Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Email Campaign Creative - 101 - Part Deux

As promised here is the continuation from my last post on creating effective creatives optimized for deliverability. These are some of the things I continually advise my production team and clients to focus on. Although following some of these may cause the creatives to loose some luster, at the end of the day deliverability is all that matters, and getting through to your consumers. So here are some more tid bits for your creatives --

Height and Length of Logo / Banner: The length of the logo/banner should be equal or less than 600 pixels. The width should be proportionate and ideally under 100 pixel range. Anything over will be one blocked image in the preview pane until the user allows images to be downloaded

Font Size: Medium font size is recommended for all creative, as large fonts within the creative affect the SPAM score and increase based on repetitive usage.

Tables: Avoid using excessive tables and/or nested tables within the creative. When images are blocked, this can cause the creatives to look broken and the text out of place.

Image Dimensions: The height and width should be defined for all images in the creative within the image source tag. This will make the creative text readable even if the images are blocked.

RTF Images: RTF images are not recommended as it's become a spamming mechanism -- so while it can get images opened, you risk getting put on a SPAM list by a user who has created a filter for this.