Good email design is a critical part of ensuring a high response rate.

A major frustration within the industry is the lack of standards to guide designers when creating HTML email. Though there isn't one email-marketing design bible, there are fundamental design rules that should be applied. This article reviews some of the high-level design principles as well as more in-depth rules affecting some of the most common issues and questions we are most often asked.

Basics

Some basic elements should always be considered when beginning the design process:

• 600-620 pixels is a good width for email design.
• Don't use external cascading style sheets (CSS); instead, use CSS inlinks.
• Optimize image sizes so they load quickly.
• Don't use flash.
• Don't use forms; provide readers with a link to a form if you're asking them to take a survey.

Microsoft Outlook 2007

Getting a consumer's opt-in isn't enough. New research indicates your legitimate email promotions are still being discarded as spam. Here's what you can do about it.

MarketingSherpa recently released the results of a consumer survey that looked at the use of "report spam" and "junk" buttons among popular email clients, and its findings are not encouraging for email marketers. While 52 percent of email users hit the spam button when they received messages from senders who don't have their permission, the second most common reason -- coming in at 41 percent -- is because the email received wasn't of interest to them.

We've heard time and time again that sending relevant emails is a best practice that results in higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction, but this study links relevancy (or lack of it) to a consumer action that can significantly damage your sender reputation. One of MarketingSherpa's key takeaways is that recipients "define spam by the quality of the email itself -- not by the overall reputation of the company emailing them."

E-mail best practices have been examined in a number of columns over the years. These columns address creative design, rendering, deliverability, technology, and more. The great news is that when you type any topic imaginable about e-mail into Yahoo or Google search, you'll get hundreds of thousands of listings and replies. The bad news is that the majority of these links take you to blogs and Web sites that contain undated or outdated insights about e-mail best practices.

With the ever-changing e-mail landscape, I sometimes wonder if we'll ever get to a point where best practices remain stable. Think about it. Just when you think you have your e-mail permission process compliant, the Federal Trade Commission updates CAN-SPAM efforts. As soon as your e-mail reputation score is high, new spam traps are put into place that require you to re-authenticate.

Sometimes it can be frustrating to keep up with e-mail best practices. Regardless of the constant changes, though, there are some tactics and techniques that consistently drive a high ROI (define). This week, we take a deeper dive into three (because that's the magic number) of the top tips in driving e-mail response.