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

What We’ll Discuss:

•Design obstacles, workarounds

•Measuring good design

•Good email examples

Anti-Virus Software

Anti-Virus Software• No JavaScript

• No ActiveX

• No Flash

• No embedded movies

• No sound files

• Nothing fancy-schmancy. Sorry.

Email Readers

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.

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

Preview Panes

Outlook2003 - Horiz.

Outlook2003 - Vertical

Thunderbird - Horizontal

Yahoo Mail - Horizontal

Windows Live Hotmail - Vertical

Email Reader Tips

• Design like it’s 1999

• Simple tables, no CSS-Positioning

• Inline CSS only

• Fail gracefully

• Design for tiny preview panes

Image Blocking

• Kids open email inbox, see nasty stuff.

• Parents complain.

• So images are now blocked by default.

Why? Porn Spam.

Design Implications?

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.

Trusted Sender

What’s this about?

“Good thing I clicked.”

Spam Filters

The Trick:

1. Open up your junk folder.

2. Look at what spammers do.

3. Don’t do what they do.

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

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.

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

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...

Permission reminder

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”

Measuring Good Design

• Open Rate

• Click Rate

• ROI (ka-chings)

Open Rates

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.

mailchimp.com/charts

Click Rates

85 people clicked the event banner!

Email ROI

Conversion Tracking

• Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends

• Append URLs with special tags, which pass data to the analytics package

• Setup conversion goals in Analytics package

What’s your email campaign’s ROI?

Anatomy of a good email design

• Background table

• Campaign-Archive

• Logo slot

• Content block

• Logo slot

• Content block

• Logo slot

• Content block

• Footer

• Logo slot

• Content block

• Footer

mailchimp.com/resourcesmailchimp.com/chartsmailchimp.com/blog

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