Wednesday Buzz: Essential Advice for Designing a Better Email

Email is one of the most effective weapons in your marketing arsenal. But a poor design can result in your newsletter winding up unread and in members’ spam folders.

In a recent blog post, experience design agency Telepathy imparts wisdom  (opens in a new tab) that can help your group create more effective emails. Its top tip: Keep them within 600px wide. “Forcing your subscribers to scroll from side to side is the kiss of death for an email’s response rate,” writes Jason Amunwa.

He also recommends placing important calls-to-action at the top of the emails, and “make sure they stand out, make sure they’re powerful, and make them look clickable.”

In addition, Amunwa argues against using embeddable fonts—just stick to the basic HTML fonts such as Arial, Verdana, and Georgia. Plus, don’t go beyond three content columns, and keep images on the left. In fact, think about an “F” when designing your emails. “Nielsen’s study found that web users skip over content that appears unimportant, resulting in an F-shaped reading pattern,” says Amunwa. “Relevant words and images on the left side of the screen tended to get more attention than things on the right.”

Hard Truths

From #OSAE17  (opens in a new tab): 3 Marketing Trends for Association Professionals to Watch – https://t.co/cXTipb0ITG  (opens in a new tab) #assnchat  (opens in a new tab) @OhioSAE @danfarkas  (opens in a new tab) pic.twitter.com/XeuudJcVKQ  (opens in a new tab)

— MemberClicks (@MemberClicks) August 2, 2017  (opens in a new tab)

Every day the web is flooded with new marketing updates and trends, but what is essential for association pros to pay attention to?

At last week’s Ohio Society of Association Executives’ Annual Conference, Dan Farkas gave a talk called “Marketing on a Budget: Three Developing Trends for 2017 and Beyond.” The MemberClicks blog  (opens in a new tab) shared a few insights from the presentation, starting with the fact that people are inundated with 30,000 messages per day, so your marketing messages are probably getting lost.

How do you get around that? “Repeat, repeat, repeat. You might feel like you’re repeating the same messages and information over and over, but in today’s crazy landscape, you’re really not,” writes Callie Walker.

Other Links of Note

Are you making these errors? Future Fundraising Now reveals the common fundraising mistakes  (opens in a new tab) that small nonprofits make.

Shed some light on dark traffic. Social Media Examiner tells us how to use Google Analytics to track dark social traffic  (opens in a new tab).

Being a great communicator is an important part of being an association executive. Grammarly shares a short list of communication skills to sharpen  (opens in a new tab).

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