5 Tips To Improve Your Email Templates

Email campaigns are fast and cost-efficient. However, unlike traditional methods of advertising such as print ads and direct mail, what you see is not always what they’ll get. How do you ensure that the messages you send will display correctly in your customer’s inbox? Below are five tips to help improve the success of your next email blast.

Use Alt Tags On Important Images

Many email clients disable images by default, prompting users to manually click to download images. To help prevent total loss of information, use alt tags which will display text descriptions when images are not downloaded.

Include Hyperlinks

Web users are trained to rollover images and text to access links. Within your email be sure to link all of your images and relevant text back to your website. If your email is focusing on a specific product, link to the product detail page to make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase. Also be sure to use concise language in your call-to-action links.

Avoid Rich Media and Flash

While animation can sometimes add aesthetic interest, the majority of email clients do not support flash. Animated gifs are sometimes used, but be careful because these can dramatically increase the size of your emails.

Test Your Email Across Multiple Browsers and Email Clients

To ensure your email will display consistently, create a testing environment including multiple email accounts. Listed below are a few of the more common email clients used.

	Yahoo		Gmail
	AOL		Hotmail
	Outlook		Lotus Notes
	Thunderbird		Entourage
	Mac Mail

Make sure to test across different browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari…) on both Mac and PC.

Provide A Web Page With Your Message

Take one extra step to ensure the delivery of your message by including a link to a web page including your email promotion or content. This can easily be done by making an orphan page and dropping in your images and text.