Campaign Monitor has published their 2008 Email Design Guidelines.

As with most articles published by Campaign Monitor, this is a must read. To summarize, not too much has changed technically from last year when Microsoft decided to use Word to render HTML in Outlook.

What’s new in 2K8

The mobile market is expected to grow substantially. While the iPhone’s mail client can pretty much handle anything Safari can, Blackberry people will be best served with plain text this year.

Possibly the most important thing to keep in mind going forward is a push by ISPs and email providers to consider relevance as a key part of defining spam. I.e. being more upfront about what kinds of information you will be sending consumers during the signup process, and making good on that promise down the road.

Get up to speed

For those of you that are a little late to the party, it’s important to realize that sending email newsletters is an entirely different thing than making a website. For one, in the US there are federal laws in place that can result in steep fines and prison time for those who violate them. Do I have your attention? Good.

People get lots of email. Most people get substantially more email today than they were a year ago. Not only are email inboxes flooded with email, they are also increasingly becoming a hub for to-do lists, calendar appointments and RSS aggregation. Your email campaigns are competing with quite a lot of information. Because of this, it is important to remember that the primary focus of your email should not be the way it looks, but rather to clearly communicate a message to the reader.

Of course, a big part of clear communication is branding and visual design, but it’s important to know what is appropriate for the medium you are using, and even more important, what is possible with the medium you are using.

General Motors hosting an H2 test drive inside a movie theatre that is showing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth would be equal parts inappropriate and ineffective. Sending a PDF file of your entire product catalog to your mailing list would yield about the same degree of success.

Before you send rich HTML email communications to your subscribers, take note of these facts, and then talk to someone with experience.

• Image blocking is the norm. Compose your email with actual text and pretty it up with images that have alternate content. DO NOT rely on images to communicate your message.
• You need to have permission to email people. It’s the law.
• Make unsubscribing easy. This is also the law.
• What is easy on the web is infuriatingly difficult in email. Keep it simple.
• On average, 50% of your subscribers will open your email. 10% will interact with it.
• Most consumers view email in a web client like Gmail or Yahoo!. HTML rendering varies from browser to browser, but more over, from within the web based email client inside the browser. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
• Most business people view email in MS Outlook. Outlook uses MS Word to render HTML. Try opening a web page in MS Word.
• It’s 1000x easier to keep your nose clean using a hosted email service than it is to use software installed on your computer or web server to do it. By keeping your nose clean, I mean not breaking the law and being sued for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Unsolicited ass kissing

I send close to 50 email campaigns out each year for clients in a wide range of industries, and I use Campaign Monitor for each and everyone. In addition to being light-years ahead of every other email campaign management service out there, they freely publish tips and tutorials for creating effective campaigns that are based on actual test cases and factual information. They have even started a grassroots coalition to improve support for web standards in email clients. If you are not using them to send your email campaigns, you should be using their site to educate yourself. They are the gold standard.