Email Design 101
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Transcript of Email Design 101
Email Marketing 101How Not To Screw Up & Get Blacklisted
Like An Evil Spamming Scumbag
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Who is this guy?
• Ben Chestnut
• Co-founded The Rocket Science Group in 2000
• Built MailChimp in 2001
• Currently 40k users, +65k managed lists, +75M subscribers
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What We’ll Discuss:
•Design obstacles, workarounds
•Measuring good design
•Good email examples
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Anti-Virus Software
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Anti-Virus Software• No JavaScript
• No ActiveX
• No Flash
• No embedded movies
• No sound files
• Nothing fancy-schmancy. Sorry.
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Email Readers
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Webmail Services• Strip your <BODY>, so no bg images. Use
embedded tables instead.
• Strip your <HEAD>, so no CSS, no JavaScript, etc.
• Strip your CSS, so you’ve gotta INLINE it.
• Because all that would interfere with their web app interface.
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Desktop Clients
• Upgrades every year that break stuff
• Outlook 2007 using Word, not IE
• Old installations and patches
• Legacy code (from the .RTF days)
• User-specific settings
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Preview Panes
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Outlook2003 - Horiz.
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Outlook2003 - Vertical
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Thunderbird - Horizontal
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Yahoo Mail - Horizontal
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Windows Live Hotmail - Vertical
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Email Reader Tips
• Design like it’s 1999
• Simple tables, no CSS-Positioning
• Inline CSS only
• Fail gracefully
• Design for tiny preview panes
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Image Blocking
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• Kids open email inbox, see nasty stuff.
• Parents complain.
• So images are now blocked by default.
Why? Porn Spam.
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Design Implications?
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Design Implications
• All your pretty pictures are OFF by default.
• Assume recipients are too lazy to turn them ON
• ALT-text can be your friend (sometimes)
• However, if you get on their trusted-senders list, they’re ON by default.
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Trusted Sender
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What’s this about?
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“Good thing I clicked.”
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Spam Filters
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The Trick:
1. Open up your junk folder.
2. Look at what spammers do.
3. Don’t do what they do.
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Don’t do this:
• YELL IN ALL CAPS! WOW!
• Use excessive exclamation points!!!!!
• get cr3at1v3 with sp3ll1ng v14gra
• send image-only emails to trick filters
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Spammy Criteria ScoreAttempts to disguise the word 'viagra' 2.8Two or more drugs crammed together into one word 0.5Subject is all capitals 0.76Subject line starts with Buy or Buying 0.5HTML font size is huge 1.76HTML has a low ratio of text to image area 1.73Frontpage used to create the message 0.5Money back guarantee 2.05HTML has "tbody" tag 1.01
Spam Assassin Criteria
Stay below 3.
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Server Filters
• IronPort/Senderbase: data from 25% of world’s Internet traffic
• All over globe, and they talk to each other
• Cloudmark, Barracuda, Postini
• High-level filtering: reputation, suspicious activity, fingerprinting
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Spam Complaints• If 0.1% complain, you’re
blocked.
• You need to know when you’re reported, and clean your list
• Get on feedback loops (FBLs)
• Prevent FBL complaints...
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Permission reminder
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Tips• Avoid too many
spammy, “sales-y” words (FREE!!! NOW!!!!)
• Design for “image: FAIL”
• Don’t get lazy with your design work
• Only send permission-based marketing, to avoid FBL complaints
• Make sure to include a permission reminder in email footer
• Avoid sending to old lists (no more than 6 months old). Try segmenting on “actives”
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Measuring Good Design
• Open Rate
• Click Rate
• ROI (ka-chings)
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Open Rates
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Tracking Opens• Transparent .GIF in
bottom of email
• Each download is an “open”
• Image-blockers mess up open rates
• Open rates typically only tracked with HTML emails, not plain text
• If they click, that’s an open.
• Take open rates with a grain of salt.
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mailchimp.com/charts
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Click Rates
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85 people clicked the event banner!
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Email ROI
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Conversion Tracking
• Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends
• Append URLs with special tags, which pass data to the analytics package
• Setup conversion goals in Analytics package
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What’s your email campaign’s ROI?
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Anatomy of a good email design
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• Background table
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• Background table
• Campaign-Archive
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• Background table
• Campaign-Archive
• Logo slot
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• Background table
• Campaign-Archive
• Logo slot
• Content block
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• Background table
• Campaign-Archive
• Logo slot
• Content block
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• Background table
• Campaign-Archive
• Logo slot
• Content block
• Footer
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• Background table
• Campaign-Archive
• Logo slot
• Content block
• Footer
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mailchimp.com/resourcesmailchimp.com/chartsmailchimp.com/blog
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