Future of Web Design Recap – Mathew Patterson

Mathew Patterson Campaign Monitor Good Practices in Newsletter and email design

• standards based designers do like html email…..they have a ‘just say no’ approach. But it does not matter what the standards people think, we are not the ones using it. Just because you hate it, that won’t stop people using it; just becuase we are designers, it does not mean we control how people use technology and it is not going away.
• the ROI in email means that it is the one of the most effective actions you can take
• it’s not completely evil..so how do we make it better? We have to go back in time!
• we started doing standards for browsers to try and get some consistency. HTML email is still left behind in 1998. To design it today you still need the skills that you had then.

Clients think that customers love their emails. ..Customers don’t really – many are just annoyances. We need to design for hatred/annoyance of email. As a designer have to stand on boundary and translates between them, so the client understands what they can do and what they should not do

When creating the message, you have to love the text! The core elements are the permission, unsubscribe and contact details; tell them why they are getting the email, how to get off the list and how to contact you.

Then you are back to using tables, to get any consistency across email clients. You need to think about images…or lack of images. Most clients do not show them by default. The text has to stand on its own.

So is email dead? No, it just needs to get a bit more bionic, faster, stronger better.

Rachel Clarke thinks a lot about digital strategy and blogs at behindthebuzz.com and bibrik.com.