Amsive

PUBLISHED: Sep 2, 2009 3 min read

Best Practices Email Marketing Design Templates

Best Practice Email Design Templates Can Increase your ROI

Employing Best Practice Elements is critical to maximizing your ROI from your email marketing campaigns.   In 2009, marketers are shifting dollars from traditional media into areas like Search Marketing & Email Marketing as they need to see higher overall ROI on declining marketing budgets.  Opt-in Email Marketing will continue to rise as it provides a low cost approach to building brand engagement, retaining customer relationships and generating revenue.  Providing the basic best practice elements for your email design templates can go a long way in maximizing your ROI.

Designing Your Email Using Best Practice Email Marketing Design
It is important that some core elements to your email are considered.  Over time, testing and evaluating performance will be critical to optimizing your open rates and conversions but some basic elements should be considered to cut down on your learning curve.

Here are some basics we employ in designing our templates:

  • Include Your Company Name or Brand in your subject line
  • Keep a consistent structure of content – consistency leads to higher click thrus
  • Logo location should be above the fold, ideally in top left position
  • Don’t overuse links thinking it will create action, 2-3 ideal
  • Text style links are preferred to image style links with higher open rates
  • Call to action needs to be placed above the fold in top 250 pixels
  • Use a pre-header to display text that sells even when images are tuned off.
  • Keep navigation bars on the left column, not on top
  • Keep content within 600 pixels wide
  • Include viral marketing components at top and bottom: Send to Friend, Share Socially
  • Make it easy to Unsubscribe for recipients in the footer section

Social Media Integration Leverages Reach & Results
An integrated approach to your email marketing campaigns can dramatically increase the reach of your message.  It is important that you invite your email recipients to forward and share with their social networks, specifically Facebook and Twitter.  The power of these Social links can leverage the exposure of the message and and any promotional emails fit very cozy into social media networks.

Following these basic best practices for email marketing design templates can go a long way to delivering the ROI you need.  For more tips, pick up this weeks www.mediaweek.com for a more indepth insight into best practice email marketing design.

Mike C

Michael Coppola is founder & CEO of Amsive Digital, a NYC based Search & Online Marketing firm.

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