Perhaps a more fitting title would be "designing a modern spam message"? Those emails are exactly the kind of emails that I never read.
It's called BACN.
Designing a modern email
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Re: Designing a modern email
#12Perhaps a more fitting title would be "designing a modern spam message"? Those emails are exactly the kind of emails that I never read.
While you may never read them, a surprising number of people do. I had an internship where my primary responsibility was composing HTML emails that went out to users on a weekly basis. If I remember correctly, the majority of our users opened the emails, and roughly 5-10% clicked on a link to content on the site. I imagine these number vary quite a bit, but for a site with a paid membership we saw a lot of traffic from HTML newsletters.
Re: Designing a modern email
#13Re: Designing a modern email
#14I want to underline one change they made that in my experience makes a huge impact: GET RID OF THE HEADER / LOGO
This is one of the basic steps that I've seen drive conversion almost every time be it ecommerce checkout / lead gen / email / etc.
The header distracts from your content, eliminate it or limit it as much as possible, especially when you have somebody that's already engaged (somebody added to cart, joined your list, etc).
In email they did exactly the right thing - center the user on the brand w/the "from address" or the title vs. wasting pixels in your content.
Several years ago I wrote about including company name in the email title as an "Always" winner for email:
http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/optimize-your-e...
Re: Designing a modern email
#15I'm one of the developers for the Direct Mail app mentioned in the article. Would be happy to answer any questions. Thanks for the interesting post!
Re: Designing a modern email
#16Perhaps a more fitting title would be "designing a modern spam message"? Those emails are exactly the kind of emails that I never read.
While you may never read them, a surprising number of people do. I had an internship where my primary responsibility was composing HTML emails that went out to users on a weekly basis. If I remember correctly, the majority of our users opened the emails, and roughly 5-10% clicked on a link to content on the site. I imagine these number vary quite a bit, but for a site with a paid membership we saw a lot of traffic fr…
Yes, spam is a profitable business, that's probably why there is so much more of it than personal email.
Re: Designing a modern email
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still using mutt, huh?
He's probably still using email for communication and not free mass media content delivery.
And how HTML in emails is getting in the way of communication?
Most people use GMail as their email client, so even when they read plain text emails what they actually see is HTML email. The only difference is typeface, but you can configure that.
Re: Designing a modern email
#18Html in email is bad.evil.wrong.stupid. When will these people get it?
Best Practices for all HTML messages is to also send a Text-Only version. Have you configured your client to prefer the text version?
Re: Designing a modern email
#19Html in email is bad.evil.wrong.stupid. When will these people get it?
I like plain text as well but I dislike the fact that it looks so ugly. Why do we need to insert line break at 72 (or something) characters? Can't we wrap text emails?
There's an RFC that nobody uses for rich-text e-mails.
[edit] found it! http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1523
Re: Designing a modern email
#20Html in email is bad.evil.wrong.stupid. When will these people get it?
I like plain text as well but I dislike the fact that it looks so ugly. Why do we need to insert line break at 72 (or something) characters? Can't we wrap text emails?
Thunderbird wraps plaintext emails by default.