Email Design
When I say email design, what I don’t mean to be is an art
director in any way (god forbid!) No, what I mean is to help to guide the
people doing the design work towards something which will work for the majority
of users we intend to send out to. In an
ideal world designers would have an understanding of the limitations of working
with email but unfortunately that’s not always the case. Email is a temperamental beast and, because
it is something we all use everyday now as much as, if not more than, the web
and the browser it’s often assumed that it’s as advanced as it’s friends that
help us connect to the Internet. The truth, however, is that email is still,
for all intent and purpose, living in the dark ages of the web, circa 1999
around the time that XHTML was a far off dream and people were just beginning
to understand that CSS was the way forward.
The reason for this isn’t that email hasn’t moved on – it
has and the modern clients such as Outlook 2003, Thunderbird and Apple Mail as
pretty much cutting edge supporting all types of standards and
bells/whistles. However, unlike the
browser in which most people have progressed as new versions are released,
email clients tend to be stuck in the past to a certain extent – particularly
for corporate clients, something to consider if you’re going for a B2B audience. In addition we have to consideration that a
large portion of people use web-based email clients to check their mail, such
as Hotmail, Gmail and so forth (myself included – I cannot live without my gmail!)
These services, whilst running in the browser, can and do have some peculiar
rules on displaying content, and so yet again it’s not safe to assume that all
the tricks we can and do put into websites will be accepted or displayed in
emails.
The basic rule of thumb is to play it safe and stick to
“old school” HTML. Basically, avoid CSS, stick to FONT tags, and forget all
thoughts about video, sounds and flash content. Aside from it being perhaps unacceptable to the audience to include
content that we assume they will want to see, it can provide hefty downloads
and, in many cases, simply not work.
Text; HTML; JPGs; GIFs; That’s your lot.
Copy Writing
As I mentioned before, what I don’t want to do is come
over all “creative”, and so when I talk about copy, I obviously don’t mean
anything about tone of voice, what or how you say something (although I think
that’s a perfectly valid topic for adventuresDM but perhaps by a different
member of the team!)
When preparing copy for an email campaign there are, by
default, a set of key elements that you must include in your brief to the
writer, otherwise the project will be left without important elements that will
mean your developer or email administrator will not know how, and therefore be
unable, to proceed. In some ways these may not appear to be the responsibility
of the copy writer, and perhaps they aren’t, but they still need to be on-brand
and relevant to the campaign, so if not the copy writer then someone else such
as an account manager or even the client should provide them.
The three key elements are the email basics, the
customized fields and link URLs, and I’ll go through those now in order.
Copy Writing - Email Basics
This phrase perhaps makes you think that these items are
not so important, but I assure you they are. There are three key items within this that you need, and these are the
Senders, or FROM, address; the REPLY-TO address; the subject line of the email. These three items MUST be included in the
copy deck for an email campaign. If not, you simply cannot send the email
out. I have seen it happen time and time
again that emails go back and forth for days between agency and client, going
over in the smallest possible details the design and content of the email, only
for the campaign to run right up to the deadline and fall over at the last
minute because for some reason or another there wasn’t a subject line included
in the original spec.
Copy Writing - Customised Fields
These are the second important part of the copy writing
stage and are to do with any personalization that is required in the
email. Emails can get very, very
complicated, especially in a full CRM programme where a users clicks and what
they read is fed back into the loop and forms the basis of the next email (this
is also out of scope for this post, and really we’re just covering a one-off
style campaign although these points are just as valid for full-on campaigns).
What I mean by personalisation at this point are things
such as:
· Greeting – Mr, Mrs, Miss?
· Name – firstname only, full name, surname?
· Any other elements such as a contact name or
telephone number at the client’s business?
· Details of an event, date or location
Basically any other item of text content that can and will
change either on a person-by-person basis, or frequently for large chunks of
users. At this point it is key not to
worry about what these items are going to be, because they won’t necessarily
come from the copy writer, but more from data or from either the client or your
own agency. The copy writer will, however, need to bear in mind what these
items are going to be and include them when they produce the text so the HTML
developer knows where to include the codes.
Similarly, the people supplying the data need to be sure
that any customizable or personalized item they include in the brief for this
email is actually going to be possible to provide for EVERY recipient. It is simply not going to be good enough for
a customized item, for example a person’s home town, to be included in an email
if it cannot be displayed for all recipients. The email engine will not be able to tell the difference between
BIRMINGHAM
and “ “ (blank)
or even GIRAFFE, and so if the data is not there, or it’s not clean, you may as
well forget it.
Occasionally, you’ll be asked to put in a special case to
cope with gaps in data. “We have images
for every one of the 20,000 users, except for some where we don’t – that’s OK
isn’t it? You can just display a picture of a monkey right?” Wrong – do not do this. You will cause more
trouble than it is worth for yourself and your team. If something is missing for a group of users,
no matter how small, you should question how valuable that piece of information
is in the first place and why it’s important for some, but not all – do we need
it in the first place then?
All of these data and copy elements should be agreed
up-front by all stakeholders before anyone puts pen to paper, or certainly
before anyone starts to write a single line of HTML.
Copy Writing - Link URLs
The third and final element in preparing the copy for an
email is link URLs. As with subject
lines, not having the right link URLs for an email is another last minute
mistake that often gets made. It’s very
easy for people on a project to say something like “click here to view the
powerpoint document” but then forget that actually that power point document
needs to sit on the end of a URL on a server somewhere, and we cannot guess
what it is.
In addition to simply not having the URLs to begin with,
having the right URLs is just as important when you consider the message you
are trying to get across. Imagine you’re
sending out an email for an important automotive client, and they want to link
through to the latest specifications for their new car. How terrible would it be for you to send that
email out to 100,000 recipients, but direct them through to last years model,
or a cheap model when you’re trying to sell them the luxury saloon. All URLs need to be provided to you along
with all of the other items mentioned above, and signed-off by both the account
team and the client. It is not your
responsibility as a builder or project manager to make sure it’s the right
product! Your responsibility is to
ensure the HTML you end up building links through to their URL and not
somewhere else. What that URL actually
is you don’t care.
A good way to deal with this is to create a check list of
content items to give to your account team and have them fill it all in and
make sure they don’t miss anything. Then, they can provide this to you and the
developer. Anything that changes can be
re-submitted to you using the same form.
In my next post I’ll be discussing the sign-off
process you should follow before you start to build, and what the build process
should be like once you do begin. I’ll
also provide you with a link to the check-list I mentioned above.
howard | 
09 26th, 2006| 
