HTML email

The personal prejudices of many designers and developers are such that HTML email is the internet’s dirty little secret. Unloved, under-discussed, sidelined and forgotten: the effective design and use of email is ignored by the majority of our industry. I’m here to tell you different. HTML email can be awesome in the right hands. My mission is to make those hands yours.

I’ll talk in general about visual design, email in the age of the smartphone, writing, and how to keep your emails out of the dreaded spam folder. I’ll even talk a little about the law, and what shady practices to avoid. I’ll also show you techniques (not all of them elegant, I’m afraid) to make sure your emails are as beautiful as they can be for your readers.

Who is this for?

Designers, developers, business owners. You can all learn something, I hope, despite the short length of this little book. While the technical stuff in chapters 3 and 4 might dive deep into the guts of how to code an email, the principles and layouts discussed there are still worth consideration by the more business-minded individual.

Why send email?

We’re all familiar with receiving and reading a vast quantity of email, but how often do we think about how we’re being perceived when we send it?

An open secret of lots of successful businesses is the deployment of gorgeous, functional emails with cracking content. This leads to more engaged users and customers, which leads to more sales, sign-ups and happy smiles, back-slapping, party hats and the sense of a job well done.

The web is a passive medium: you can write insightful articles, create a beautiful website or application, but it’s true that if you build it they won’t necessarily come. Any business needs marketing, to tell its customers and potential customers about the cool new widget it just released. Email is fabulous for this. Email is pretty much the only way to reach out directly to your customers and remind them you’re still around. This applies to one-man consulting shops as much as to department stores and internet behemoths.

Speed and simplicity

Once you have all your email templates set up you’ll need very little time to launch a marketing campaign and the emails are sent straight away. No waiting for the printers for leaflets, no renting a venue, no marching around town in a sandwich board – just your message reaching your customer’s inbox within minutes.

Measurable

One of the great marvels of the internet is the ability to measure and find out almost exactly what your users are interested in. This is also true for email. Most marketing email clients will track the opens and clicks within your emails, meaning you’ll know whether people really do want to read the latest message from the CEO, or whether they’d much rather simply buy the latest Stephen King novel.

Kinds of email

I break emails down into three broad types, with differing ways to reach out to your customers.

Marketing email

When you think of emails from companies and organisations, these are the emails you think about. Sent most often to the entire userbase of a website or service, they’re used to announce new products, sales or launches. If the company creates a lot of supplementary content in its area of expertise, the messages are likely to include a few links to a blog or online reports. These are the emails that are most analogous to a TV or print advertisement, except they’re delivered directly to your users, and you can see how engaging they find your missives. Useful.

Transactional email

Transactional emails are the nuts and bolts of your website: reset passwords; invoices; or changes to legal terms. The most important of these are receipts and invoices, the results of your customers buying your goods or services.

Do not underestimate the importance of transactional email. If you take one thing away from this book, let it be that your transactional and marketing emails should both receive the same amount of care and attention in design, content and copywriting.

At ImpulseFlyer our invoice also confirms a hotel booking. We therefore include all the details of the trip, information about the hotel, a map and a number to call us on if there are any problems.

While this is a feature of businesses where the email is used as a proof of purchase, it’s a good practice for all emails where you’ve taken money from your users! Why not write a little thank-you letter rather than send a dry, by the numbers note? Make your users feel good and they’ll reward you with their business again.

Life-cycle email

There is a whole other book waiting to be written that deals with the when, how and why of life-cycle emails.

Life-cycle emails are generated by your application or by specific events triggered by your customers. They are typically attempts to re-engage customers, or to encourage a new visit to your website based on their behaviour in the past.

Examples of these emails you’ll most likely be familiar with include:

• Facebook emailing you to tell you you’ve been tagged in a photo.
• Amazon letting you know that the new book by your favourite author is coming out.
• Twitter informing you of a new follower.
• A project management tool emailing you a couple of days before your free trial ends.

There’s a crossover between your marketing and life-cycle emails. It’s easy to recognise the continuum between an email sent to everyone announcing a new feature, through a new feature being available to users in a certain country, to “Hey, your free trial is about to expire.”

An aside on social media

This might be controversial. Hold tight.

We live now in the age of social media: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, MySpace. While these sites are great avenues for interacting with your users and should definitely be on your marketing radar, it’s worth considering a strong email presence before them.

Pew Internet suggests that 92% of online adults use email and 67% use it every day. About two-thirds of that number use social media. The audience (even for Facebook) is still a fraction of the total number of people online.

A problem with focusing on increasingly noisy social platforms for your marketing is whether you’ll be heard at all. You’re at the mercy of the algorithms of the social networks and the only way to guarantee your message is seen is to pay for an advert.

You might also have noticed that these very social networks are incredibly active in your inbox. There’s a reason for this: they know that telling you your friend just tagged you in a photo from the weekend is a great way to get you back on their site. This is definitely not to say you shouldn’t use social media; in fact, it may be a great way to build awareness and recruit users. But email is (or at least can be) personal and intimate and incredibly effective.