Email design that solves delivery and display problems

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(This Halloween, expect to see email designers scaring their colleagues by dressing up as Outlook 2007.)

The last few months have seen various design issues come to the fore:

The growth of image blocking
Recognition that the same email can look very different, depending on which software or webmail service is used to view it
The growth of mobile email
A nostalgic return to the old HTML versus text format debate, given that text-only mails solve some of the above problems

Here are some new articles and blog posts that provide some clarity on these issues...

First up is Glen Lipka, who has developed an email template that he says works in a whole host of email clients and webmail services. His post and comments elsewhere also explain some of the problems of designing for multiple email display environments.

Then Anna Billstrom gets out her iPhone and pulls together some email design recommendations for that particular mobile device.

Andrew Osterday argues that HTML email that displays poorly drives up spam complaint rates and can thus lead to delivery problems. So he raises the possibility of a return to more text-oriented emails, low on images.

And Karen Gedney touches on the same theme in an article on the email review process. At the bottom you'll find useful warnings on what can go wrong when you automatically convert a pretty HTML email into a text-only version. Love this quote:

Formatting a text e-mail immediately before
broadcast is like changing a TV ad into
a radio ad by just deleting the visuals.

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | October 03, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
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