Tips for great email marketing campaigns

Advice for improving email campaigns through simplicity, clear purpose, and better design decisions.

Give the email one job

The strongest campaigns ask the reader to do one thing. A message that offers a download, a sale, an event and a survey at once splits attention four ways and usually achieves none of them.

Deciding the single job before any design work begins makes every later decision easier, because anything that does not serve that job can simply come out.

Design for the inbox, not the portfolio

Email rendering is stubbornly inconsistent, and a layout that survives it tends to be simple: a single column, generous spacing, real text rather than text baked into images, and a link that is obviously a link.

Assume images will be blocked on first open. If the message collapses into nothing when they are, the design is carrying meaning the copy should have carried.

Write the subject line last

Subject lines written after the email is finished tend to describe what is actually inside, which is both more honest and more effective than writing a promise first and building to fit it. Preview text is the second line most people read and is worth setting deliberately rather than letting it inherit the first sentence of boilerplate.

Test before it goes out

Send to yourself, read it on a phone, click every link, and check that the unsubscribe path works. A short list of mechanical checks catches the errors that are embarrassing precisely because they are obvious in hindsight.

Testing also covers deliverability. Authentication records on the sending domain matter more than any wording choice if the message never reaches the inbox.