Valentine’s Day just happened so I held my magic 8 ball and took a few minutes to contemplate on what I could’ve done to make that day extra-special for my loved ones.
For some reason, I was transported to memory lane and that’s when I remembered:
Valentine Cards
Call me old school, but I never underestimate the power of good ol’ fashioned Valentine Cards.
To others, they’re the bulky epitomes of cheapness bound by glue and inspired by laziness, insincerity or both. But for the ones receiving them, they’re beautiful little pieces of thought with carefully crafted borders and elegant images centred to reflect the season and the emotion they represent.
Valentine’s Card analogy in 3, 2, 1 …
Like a Valentine’s Day card, email templates serve the purpose of enhancing your message of love and concern. When it comes to communicating with your subscribers or customers, you need to show them your love, not only through the message you want to convey, but with how you convey it.
Here are the things we should consider when making an email template:
1. A Good Preheader – Preheaders are those tiny blurbs of text that users see when they open or preview an email from their browser or email client. There have been two schools of thought regarding the use of preheaders. The first states that preheaders should be used for the conventional purpose of providing the recipient an option to view the images in the email or to add the sender to their safe-sender’s list. The second school of thought believes that a call-to-action must be present in the preheader to save time and keep the recipient’s fingers off the delete key.
In my opinion, if you’re trying to nourish a relationship with your contact, go with the first school of thought. Let’s face it; giving them something to purchase from the get-go is going to cause some serious trust issues and will increase the chances of making them unsubscribe from your list. So do the right thing for your email template, and give them options first.
2. Images and Banners – Although some email clients don’t view them, images play an important role in brand recall and in making your contacts feel special.
Here’s a little nice-to-know: Spam filters measure the ratio between text and images (duh?), and they do that with reference to pixel size. If your images are bigger in proportion to your text, your message would sit idly in your contact’s spam box. As much as possible, keep your images well within 470×150 pixels and make them as light as 25 kilobytes. They load faster and won’t be too much of a distraction for your contacts.
Put in an image when you absolutely think that your message needs it. I normally keep my images limited to a banner just so they can have a logo or symbol to associate my brand with. You should also use anchor text so you can elaborate what that image is for. Since there’s no guarantee that your contacts would even bother to load the images from your message, leaving them with textual hints can give them an idea about what the image is and why they should view it.
3. A Good Structure – I know, I know. Structure can refer to the way we write our messages. But in this case, I’m going to talk about the aesthetic structure of your email. I can’t really stress how important it is to have a hip and funky-looking template, so I’ll just have to place emphasis on how to make it:
- Use tables when designing your templates. Besides being the only way to structure images and text, almost everyone’s had experience with table applications before. Tables can save a lot of time for both the creator and the reader. For the most part, it’s easy to alternate between images and text as recipients go down the email.
It’s important to establish where an email came from and who sent it. This is why you should place special attention to your email signature. It’s basically the footer of your email that provides some information about you – the sender.
Never forget to include company details such as address and telephone numbers so your recipients could reach you if they decide to resort to other forms of communication. Oh yeah, and the law requires it as well.
- Consider mobile contacts too. With more and more emails being read on portable devices, the ability to zoom in proves to be very important. It’s vital to keep the text as inline as possible, and the width consistent so that browsing through an email won’t be a hassle.
4. Unsubscribe links – It’s customary to give your contacts the option to unsubscribe because of two reasons: a) it leaves the impression that you do value their choices and preferences as an internet user and b) it’s better than being reported as a spammer or having your message marked as junk.
Of course, if you want to save yourself from the hassles of creating an html email, there are email service providers out there that offer great email templates:
Mailchimp, for instance, doesn’t only have pre-built email templates, it also offers the chance to customize these templates to your advantage.
Aweber offers email templates too but they’re only limited to adding images and changing colour schemes to match your branding.
Campaign Monitor is giving away free HTML email templates that are compatible with most email clients. Here’s a link so you can check it out: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/ .
Whether it’s trying to sell something or letting subscribers know of your newest blog post, email templates make all the difference in really getting that message across.
Andy “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against roses or chocolates” Jenkins
PS
Show me some love in the comments section and let me know what you think.
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