Website Marketing Club

Five Tips for Successful Email Advertising Layouts

Dec 3, 2009 Advertising

The layout of an email is just as important as the subject line and content. If the layout of your messages is jumbled and overfilled then your recipients will not understand how to respond or they will ignore it all together, and if the email is too plain or empty they will likely be disinterested. Layout is extremely important, but too many email marketers ignore the layout of their messages which results in very low click through and conversion rates. These five tips will help you to be one of the few email marketers who realizes great success.

Use simple graphics. You want to catch the reader’s attention and what better way to do that than with an attractive, colorful picture of your product or service. The problem is that most graphics can be confusing and unclear with the message they send. Research shows that you only have seven seconds to deliver your message in an email. If your graphics are too vague, too complicated, or too numerous, then you will not be successful in getting the desired response. The best graphics are simple ones.

Limit images to four or less. Pictures can take a few seconds to load – a few seconds you cannot spare. Some email clients disable pictures thus prolonging the moment when your reader can see them and make a decision. Putting only a few necessary graphics in your email will keep the load time to a minimum and give your readers enough time to process your message instead of waiting for a page to load.

If you can encourage your readers to click on links in your email messages then the email service providers will recognize your messages as legitimate and not spam. Having multiple links in your messages will encourage your readers to click on them and thus improve your reputation as a real email marketer. Place several links in each message – as many as seven is ideal.

Just as with graphics, you want to be judicious in how you use copy in your messages. Readers are even less motivated to spend their attention span on copy than they are on graphics. If you keep this in mind then you will always remember to be quick and to the point with the limited copy that you do use. Keep things on a low reading level and do not write long paragraphs – like in this article. A few lines of well thought out copy will serve as a teaser to get your readers to follow your links to a landing page where you will have fewer constraints on your words. In email messages – use copy simply and sparingly.

Testing is a must. Run split tests on everything you do, so you can find out what your readers respond best to. Every campaign will be incrementally better if you get in the habit of always A/B testing your layouts – as well as other elements.

The second type of testing that is essential to any email marketing campaign is a simple trial send. Get an account with the major web email clients and send every message to yourself before you send it to your contacts. When you open up your email in each of the different clients you can look to see if it went through and what it looks like. This gives you a chance to be sure that things are in order so a mistake doesn’t lead to a mass opting out that afternoon! Always be testing.

Do not neglect the layout of your emails and you will not fall into the trap that so many email marketing professionals do. A good layout will take the most advantage of every open and help get your click-through and conversion rates to a level that will make your competition very jealous.

Want more email marketing tips, then visit Steve O’Bryan’s site and also learn how to choose the best email marketing campaign software for your needs.

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