The killers of Good Email Design

An otherwise perfectly good email campaign can be ruined by some very insidious little problems that can manifest themselves if you’re not careful in how you manage all the little details of email, landing page and message design.

The worst thing about these campaign killers is that they are not only easy to avoid but also can make you falsely think that an otherwise great marketing effort to the right subscriber base is failing because of lacking interest when in fact it’s just these little errors that are causing low conversions.

Thus, in order to let you focus on the raw marketing that will make your conversions grow and your sales increase, we present you with a “hit list” of the top five campaign killing mistakes many email marketers make.

Let’s get down to business.

1. Mr. Loud Colors

An email campaign with an otherwise serious message and a great value proposition to the right target audience can be totally derailed by using way too many bright colors that just distract from what you’re trying to say. Loud colors are the email marketing equivalent of using a clown to present at a sales convention.

Instead, focus attention on your email’s main message and stick to more muted colors for the decorative elements of your landing pages and the bulk emails you send out. Here are some color palette ideas that look professional and won’t distract.

2. Mr. Distortions

Distortions can really bring down your click through rates by causing your mail campaigns to be unreadable to many subscribers without you realizing it.

This happens when you design a message or landing page in a way that fails to load properly on certain mail servers, browsers or screen types.

Avoid this problem by carefully checking every new email campaign and page layout on dummy accounts with the major mail servers, on different browser platforms and on both mobile device and desktop computer screens.

3. The Malicious Mr. Red X

Similar to distortions, the Red X s what will damage your campaign when you send image laden messages to subscribers only to have them arrive at mail servers whose image display has been shut off.

Avoid this by simply avoiding the use of images as an integral part of your email campaign. Instead, focus on creating nicely descriptive text content, which will never fail in any mail server. If you
absolutely need to have an image in your bulk mailing, then make sure to include an ALT description of it too, which conveys what you were trying to say.

4. Mr. Pixels

Pixels happen whenever you use images in your mail campaigns or landing pages that are not particularly good at scaling up or down with larger or smaller screens.

You can avoid pixels by selecting images that you know will scale properly even on different screen sizes because you’ve tested them to do so.

However, as we already said above, try to avoid images anyhow, they’re usually more hassle than they’re worth in most bulk promotional or transactional emails.

5. Mr. Worst of Wordiness

This is the most easy to spot and easy to fix conversion killer that any email campaign can suffer from.

Wordiness can drop your click through rates and conversions by annoying your readers with time wasted reading through too much filler content that doesn’t get to the point.

Thus, get to the point quickly in your emails. Let your readers know what you’re offering them and how it will benefit them as quickly as possible.

All of these are easy to fix once you know what to look for. This hit list comes from Reachmail, Guestpost by Matt Zajechowski of Digital Third Coast.