Melon Corporate Blog

Email Design VS. Email Content

Posted on Apr 28, 2008

Design VS Content
Laaaaadies and Gentlemen!

In the Red corner we have ever-so-pretty, pixel perfect, queen of presentation and impact… “IMAGE!”

And in the Blue corner we have the informative, the educational, the dynamic king of infinite use… “CONTENT!”

Design versus Content.

Which one would you back in a showdown? Read on to find out which is the most important aspect of e-marketing…

In truth, this battle comes not from the contenders themselves, but from the generals in charge.

If you are talking to a designer (and I'm being overly stereotypical here) you will find that to them, design is the most important aspect of your e-marketing peice. It doesn't really matter what the thing says textually as long as the layout, colours and emotion conveyed by its design have its intended impact. As long as it looks "good".

Designers are very proud creatures.

If you are talking to a marketer (again I'm being overly stereotypical) you will find that to them, content is king.
It doesn't really matter how the thing looks because it's the content that is important and it's the content that the user is really after.

Marketers are also very proud creatures.

Both designers and marketers can be very, very stubborn (that's not a stereotype - that's a fact!).

The correct answer of course is that it takes an appropriate blend of the two to have a killer e-marketing peice. It is no good having pages and pages of text if it is ugly to look at. And on the other hand it is no good having the greatest looking document in the world if it fails to tell the user anything informative.

This is reflected in the email user open rates and the click through responses we see.

I have collected examples of some emails that reach my inbox to show exactly what does and does not work.

For starters we have a pure sales content email.

This gets the information across in a no frills way. To its credit, the information is clear and easy to read, tells me exactly what the products and prices are, and has click throughs for more information.
How this could benefit would be from a good use of tables, some background colours or images, and some styling on the links.

Next we have the opposite - a picture heavy email.

This displays all content visually and everything, even the text, is represented by an image. There are click throughs to each product, which is good, but what if I am at work and don't have time to click through each image to get more information.
This particular email could benefit from some more descriptive text for each item. Text as characters instead of images - for users that don't have images turned on by default would also be good.

Now let me show you an example of good email design.

You can see that everything is layed out nicely. The sections are clear and concise, and provide "Check It Out" click through links to keep the body of the email to a manageable level.

The content is also of an informative nature. This is important because if you overload your readers with salesy-speak, the majority will switch off. A good rule to follow is the 80-20 rule.
80% content, 20% marketing.

This will ensure your reader base continues to look forward to the next edition.

So take a good look at what you are sending out. If you're suffering from "too much" of something there's a good chance you need to take your designer and your marketer out of the ring and back to the drawing board.

And if you need a little nudge in the right direction, contact us to discuss some great custom-built templates to get you started.

Melon Corporate Blog

Email Design VS. Email Content

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