Email Design
There was an interesting debate in the office today over a re-design of a marketing email for our eCommerce company.
I feel the existing design is out-dated and uninteresting - essentially it’s not doing a very good job of marketing. I compared the existing design with marketing emails from Play.com, CDWow, Amazon, Marks & Spencer and Apple and noticed the common trend that they are all very image rich emails. The primary aim is to be eye catching and give you enough enticement to click through the email and onto their web site.
Our existing email template in contrast is very text heavy. There are some images but not enough. While my belief in web design is to always use text wherever possible and that any design elements should only be there to enhance the content - for the purposes of a marketing email I think the absolute priority is to be attractive, eye catching and inspiring. If you achieve these things the actual content is almost irrelevant.
I make the comparison that the design should be like a magazine cover. It doesn’t have to give you any information of what is in the magazine. It just needs to attract you enough to pick it up and read it. The equivalent of clicking through on a promotional email to visit the actual web site.
Others in the office however, contend that the email should provide more information - at the very least a contents page and probably the editorial as well. My argument is in the belief that the majority of people receiving the email will have made a sub-concious decision, even before opening the email, as to whether or not they will click through to the web site. The design of the email therefore should be regarded as a moment of closure on the deal. If it looks great and says: come on in, we’ll also give you 15% discount, that is probably enough. A paragraph of text and a couple of images at the side don’t achieve this, the text probably won’t get read, it’s not visually enticing and it flags the company as being out of touch with the marketplace.
The counter argument to this is that many people receiving the email don’t know enough about the company, that there needs to be more informative text about the company to explain to these people why they should be clicking through on this email and visiting our web site. And perhaps this argument is correct. I only hope I can push my argument enough that I at least get a chance to properly test it.
