20 Popular Email Questions Answered Pretty Quickly
These are questions we get all the time with some quick, thought out answers.
We have heard these questions over and over again. Mostly during a presentation or from the guy down the hall who knows that we have an email website. Either way, we thought we’d reference some of the top 20 questions (or variations of those questions) here. Remind yourself that the topic is about emails, so this isn’t the most riveting stuff in the world. However, we have tried to liven it up for you. Enjoy…
1. Why are there so many GIFs in email now? How to create your own GIFs?
We love them for how perfectly they express our thoughts when words simply won’t do — or when we need to better demonstrate a product feature. Despite their pronunciation debate, they have become commonplace on websites, apps, and emails. Even grandma is sending me them via iMessage now. (I shouldn’t have ever showed her that — I definitely don’t need any more GIFs in my life from a generation that I don’t understand.)
But we all want to add a some“pizz-az”, right? Animated images in email give you a way to add a little something more to your otherwise static message; a message that your competitors and hundreds of other companies are also most likely sending out. Just do us a solid and make sure that it jives well with your audience. For example, Outlook (ugh, the worst) still doesn’t support GIFs. Jason Rodriguez at Litmus wrote the Bible on GIFs in emails if you are looking for a good read. I think it was nominated for a Pulitzer… but don’t quote me on that.
So what is our point of this? Our point is that GIFs are fun and they make your message more memorable. We hate creating our own, so we partnered with Animaticons to bring you an exclusive pack of easy to use / customizable icons that work in a variety of places. You can get that download here.
If you really want to take the burden onto yourself and want to learn how to build a GIF, here’s a great tutorial from Hubspot on how to do it in Photoshop.
2. What are some of your favorite email design/writing blogs?
Here are a few (in no particular order)
copyhackers.com
blog.hubspot.com
blog.intercom.io
litmus.com/blog
blog.invisionapp.com
getvero.com/articles
campaignmonitor.com/blog
emailonacid.com/blog
unbounce.com/blog
dribbble.com/stories
#emailgeeks
You can also find a whole ton of podcasts, tools, courses, and books on our resources page.
3. When including an image in your email, what size should it be (i.e. minimum/max width/height/file size)?
If you have been sprucing up your HTML skills, most of this will make sense to you. While we hate using the term “Best Practices” for email, there are some pretty basic standards that will help your email get delivered and looked at:
- Your email should be between 600 and 800 pixels wide. Anything wider and the kids will probably make fat jokes about it. (Also, many clients have this as a standard.)
- Don’t design an email that is just one big-a** image. Even slicing that image down into smaller images doesn’t perform as well. Try to add in some text in there to break it up.
- Account for fat fingers on mobile devices — allowing for ~46x46 hit areas for links
- Add support text to all images to help your email get through spam filters
- Gmail clips emails after 20540 characters of code, or roughly 20kb of size. So make sure your email is smaller than that, including images.
4. How do you achieve a subject line that isn’t spam happy?
There’s a ton of research out there on subject lines. Each one of them tells you to test it for yourself. What may work for someone else may not work for you. There are some things to watch out for though:
- Avoid overused/salesy words (such as “act now”).
- Include personalization/localization when possible (first name, city).
- Don’t go all crazy long with your subject lines (most people agree that below 50 characters is good)
- Avoid ALL CAPS, exclamation marks!, and ***too many characters***
5. How large should you make your text?
General guidance is size 16 (depending on font) or higher. Also think about your visual hierarchy when aligning and sizing your text. Reading distance is a key consideration when choosing font sizes. On the desktop, with an arm’s length between me and the monitor, larger is usually more comfortable while considering how many characters exist on one line and the what the leading line height is (around 60 characters and 1.5x the font size respectively).
6. What would you recommend as an alternative to using fonts in images? Just using the standard fonts offered?
According to typography and responsive super genius Anna Yeaman, 74% of headings are sans-serif and 65% of body type are sans-serif in email (Helvetica and Arial leading the pack). Serif bodies (such as Georgia) were more popular for educational/prestige newsletters, but many emails mix sans-serif and serif (such as MailChimp). Google fonts are a good place to start figuring out what fonts you want to use and what is mostly supported.
7. What do you recommend for small companies that don’t have a big budget to have a photographer take images on a white background often? How do we really create a clean layout with white space?
You don’t need a white background to have a professional look nor create space. There are a lot of good, free photo banks out there that will give you a polished look (Unsplash, Death To The Stock Photo, and Stocksy are some of our faves). You can even take your own photos with your phone through a good app and use those. As for white space, think more hierarchy than anything. A powerful image, plus a good header and supporting, simple text is all you need. Just give those elements some breathing space.
8. What makes a great CTA? Text only vs button, color, location, etc…
Just like how your email needs a purpose, so does your CTA. What do you want your subscribers to do? How will they know what you want you to do? Why should they do it? Emma has a great reference guide if the points below are too short for you.
- Design: Keep these buttons big enough for big thumbs like ours to click on them (Apple suggests 44 pixels) and give them spacing from other elements (images and text). You’ll want to place the most important CTA early (from our tests, the first CTA is clicked on the most) and provide enough contrast from the background and other text that is apparent that they are focus points. The color doesn’t really matter, but we do a monthly roundup of great CTA button colors in our top 10 blog posts if you are interested.
- Language: The biggest mistake is using a weak, passive call to action. The classic example is: “click here.” There’s no incentive and there’s no indication of what will be waiting for them after they do (if they ever do). So what you should be doing is including some active verbs that describe the benefits or create some urgency. But at the same time, keep an eye out for “high commitment” CTAs, such as “Buy Now.” Do you really think that someone is going to buy something just because you sent them a few sentences and an image in an email? Maybe. Even better, use low commitment CTAs that doesn’t infer a high amount of time, stress, or money. Think along the lines of “learn more” but something a little more interesting than that.
- Image vs Code: If you don’t know how to code, then using a button image will accomplish what you need to. However, the main problem with image buttons is that many email clients block images automatically. This means that your CTA (the most important part of your email) won’t be seen. So we encourage using a “bulletproof” button — which is a small snippet of HTML and inline CSS that creates dead-sexy buttons that render well across email clients even with images disabled. This is why we also campaign to use text outside of your images.
9. Do you have any suggestions about the e-mail footer? Some of them can be CRAZY busy.
We hate stupidly long footers and try to make fun of them with our own footer that we include in our weekly roundup email. There is also a great website called Spot the Unsubscribe which shows how horrible long footers can get. However, we understand if your legal council makes you include some boring mumbo jumbo so you won’t get sued. If that is the case, see if they are satisfied with including a link to your legal terms instead of laying them all out like a master’s thesis. You can also write up your legal terms so people want to read them. Here’s ours.
Like this so far? Press the 👏 and recommend it. It will let us know if we should continue to write stuff like this in the future as well as help others find it.
10. How important is it to keep your email newsletter to a single column? Ours currently follows a 2/3 1/3 column design but I’ve noticed emails moving away from that.
It isn’t too important. But when you introduce a second column, it becomes more difficult to keep that visual hierarchy that we have been talking about. Two columns can also terribly suck on mobile. Test it out by moving the 1/3 portion to the bottom of the email and keep it just one column. We have similarly been running a one vs. two column test and the results vary based on content (images in both columns, text in both columns, mixture of text and images) and region (our friends on the other side of the pond have been engaging with two column more than one column, for example).
11. How are companies like charity water and thredup able to use so many images without getting marked as spam?
There are a lot of spam factors (not just images) and they vary based on the client. Think of it as someone interesting you once met and invited them over to your gated community (one can dream in these kinds of examples). If they show up to your house wearing a onesie, as long as their name is on the list, the guard will let them through the gates. Now think if everyone in the community had them on the list, and they visited often. The guard would recognize them, even though they may look a little strange.
Similarly, the factors that email clients look for are subscription confirmation, engagement with content (subject lines that get you to open, images and links that get you to click, etc), and similar users that are engaging with the info. That is how popular brands continue to hit the inbox. The more people that stop engaging or marking it as spam, the better chance of missing the inbox in the future. On the other hand, the more text and ALT text that an email has, the better chance that an email client will be able to scan the email and determine that it isn’t spam. Email clients like Gmail don’t share all of their secrets, but you can pretty much ensure a good deliverability to the inbox if you’ve confirmed the subscription with the reader as well. Many ESPs (MailChimp, for example) do this with new users to your list to ensure good a good reputation. It’s like having a pass to that gated community without the nod of the security guard — as long as you don’t get kicked out.
12. Are there good days/times of the week to send out emails to customers or days/times that should be avoided?
It depends on who you are and, more importantly, who you are sending to. We have found that Thursday is a good day for our weekly roundup email, but Sunday or Monday works best for some of the product companies we have worked with. In other words, this is subjective to the industry and the subscribers that get the content you are sending.
When it comes to the actual time of day, most email marketing tools show that between 7:00 am and 12:00 pm is the time frame when most emails are opened. But, like day of the week, you should really test out what time works best for your subscriber base. There’s no one time during the day when everyone (or even half of everyone) drops what they’re doing and says, “Now is the time, and this is the place, to engage with email.”
13. Is extra time to make a responsive fluid worth the effort?
You are probably getting used to us saying, “it depends — go test it out on your list,” but you need to know how much your email is opened on different devices to figure this one out. In general terms, if you are following best design formats and have bulletproof buttons with HTML text, you can get away without formatting for responsive design. For the true email geeks reading this, they will cringe reading that. But the average consumer is none the wiser if you have optimized your images, text, and buttons already.
14. How much text is appropriate if you are sending out a newsletter?
There isn’t a true answer to this. There are longform newsletters (such as Tedium, which uses content blocks, colors, and images to deliver an entire blog post in an email) and shortform newsletters (such as Tookapic, which uses just a couple sentences and headings). Because most people are trying to drive more traffic to their website, the former option (longform) isn’t probably what you are going for. Usually, the latter is much easier to write. And while there isn’t a silver bullet number for text, we’ve seen that emails that group their text blocks into 3 to 4 lines usually perform better (here’s a great example from Studio Science). Similarly, with our own tests, we’ve found that people engage more with our weekly roundup when our opening text is shorter vs. longer (usually around 2 paragraphs).
15. Are you using standard templates or are totally building stuff. If the former, how do you make it not feel templatey… or if latter, what’s you’re process?
We are doing kind of a hybrid — starting with a template from MailChimp and then customizing it to fit what we wanted. This saves us time since the next time we send, all we need to do is replace the copy, images, and links (not much coding necessary after the initial build). We have put a lot of time testing different sizes, layouts, etc which has helped us see what our readership is most likely to enjoy.
We are also building our welcome emails and other emails that will be necessary with the release of the updated website. These were a little more complicated, but the process looked a little something like this:
1. write the copy
2. second guess the copy and throw it away
3. write more copy
4. design around the copy
5. convert design into code
6. test code out in Litmus to see how it renders
Here’s a new welcome email we are designing right now…
16. How intuitive is clicking an image without a text prompt?
We don’t have any research this one to back up, but in our experience the larger the image or the more recognizable an icon (like the facebook or twitter logo), the more intuitive it is to click on. Also, web users will see their cursor change to that little fat hand with a pointer finger out when they scroll over something clickable, which helps.
However, if you want people to click on something, a bulletproof button is the best way to direct your call-to-action. That way if they are viewing from their phone and don’t get that chubby finger, the button is there to taunt them to push it.
17. What are the best non-product sales emails?
There are plenty of examples of non-product related emails on our website. Everything from charities, to tax professionals, to events, news outlets, and app downloads. Take a look at a category that you are interested in creating an email for and see if there are any that inspire you.
18. Any tools out there to help test emails?
- Litmus
- Email on Acid
- Targeted.io
- MailChimp & Campaign Monitor have methods to test after you’ve completed a campaign.
- Your coworkers (ask people around the office what they think, if it looked funny, etc)
19. My audience is 55+, do these design tactics work with that age group as well?
Yes, but we would suggest increasing the font size for older demographics. (See the “How large should I make my text” question above.) Otherwise, they are still humans and will appreciate good design when it comes into their inbox.
20. Where do you get the emails on ReallyGoodEmails.com so you can use them as a template?
Your ESP will have similar templates to choose from. But if you want to use one specifically from our site, look for a “live link,” which will take you to the hosted email. From there, right click and view the source code. If you know any HTML and CSS, then editing the email to work for you will be fairly easy. If you don’t know anything about coding, then we suggest contacting a company like EmailMonks or PSD2HTML who will take designs and code them for you.
This post was written by Mike Nelson (@mevlow) of Really Good Emails. Mike was the marketing director of an Inc 500 company, IRCE 500, and taught at the graduate level. Now he spends his free time working on curating, interviewing, and researching email.
