5 Common Killers Of Good Visual Email Marketing Design

Email marketing can be tricky business for a number of reasons. The most common one is that a lot of people consider email marketing as spam even though in most cases it’s not. It’s simply a case of spam agents ruining it for everyone else.

Email marketing campaigns can go wrong for many reasons, including the possibility that you’re simply selling the wrong product to the wrong audience. However, assuming you’ve done your research and know that there’s a demand for what you’re offering, then your marketing campaign’s lackluster performance is almost certainly due to some other factor.

Luckily, the list of most common email marketing campaign problems is pretty small and here we’ve prepared a nice “public enemies” list of the five worst offenders who are likely to sabotage your email marketing campaign.

Each of these five is being presented as a specific character who you should get rid of as if they were a bad employee who’s scaring off customers.

Also, for the more interactive, visual version of the following post, check out the original video it’s based on, by the professionals at the email marketing company Reachmail.

We have compiled the top 5 “Villains” that can ruin so many otherwise great email marketing campaigns so that you may avoid them and increase the success of your efforts.

1. Mr. Loud Colors

Mr. Loud colors is the marketing agent who shows up at a meeting with your customers with some great information and value propositions to give them, but gets no attention for what he’s saying despite this. Why? Because, as the name implies, he’s dressed so crazily that nobody can pay attention to him or (worse still) take him seriously at all.

In other words, an email marketing campaign whose fundamental design is loaded with ridiculous, distracting color and style elements is much more likely to not be taken seriously by your subscribers. Instead, focus concentration on your actual words by sticking to a muted design that’s elegant, professional but uses soft color palettes. A great list of some professional choices you can be found over at CrazyEgg.

2. Mr. Distortion

Mr. Distortion suffers from the deeply unfortunate habit of presenting himself nicely and normally when dealing with you and then completely losing his cookies when exposed to many of your customers in different circumstances. Naturally, this makes him less than convincing to those potential customers.

What we’re talking about is the tendency of certain design elements and layouts in your email marketing campaign messages to not work as well as you planned when they’re opened in different browsers, email servers or display mediums (mobile devices).

In order to avoid this potentially serious conversion killer, test all of your email campaigns beforehand in dummy accounts across all the major email servers your readers use and then also test them across different browser types and finally on different mediums such as mobile device screens.

3. Mr. Red X

This nefarious character has a bit in common with Mr. Distortion in that he also doesn’t show himself until he’s dealing with your subscribers and not you, much to your detriment.

What we’re talking about is the tendency of some marketers to depend on images as a means of communicating information in their promotional emails, and then sending those image-laden emails to subscribers who’ve shut off image display in their mail servers.

Instead, try to avoid images in favor of well-written text as your communication medium and if you just have to go with images, then make sure to create descriptive ALT tags for each of them.

4. Mr. Pixels

The biggest problem Mr. Pixels has is that he’s just too small for the role he’s been placed into. Luckily though, he’s usually easy to spot if you’re regularly testing your emails across different platforms and keeping your eyes open.

What we’re referring to with Mr. Pixels is the tendency of many email images to scale badly when expanded too much for their native resolution or shrunk too far from a large size.

As we already mentioned, you should be avoiding images anyhow, but if you have to use them, then pick nice medium sized files that can scale either up or down cleanly.

5. Mr. Wordy

Finally, we arrive at our final and easiest to spot campaign damaging villain; Mr. Wordy. His biggest problem is that he simply can’t shut up and get to the selling point before boring or annoying those who are listening to him.

In other words, when you want to sell a value proposition to your subscribers, inform them of what they really need to know but make sure you get to the point as soon as you can. Don’t waste anyone’s time in a way that makes them click away.

5 Killers Of Good Email Marketing Design

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