Email marketing, casually known as sending email blasts, can be a relatively easy, effective way to broadcast your brand’s messaging to many members of a specific audience all at once. Though it may be tempting to quickly hit “send,” there are certain shortcuts you should avoid when it comes to email marketing. One of those is sending your email blasts as a single image.
Designing email templates
First, let’s break down what exactly what we are referring to here.
When you get a marketing email in your inbox, you open it to likely see a composition of copy, photos and graphic elements. These elements work together to create the overall design of the email, which serves to engage its audience and clearly convey a message.
At McNutt & Partners, we use a program called MailChimp for email marketing. MailChimp gives us the ability to design email templates for our clients that are attractive and user-friendly. These templates can be saved for future use, with the ability to switch out copy and graphics as needed for various messaging.
The shortcut you shouldn’t take
Sometimes, we’ll have clients come to us with a design idea for an email. The design is outlined in a PDF or JPG file, which essentially has all the copy and graphics grouped as one entity (i.e., a single image).
Our clients ask, “Can we just paste this image into the body of the email or attach it and send it that way?” Our answer is, we wouldn’t recommend that you send your email blasts as a single image, and here’s why.
For one, PDF attachments or images pasted in the body of an email may not work correctly, or they may be hard to read. The latter is especially true for someone on a mobile device, which is often the majority of your audience.
Moreover, recipients are also unlikely to open an attachment in an email they aren’t expecting, like a marketing email. If you went the route of pasting your email composition as a single image, users have to actively click “download images,” to see the content, which is just an extra step that many won’t do.
Finally, some spam email filters, especially corporate ones, may send your message to a junk folder or block your message altogether because of the attachment.
The alternative
The alternative to the sending email blasts as a single image or attachment is what we previously mentioned: designing an email using a mail service provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Doing so ensures that all elements of a campaign are easily viewable to recipients and makes creating new campaigns a breeze compared to editing a PDF or JPG each time.
In a “nutt” shell
Sending your email blasts as a single image presents several potential barriers to recipients actually seeing your content, which defeats the whole purpose. We recommend sending your email campaigns with their content in the body of the message, not as a PDF attachment or JPG.
Want us to design and manage your email campaigns? We are happy to do so!
McNutt & Partners is a full-service advertising and digital marketing agency. Contact us today for your marketing needs! Call 334-521-1010, or visit our contact page.
