The main reason these efforts are counterproductive is that they usually involve adding graphics, or turning the message into one large graphic. Anyone who still connects through dialup (fewer every day, admittedly) or with a smart phone over a slow cellular network will not be happy about waiting for a large graphic to download, and graphics increase the chance that your message will run afoul of spam filters.

No graphics in email

I would argue that one of the simplest ways to improve your chances of reaching your audience is to never send emails that are simply an image, or that include images as attachments.

As an example, I once received an email in which the message was mostly text, yet the text was sent as a graphic. That made the email much, much larger than it needed to be—over 1MB. A better approach would have been to copy and paste the text into an HTML email as text, not as an image, then apply HTML formatting for the headline, lists, etc.

By omitting all the images, the message would have the same information, most of the visual interest, and it would be a tiny fraction of the size. It would then appear quickly, even on a slow cellular connection.

Doing without images may seem like a loss, but I'd argue that it is actually likely to increase your response rate. People's inboxes are busy, crowded places, and most people have have developed ruthless pruning habits to get to the information that they really need.

Adding graphics to dress up your message and set it apart is actually more likely to get it treated as spam, either by automatic filters or, more critically, by the recipients when they scan their mail.

A tight message is worth a thousand pictures

To improve the odds that your audience will stay off the delete key long enough to read and absorb your message, skip graphics and concentrate on honing your text. Some tips that I've collected on how to do that (and which I frequently forget to apply in my own work) are:

• Focus on the benefit for the recipient—don't tell them why it's important to you, tell them what they'll get from it.
• Give specific information and details to support those statements.
• Keep it short—edit ruthlessly to remove anything that doesn't support the first two points.
• Avoid slogans, tag lines, and marketing speak.

Apply the same principals to your subject line, and take a long time to get it right, because a great message with a bad subject line will never be read.

That last point is especially important.  The subject on the Tito announcement, "Dennis Tito Lecture, Thursday, April 27, 2006, 7:30 p.m.", wasn't bad, but it could, perhaps, have been better.

When I scanned that subject line and didn't recognize Tito's name, my first thought was that it wasn't of interest to me, and I deleted the email without opening or reading it.

Some variations that might have gotten me interested enough to read it:

• Dennis Tito, first space tourist, speaks about his flight on Thursday, 4/27, at 7:30 pm
• Space tourist Tito to speak about traveling by Soyuz to the International Space Station, 4/27/06, 7:30 pm
• Lecture by space tourist Dennis Tito on his flight to Station Alpha, Thursday, 4/27, 7:30 pm
• Experience life in space through a lecture by space tourist Dennis Tito, 4/27, 7:30 pm

With a little thought, I'm sure you can come up with something better. The point is just that because I didn't know why Tito might interest me, I never even looked at the message.  A subject line that hinted more directly at the content of the talk might have hooked me.

Put graphics on the web

If there is a lot of associated material—speaker bios and photos, detailed registration instructions, sample photos from a presentation, etc.—then you should put those somewhere on the web and include the URL in your email, along with a clear description of what the web site has to offer the audience.

If you've gotten them interested, they'll go check it out. If they're not interested, you haven't antagonized them by making them wait for graphics to download, and the person who's running their mail server will thank you, too.

Author:
Hilary Mark Nelson
hmnelson@purdue.edu