Free Email Templates: 4 Elements To Improve Design

E-Mail templates are wonderful tools to communicate to your clients, while maintaining a sleek and professional look.  The purpose of these templates is to give you an easy and fast way to create a savvy looking email without much technical expertise on your part.  But even while using a template, it’s important that you make sure the design is beneficial to your purpose, if not, improve it and make it more effective.  Here are a few critical components to successful design.

White space is an undervalued and important element to design.  It’s easy to get carried away in cluttering up a message with lots of images or text.  Keep the space around your text proportionately free so that the readers’ eyes naturally focus on the text rather than the things surrounding it.  Keep in mind that your audience’s attention span is limited – the denser your gray blocks of text are, the faster you will lose their interest.

Don’t use the top space of your e-mail for images or some type of header.  Many email services block the loading of images, and hence the only thing the viewer will see is a message stating that the image could not be loaded.  It will be a waste of your effort and your message will not be conveyed.  Design your email in such a way that the beginning contains the crux of text that captures the essence of your message. This can be followed by images, but never preceded by images.

Be careful of including a series of links at the beginning of your e-mail.  Particularly in our modern day in which many people check their e-mail on their cell phones, these links will appear as long and unending lines to scroll across.  This is sure to turn off your customer, and it is likely that they won’t read further.

Using too much formatting, many times, does not get carried over in various email services.  Many designers use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create their templates, but services such as Outlook 2007 no longer show formatting unless it is coded in “inline CSS,” which is a much more detailed coding process.  It is good to convey this to your designer if he or she is using CSS.

Finally, while design is key to a first glance, text is still the essential core of your message.  Don’t let design misguide your audience – without text to back it up, your readers will not know why the message was sent.  Images, videos and other features may not always come through in an e-mail, so make sure you have text to back up your design!

About the Author

Jamie Colbs is a best practices activist and advocate for free html email templates

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