Simplicity Is the Nature of Great Emails
The modern email inbox is a perpetual promotion machine of colors, styles, and sales pitches all fighting to be seen.
In an attempt to break from the herd, many email marketers ironically adopt a herd mentality of more clutter, more content, more, more, more. This misguided pursuit of increased visibility merely leads to increased invisibility.
Before joining the invisible ranks of the "clutter cult" of email marketers, consider that a huge body of marketing research demonstrates that the human mind is a sucker for simplicity and focus. The eye embraces that which can be easily digested. Less is more.
Unless you're emailing something of personal relevance or urgency to your client, you have only three and a half seconds to be interesting. Fail, and you're deleted.
All those hours designing a big, bloated email reminiscent of an advanced Web page, only to be tagged as junk. Ouch.
This premature email death may be avoided with a little soul-searching. Before you design your next promotion, ask yourself three questions:
- What is your favorite kind of email?
- How much time should you spend reading an email that was sent to you along with a zillion other people?
- What else is happening on the page when you view a typical email?
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Comments
I truly agree with this article and my open rates have been averaging around 30%. I don't listen to Miles Davis. I personally listen to more youthful music however I do find it easier to make excellent subject lines while listening to music that insterest you.
Tesha M.
This article makes absolute sense but most marketers are not following it. If any e-mail is over a paragraph and I don't know the sender I'm likely to glance then delete. If it's short and to the point I'll consider reading it...I'll try that with this post.
Nathan Lands
http://www.hiyaya.com
Software Development - E-commerce Platforms - Web 2.0 Application Design
Tampa, FL
Helpful advice. I sendi email to my nonprofit constitutients with Constant Contact, using a basic template and not much fancy stuff. I'll watch out for too much fancy stuff after reading this.
I constantly battle with clients that think they know best when using this channel. At least articles like this give some 3rd party weight to my arguments!
Even if people need or want the detail they are not ready to digest it in an email environment were time is of a premium. Lets not forget that “links to more information” is always a great circuit breaker to give the power back to the reader!