Great Email Marketing Tips for February
How to live with blocked images
All the best practices in the world are just wasted ink if people don't follow them. And many people don't, as demonstrated by Jeanne Jennings in her latest ClickZ article.
She examines a number of marketing emails that landed in her inbox to see how they stand up when images are blocked (as so often happens). She casts a judgmental eye over such things as the effectiveness of headlines, calls to action, and the ability of the email to communicate effectively sans pretty graphics.
Ignoring ums and ahs about causes, effects and other influences, the end conclusion is lots of marketing emails are pre-programmed disasters when displayed without images.
Check out her advice and yours won't be.
Making the most of less space
Is the glass half full? Or half empty? Stefan Pollard takes the optimistic view of shrinking display areas and image blocking at the important webmail services (and other places people read email.)
Instead of bemoaning the loss of creative flexibility, he suggests how you might use the growth of preview panes to design and write emails that use a combination of subject line and above-the-fold text to grab and hold the prospective reader.
What fonts say about your email
Kudos to the MailChimp blog for pointing me to this report on how your choice of text font impacts how people perceive the emails.
And even more interesting is a reference buried within that article sending you to another report by the same authors.
That second report lists the perceived characteristics of online typefaces and reveals which fonts are deemed most appropriate for different online settings: everything from email to instant messaging to websites to eTextbooks.
The key message for me is one you might have heard before. This kind of analysis lets you eliminate those fonts which definitely won't work. But use your own tests and intuition to gauge which of the remainder will work best for your audience and objectives.
Have a happy-email day!
Vance Alford
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