Designing for email marketing can sometimes be daunting: you need to take into account how 10 different clients will display your message, or whether your customers will even choose to show images. But even with the threat of no graphics, tons of big name companies are choosing to go the ‘pretty-design’ route and leave live text out all together. Good or bad idea?
As long as your numbers prove your design works (with either purely images or live text, also), then there’s no problem. This example, sent by Urban Outfitters yesterday, shows the email marketing trend that many large brands are going with. Without the alt tags (which just say a quick message about what the image is, if not displayed), the email would just be one big white box. A company like U.O. can certainly use their audience to their own advantage when sending emails: they are generally young and probably tech savvy, or at least understand that if you want to see the pretty pictures, you have to take that extra step to ‘Display Images’. It’s a gamble, but it looks like U.O., along with so many other companies, are willing to take it.
So once you get past the ‘Display Images’ issue, what should your all-graphics email look like? It should be worth the extra click, and I feel that Urban Outfitters accomplished that with this email. Their marketing is usually edgy, integrating popular art trends, and with this email they’ve decided to show that using a beautiful color scheme with bold letters is all it takes. Of course the words ‘Free Shipping’ are always a good attraction, but the graphic was only as busy as it needed to be, and as a customer I appreciated that.
The moral of the story: don’t over-stimulate your audience with tons of pictures. The message should be clear, and the graphics should only be used to add to it, not distract.
