I read an article about email optimization the other day and thought I would share with you some of the things i took away from the article. The biggest thing is that we cannot approach email design in the same way we typically approach web design.

Take for example my personal website - http://www.baty-barr.com. I lead off with images of my children and and other images and that takes up most of the 'above the fold' space on my homepage. Even my interior pages have a graphic header. In this day of email image blocking and the like this is just not a great idea. We need to structure out emails with mostly text above the fold - almost like an upside down web page. In fact, if we think about standard webpage footers, what kinds of elements are found way down there? Text based versions of our top navigation, links to our privacy statements, terms and conditions and an a lot of websites a physical contact address and/or phone numbers.

What a crazy idea it would be to lead with that info in our emails!

I know, I can already here some of you out there screaming, "What about branding!, How will people know that the email is coming from me or my company?". My answer to that is why wouldn't we tell them that in the subject line or in the intro sentence to our email?

I propose this:
An html text headline [an h1 tag perhaps :)] that carries your corporate color, which is part of your branding. Perhaps the headline even contains your company name? For example:

ThinktankMail Offers Great Email Plans For Any Size Organization.

In the headline I have identified my company and the main content of the message. I could then follow that up with a brief paragraph that explained what it is that my company does and what the reader can expect to be found in this email.

Then I could entertain a banner type graphic. Yes, I did say graphic :) This graphic could act to reinforce my brand, break up the content or simply be an indicator that my layout scheme is changing from a single column to a two or three column layouts.

Let's change the discussion a bit and talk about what kind of content can be in our emails. It really depends upon what the purpose of the email is, but let's say we are talking about newsletter type emails for this discussion. The main purpose of emails like this is to [yes keep our readers informed but...] drive traffic to our websites. What they do once they are there is another completely different discussion for another day. So, based on the statement that we want to drive traffic to our site, do we want to put complete articles in our emails? I recommend to use teaser content in the email and drive them via a hyperlink to the website for the full article.

This accomplishes several objectives - it allows us to give our readers more, smaller chunks of info and creates more opportunities to have them click through to the website.

If the content of your newsletter articles isn't enough to drive readers to your site, the 'offer' or 'coupon' is another great way to drive traffic. I will touch on these concepts in another post.