Email design can be a tricky subject with all the different email programs available. You may design a very nice email, but end up with readers that just can´t see it. There are a few major mistakes that you might be making, turning your amazing email design into something that no one can read properly.

Email Design Mistake One

Using images for important information. If your headlines or slogan or any other vital information is being presented in your email design as an image, you can bet that at least 50% of your readers don´t see them. Many email clients turn images off automatically, so you want to make sure that only non-vital info is included in images and always use alt tags.

Email Design Mistake Two

Placing your best content at the bottom of your email. This is a big mistake. Sure, you want people to read all the way down, but many won´t. So make sure your riveting and most important information is at the top of your email.

Email Design Mistake Three

Not testing your email design. Check it in as many different email clients as possible. Find out what your email design looks like in Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook and anything else you can think of. Not all of them will show your content as you had planned and knowing where your design can be tweaked will help you make it a good one for everyone who subscribes.

These are three big email design mistakes. If you recognized your email design in any of them, they are pretty easy to fix and can mean a huge difference in the quality of your emails.

We think a lot about formating when considering email design, but fonts are a major part of the design. Choosing a font isn´t quite as simple as grabbing whichever one pops up first on the list. There are a few considerations to keep in mind.

Readability. Cursive fonts translate to bad email design. They are hard to read and may not exist on the subscriber´s computer.

Size. While any font can be adjusted for size, you want to make sure the ones you choose for your email design don´t have to be huge to be read.

Tone. What message are you trying to convey? A fancy, hard-to-read font like Gigi will convey a more elegant (albeit illegible) message. New Times Roman is more formal, Arial is quite friendly.

Other email design fonts that are easy to read and best to use include Calibri, Corbel, and Verdana. Each of these makes your email design function better.

Are you making one of these common email design mistakes? Many people do and they could really improve their email marketing skills by fixing them.

1. Sending your email as an image. Many email marketers find that it is easier to simply design the newsletter as an image to avoid the hassles of HTML. Plus, images look the same, no matter which email server your subscribers use. But there are some major flaws in this method, the main one being that more and more servers are actually blocking emails that only consist of images. So, think twice before taking the easy way out.

2. Not including a text based link back to your website. Having the URL in plain sight means people are more likely to click on it than a cloaked link, but many email designs don´t include this vital factor. If your email newsletter is one that lacks a text based link, add it in today.

3. Forgetting to include Alt-text. If your images don´t load, the alt-text is what tells your reader what the content of the photo or illustration is. Without it, they will just be looking at big blank spots in the email design.

If you are making any of these mistakes, it is time to reevaluate your email design and try to improve it. It´s never too late to fix your email design.

The last thing you want is for subscribers to open your email, but delete it before it finishes loading. The reason this happens is often because the email takes too long to load, often due to images. You can correct this problem by using smaller, made-for-email images.

Keeping the email design simple is also a good way to make sure that load times don´t get out of hand. There´s no need to have flashy images all over the place. Often one or two well-placed photos or logos are all that is needed to enhance your text.

Going with a very simple border is often better than using image heavy ones that are so popular with less professional email designs. You can also speed load times by not using a watermark or background image. While this may look cool, if it slows your load time down too much, no one will even see it!

Keeping your email design simple, with few images and easy to read text is the best way to avoid losing readers who were willing to open your email. They´ll be happy to stick around if you respect their time and offer quick loading email design.

Text email newsletters offer a unique challenge. Creating a decent text email design can be rather difficult, but not impossible. Today, I´ll cover a few tips to help you with your email design, make it easier to read and more pleasing to the eye.

• URLS are a very important part of email design. In HTML format, you can hide them as links, but with text, your full URL is out there for everyone to see. To make things just a bit neater and encourage people to click, try to format your URLS properly. For example, instead of http://www. thislink.com/?19083479879867, which is very user unfriendly and gives a reader little reason to click, try something like http://www. thislink.com/freesample/.

• Use lots of white space. There is no reason to crunch your email up, leave a space between paragraphs, a couple between two different articles.

• Simple dividers like the asterisk sign are often used, but these can tend to look messy. Instead of having a line like this:
  *****************************************************
  Why not try a more simple, classy division such as this:

  * * *
  It does the trick, but looks far more professional and is rarely used in email design.

Your text emails will be more difficult to design, but you can certainly create a pleasing look, simply by following the above tips.

Should you design your own newsletter or use a template? There are pros and cons of each.

First, let me say that you don’t have to do your newsletter all by yourself. You can use a service like Constant Contact If you do decide to use Constant Contact, let me know because I can get us both a $30 credit by referring a friend. I’ll send your e-mail address to Constant Contact and they will contact you. When you sign up for their service we’ll both be credited $30.

Yesterday I asked whether you should design your email marketing campaigns yourself or use templates. Instead of answer the question directly with pros and cons, I gave you some useful things to think about before you decide. Most of it was against, or con. Today, I’d like to give you a few benefits to designing your email campaigns.

The first benefit, of course, is the pride that you’ll feel as a proud email designer and owner. Not many people can design their own email newsletters and brochures. For one thing, most people who go online with their business these days do not know html. But there are several programs on the market now that allow you to design your documents in html or other applications without knowing how code them yourself. Some programs will convert the documents for you.

And you don’t have to stick with html. Many successful email designs have been done in .pdf.

The second benefit to designing your own email products is that you can brand your email newsletters, brochures, and other marketing collateral to suit your business. You can take your print materials and convert them to digital products with relative ease and carry your off line branding over to your online business.

Benefti No. 3 to having your own email design strategy is control. You control the medium and you control the message. I can’t say enough about that. Since you control whether, when, and how to create your email designs, you must take full responsibility for their success and failure.

Custom email designs to better overall than templates. They make the companies they represent more money, convert more sales, and achieve more overall results than some pat digital product that looks like everyone else’s. That’s benefit No. 4.

If you design your own email campaigns, how about sharing some of the benefits you’ve realized because of your decision to do all your own emails, design and all.

It’s a difficult question to answer. Should you design your own email campaigns? Newsletters, brochures, etc.

There is a lot to think about when you decide whether to design your own emails or use a template. First, you should consider whether you have the skills. At the very least, you’ll need to know html and it would be a good idea to learn a few other coding skills as well - CSS, php, and perhaps even asp. If you don’t have the skills to do it yourself and you want custom email design then you’ll have to hire someone to do it for you. That could get expensive.

The most basic email designs are not too hard to create. You can have a fabulous design in an hour or two. But if you start getting complicated with your email designs, using Flash and other multimedia concepts, then you’re talking about some real money. You might hire someone to work with you in-house or you can hire a company to design your emails for you. Either way, it could get costly.

Besides the cost of email design, there might be other issues you should consider as well - will you stick to the same design in every email or get creative and use a different design for specific purposes? For instance, you might have a different design for your Christmas email campaigns and another for your Easter campaigns. Again, if you are using freelancers to design these email campaigns then you could run into some expenses.

So should you design your own email marketing campaigns? It’s up to you. But you should give it careful consideration.