Email Campaign Creative - 101 - Part 1

Create campaigns that are great looking with a focus on deliverability and maintaining creative conformity when received by the ISPs. Here are some of my suggestions:

CSS Styles: Yes they look GREAT when used on a website but for email creatives its a big AVOID. Creatives that are heavy on the CSS styles have a low text to html ratio low. CSS should be avoided in emails as they will be ignored by most web clients. Style sheets (inline or external) will be ignored by Yahoo/Gmail. Instead it is advised to use inline table styles for all your styling requirements within a creative.

Clean and Smooth Transition: Creatives should be clean and must have smooth transition between image and text from top to bottom ---limiting to a maximum of one column where text is displayed. Adding multiple columns of text and images causes the creative to break when the images are not displayed -- currently a standard practice by most web based and pc based email clients. To attain a cleaner and more presentable look, we recommend that you do not exceed more than one column for your email creatives where text is displayed. This will not only make your creatives look more professional, but also when images are disabled it will make the email acceptable as well as readable. It also makes it easier to convince the ISPs that the Newsletter is legitimate--because of the look of the creative--and not intended as SPAM, when someone reports the email.

Backgrounds and Alignment: Colorful backgrounds again raise the SPAM scores precipitously. A white background is the lowest scoring color within a creative. Also, most SPAM creatives are centered. We advise that you left align your creatives to make it look more legitimate form of communication. Developing creatives with a white background and aligning the contents to the left, makes your email campaign look less like a SPAM mailing. The combination of these changes i.e. of background and alignment will have a positive effect on your deliverability by decreasing your SPAM score

Text to HTML Ratio: Creatives must have images and text in a creative. A 60-40 rule should always be followed while creating html based creatives. Most SPAM messages are center aligned image only, and hence is a SPAM indicator for various filters.

The second part will continue on this post.

Happy Mailing!