Five steps to remember when designing for email

Ensure that you're familiar with the objective of your campaign

There is no way you can optimise your campaign to suit your target audience's needs, without knowing your campaign objectives. Each objective will have a set of design rules in order to optimise it.

Know the audience

As a marketer, the more you know about your audience the more powerful your campaign will be. With email this includes knowing what email accounts you are sending to and ensuring that your database is clean and up to date.

Designing with other platforms in mind

Most campaigns these days are executed across multiple platforms. Ensure that your message is consistent and that your design is developed for each platform. It is not as easy as taking your print campaign and disseminating it via email. Your email campaign might very well have different objectives and therefore needs to be designed accordingly.

Have an exciting, enticing subject line

Subject lines are usually the first contact the recipient has with your campaign. If it is not relevant to them they are more than likely not going to be interested in taking the next step - opening the email.

Designing with the preview pane in mind

Often we neglect the power of the preview pane. (The small panel no more than a couple of centimetres in width or height that the recipient views before opening the email.) Your logo and main value proposition should clearly be visible entice the recipient to read more.

Email has many unique characteristics and you need to use specific email-centric design practices. To aid you in the email campaign development process, you can download the Email Design Bible on the Demographica-owned website www.emaildesignbible.com or from Bizcommunity's Reference section.