Across the industry, desginers are going back to the basics regarding their email creative. These simple guidelines will not only help your email render well across the various email clients, but will also make your email stand out above the rest. Click here to view our 2007 Email Design Guidelines, as featured in this month’s issue of Factory Direct.

Get your copy of the printer-friendly PDF verison of this guide here:

2007EmailDesignGuidelines.pdf

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This is simple, but I’ve noticed lately that it is often overlooked.

We all know that there are four critical elements for every email:

-Content (email creative, message, offer, landing page, etc.)
-From Line
-Reply To email address
-Subject Line

When preparing an email, it’s very important to test the email to be sure everything works, that there are no spellling or other grammatical errors, etc., but it’s also important to focus on something else….

How does the email look when it lands in the Inbox, and what is the First Impression!

How does the From Line look, and how does it look with the Reply To email address? Is it too long? Misleading? Odd looking?

It’s important to be consistent as you continue to email, so it’s important to get it right the first time so you don’t have to keep making changes.

How does the Subject Line appear? Test some variations to see if you can find something that seems better, and gets a better response with your test audience.

Test in a few different email clients if you are sending to web-based email clients like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. (you can set up free accounts very easily). And ask colleagues, friends, relatives, etc., to give you their own first impressions before locking into to a final format…

Email testing is too easy to skip….and it may make a world of difference in your success!