Email design

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

As you're well aware, web design nowadays is very fancy. Sadly, due to client and security constraints, email design is not. While new websites are going for a 'Web 2.0' look and feel, emails are still stuck on HTML 3.0. You've probably noticed that most of the emails you receive are fairly basic in format.

No doubt when you're new to email marketing, you will rebel against this. You will try to push the envelope. You will try to sculpt a sexy design for your emails to match your website, and you will spend hours upon hours testing and tweaking to make sure it renders in all clients. And then you'll try it in Lotus Notes...

You see, most email clients do not handle HTML markup perfectly. Many block scripts and forms for security reasons. Many simply refuse to render background images, including the near-ubiquitous Outlook. Lotus Notes has a tendency to skew tables. And almost every single web-based email client (Hotmail, Gmail, etc) will change or remove your CSS declarations.

So my sincere advice is: don't fight it. Find a design that works with your branding guidelines, is simple yet sleek, and works in all clients. Then re-use that template wherever possible. You'll soon find that it's very easy to waste hours upon hours trying to have your template render properly, and it's simply not worth it in the end – most people just block the images and never see your beautiful design!

One conversion-enhancing tip I can give you is this: match the landing page creative as much as possible in your email. Not the content of course, you don't simply want a repeat of your email on the web when someone clicks on it. You want to take them to a landing page that they can quickly recognize as being synonymous with the email, perhaps through the stock imagery, the layout/colors, and the headlines. This minimizes confusion, and people can keep in mind their goal of conversion.

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide