tombstones
Those gray boxes aren’t tombstones, but they do effectively bury your creative efforts. The work of e-mail spammers has led e-mail clients to block all images by default, desecrating you beautiful-in-life images. Instead, your message turns into a wasteland of gray boxes praying someone will allow them life again by clicking “enable images”.
Keep as many tombstones as possible out of your e-mail by using text, background colours, or background images. Whenever possible, use text instead of images, even if it means compromising overall design. Sure your e-mails might look nicer with stylized text, but if the user never sees it, its effort wasted. Worse yet, its a message not communicated.
Invest in employing a professional broadcast partner that will provide referenced and images so that images are streamed into the Inbox rather than embedded in the HTML design.
Headless e-mails
Is the head of your e-mail getting chopped off by the preview pane? Many e-mailers pour the heart of their effort into the head of the e-mail, the topmost three inches are visible in a preview pane. But if this effort is done with one image or a block of images, the head of your e-mail has been effectively cut off if images are disabled.
Instead, make use of this space to further sell the rest of your e-mail. Provide an “in this issue” list of articles if you’re sending a newsletter. If you’re sending a promotional message, provide key details of the offer. Entice readers to open your message to see what is below the preview pane rather than showing them enough to prove to them they’re not interested.
Calls-to-action buried alive
Are your calls-to-action getting buried alive among other content and creative? A string of three hyper-linked words in a block of text or a paragraph is not likely to catch the attention of someone skimming through your message. If your message is one large image with no cue to click for more information, you could be killing your own results before they ever get a chance to breathe on their own.
Instead, make your calls-to-action clearly stand out and make sure it is extremely obvious that there is a clickable action. Make text links a bright colour, bolded, underlined and not surrounded by un-clickable text. You may even want to spell it out: “Click here to purchase online”. If using graphics, make sure the graphic resembles a clickable button. And heeding our warnings above, add a line of text below the image as well in case images are disabled.
Clean up the dead… addresses
Are long dead e-mail addresses haunting your open and click through rates? They might have once been active addresses, happily opening and clicking through, but now they’ve fallen off the land of the living. They’re no longer opening your e-mails; they’re no longer actively reading or clicking. You’re not sure they’re around to get your e-mails at all. If someone hasn’t opened a message from you in over six months, chances are the address need to get the axe. If chopping your list scares you, send an e-mail to this group of non-responders asking them if they would like to continue to receive messages from you. If they still don’t respond you can comfortably call them dead and hack them from your list.
Scary trips to lands unknown
Are you sending your recipients on scary trips to lands unknown when they click on a link in your e-mail? Are they left wondering where they are, how they got there, and what they are supposed to do?
Reward active participants by taking them on a pleasant trip to a landing page that resembles the branding on your e-mail, and has explicit instructions on what they should do next. And they may reward you by clicking further and completing the desired transaction.
I see a lot of this and it frightens me when I receive e-mails from people that are trying to acquire me as a customer either in a consumer or professional context. Any volumes of broadcasting that is done, needs the services of a broadcaster. A good broadcaster will not only provide you with the engine to send bulk e-mail efficiently, but tracking, management of opt-outs, and the ability to send your e-mail message in a format that is user focused is the real benefit.
Posted on 26th March 2007