Email Design 101

Email Marketing 101
How 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


Why? Porn Spam.
• Kids open email inbox, see
nasty stuff.

• Parents complain.

• So images are now blocked
by default.


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


Spam Assassin Criteria
Spammy Criteria Score
Attempts to disguise the word 'viagra' 2.8
Two or more drugs crammed together into one word 0.5
Subject is all capitals 0.76
Subject line starts with Buy or Buying 0.5
HTML font size is huge 1.76
HTML has a low ratio of text to image area 1.73
Frontpage used to create the message 0.5
Money back guarantee 2.05
HTML has "tbody" tag 1.01
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 • Make sure to include a
spammy, “sales-y” words permission reminder in
(FREE!!! NOW!!!!) email footer

• Design for “image: FAIL” • Avoid sending to old
lists (no more than 6
• Don’t get lazy with your months old). Try
segmenting on “actives”
design work

• Only send permission-
based marketing, to
avoid FBL complaints


Measuring Good Design

• Open Rate

• Click Rate

• ROI (ka-chings)


Open Rates

Tracking Opens
• Transparent .GIF in • If they click, that’s an
bottom of email open.

• Each download is an • Take open rates with a
“open” grain of salt.

• Image-blockers mess up
open rates

• Open rates typically only
tracked with HTML
emails, not plain text


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


• Logo slot
• Content block


• Logo slot
• Content block
• Footer


mailchimp.com/resources
mailchimp.com/charts
mailchimp.com/blog


Email Design 101

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Email Design 101

Similar to Email Design 101 (7)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Email Design 101