Email Design Best Practices: Science Over Surveys
Too many times we hear about people doing yet another survey to prove their hypothesis. You don’t require a survey to determine what monitor settings people who will read your email might use! You can get the actual info by looking at actual Website reader metrics to determine exactly which monitor settings are used and how often. I call this Science over Surveys. Don’t ask people what they do! Watch them do it.
Somewhere in your Website statistics you can learn which computer monitors people use to browse your Website on any given day or month. Look at your stats to determine the most reasonable or appropriate monitor setting for your audience and then use this information to draft a message that fits nicely onto most popularly‐used monitors. It is better to use science than it is to use surveys to determine how people view your site and, ultimately, their email. Look at Figure 1, and you will see that if you plan the email for the top four monitor settings: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1280×800 and 1680×1050, then you cover over 74% of all possible viewers. Some of you might want to look at these statistics and be sure your site fits within these parameters as well.
Make a sketch‐level plan, but try not to plan too much as a lot of your knowledge will come
from what you learn from email recipients’ actions. Send multiple versions of the same email
using multivariate testing. This is a more evolved method of AB testing. It uses multiple
variations of a message and other offers within the email to judge responses and then uses the
most popular version for the rest of the recipients. Keep sending the emails out fast. Learn
about the viewers with which you are not already familiar.
Email Best Practices