We can give you tips for creating stand-out email marketing all day long, but sometimes advice is better when it comes from someone in your shoes.
We talked to Emily Ashburn, director of Business Development and Account Services with Paladin Engineers for a “how-to” guide on creating a simple email, from a real user’s point of view.
1) Gather Your Content As You Go
Emily sends out her email newsletter quarterly. “So for the first two months of the quarter, I’ll collect my content. I keep an email file and I just put whatever I think might be a good idea in there.”
2) Don’t Stress About Design
“I keep a yahoo account for email marketing samples,” explains Emily. “I take the ones that look easily replicable, and I use them as a template for design.”
When it comes time to actually lay out her email, Emily uses a sketch pad to draw out a rough draft of her design and map out where she will put each piece of content. “I put the most relevant content in the upper left hand corner and work my way down from there,” she says.
Another trick Emily uses, is to have a graphic designer prepare her header beforehand. “So it comes to me as an image I can upload into Exact Target, and it already includes all of our social media.”
3) Keep it Simple
For supporting images, Emily uses all stock images from her iStock account. “I find things that are within the same family and kind of theme together and use them throughout the same email,” she says.
She also sticks to one background color, plus a border and limits herself to two fonts per email. “The concern is how things will translate on the other end, so I just try to keep it pretty clean and uniform,” she explains.
4) Test, Test and Re-Test
The first step is testing links within the email, to be sure they go where you intend. The next, is of course to test the email send. “I personally test it within yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, outlook, and mobile,” says Emily. “I send it out to people in my office who have different types of phones, and that’s how I test it.”
Follow Emily’s tips and you can create reader-friendly, functional emails without spending time you don’t have to spare. It’s that easy!
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