How to design & develop a successful e-newsletter.

Here at Indulge Media we offer e-newsletter services to a few of our clients, including Blue Islands, Fermain Valley Hotel and Muscle Bulletin. The message and format of each of these varies, depending on the message and how loyal their mailing list is.

Ensuring deliverability is paramount, and there a number of things you can do to encourage people to open your newsletters and to reduce the number of newsletters that get spammed.

For creating the campaigns, testing, mailing list management, reporting and for sending we currently use Campaign Commander and Communicator Corp. Both are reliable and efficient solutions and put a lot of effort into white listing their servers.  If you take e-newsletters seriously then you should always use a specialist provider for this reason.

Here are a few technical rules and guidelines for putting together a spam-filter-busting e-newsletter that we have compiled over the years. We hope you find them insightful and useful:

Content

• The amount of content is a decision based on your intended target audience.
• Don’t type in ALL CAPS, as that's considered SHOUTING and is rude.
• Don’t use consecutive exclamation marks or question marks in Subject Line & Message Body
• Avoid more sophisticated typography - typographer’s quotes and apostrophes, en and em dashes, and bullets - that your readers' email applications may mistranslate as nonsense characters. Stick to the QWERTY keyboard layout to avoid these unexpected and unpredictable results.
• Don’t use URL Masquerading: displaying a URL that is different from the real <href> URL
• Avoid poor grammar and shortcuts, such as using the numeral 2 instead of spelling out "too."
• Spelling and punctuation count! Use your spell checker or risk coming off as uneducated and unprofessional.
• Use acronyms (LOL or BTW, for instance) and emoticons (winks, smiley faces) sparingly or not at all for business emails.
• Put URLs on a separate line for improved readability.
• Keep your email message brief; a reader’s attention span for lengthy email is much shorter than for print.
• Avoid Suspect Spam Phrases, for example proven, enhance, hassle.

Design

• Use the content within an enticing branded magazine ad style design.
• Keep it simple. Clean uncluttered designs will stop users from unsubscribing.
• Content title is the largest font and matches the subject title.
• Further copy or content should be indented
• Use universal system fonts installed on most computers, such as Arial, Times, Verdana, Trebuchet, and Geneva.
• Use images wisely. All designs should work well with or without images
• Preview pane in most email clients is 400 pixels high. Keep the top 3-400 pixels for your main call to action.
• Set your width between 500px - 650px
• You have about 2 seconds to capture attention. Certain areas of the screen are hot spots for focus, namely the top and the right-hand sides.
• Alternative version of the newsletter via a web link ensures your recipients will see your message.
• Clear unsubscribe link at the bottom
• Create a flexible template that is adaptable to seasonal colours and special occasions.
• Think of the newsletters you received and which ones you liked.

Programming

• HTML Table structures achieve the best results
• Use nested tables: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2644/nested-tables-in-email-how-much-is-too-much/
• Avoid using JavaScript. Most email software will disable it anyway.
• Use inline CSS
• CSS style declarations appear below the body tag, not between the head tags.
• CSS style declarations are very basic
• No CSS shorthand
• Define the background color in a td cell with the bgcolor attribute, not the CSS style or body.
• For font consistency in webmail use <font> tags instead of styling the <p> tags
• Include tags for analytics and site overlays
• The size of all tables & cells should be specified
• Do not use margins (not supported in Hotmail)
• If there's a spacing issue with the columns in the email design, tweak the cellpadding and cellspacing attributes of the HTML tables.
• To reduce the spacing between paragraphs in IE use a double line break
• No cells should have nothing in them - ue spacer.gif or a hard coded space if necessary
• While a 1x1-pixel image can be used to force spacing to create a precise email layout, spammers often use 1x1-pixel images to determine if their email has been opened. As such, using this practice will increase the likelihood that your email is classified as spam.
• Similarly, avoid using a large image "above the fold" in the email. This is another classic spammer practice and may cause your email to be interpreted as spam.
• Slice up very large images in Photoshop and save as a progressive JPG’s. Place these images within a HTML table layout sized to the dimensions of the sections that have been sliced.
• Be sure all your images use the alt, height, and width attributes. Setting values for these attributes improves results in Google Mail, as well as maintaining your layout when a reader has their images turned off. Note, however, that Outlook 2007 does not recognize the alt attribute
• Image displacement can occur when a td cell is closed right below an img tag. This is an ancient HTML problem. Putting the tag right after (on the same line as) the img tag eliminates the annoying and mystifying 1-pixel gap.
• Don’t use a single image
• All images should be hyperlinked
• Use the following inline CSS to stop a 1 pixel gap display below your image in Hotmail: style="display:block;"
• Use absolute URLs to images stored on a web server.
• Do not use background images (not supported in Outlook)
• Use special characters for symbols and punctuation
• Use 6 character colour references
• Use the target="_blank" attribute for the a tags, so that people who read with webmail services don't have the requested page appear within their webmail interface.
• Keep HTML light: ~100Kb (with images), ~15-20Kb without images
• Style alt tags by using “style=”color:#” in the anchor links, so your email remains on brand without images.

Adhering to these guidelines will create a well designed email, which passes the deadly spam filters. Test your newsletters in all available mail clients to confirm successful delivery and consistency in layout.

Here are some interesting mail client usage stats from Campaign Monitor: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/. Most of the common programming issues are found with Outlook and Hotmail but these are the 2 most popular mail clients, so its worth putting in the extra effort to make sure they are delivered correctly. Mobile mail clients are also becoming every increasingly popular.

Let us know if you have any other e-newsletter tips and tricks!