The Email Wars

Morgan’s Hotel Group is a favorite of mine not only for the timeliness of the emails that they send, but the design that they use. They seem to have a balanced frequency that, for me the traveler, is relevant to me looking to book that week or for an upcoming trip. I seem to relish the times that they deliver something to my inbox.

But I wanted to focus on this latest one for the good and the ways that they could improve them.

1. The pre-header: Now leading with “If you can’t view this email” is no longer the best thing to design into your email. Why? Well it is the first thing you can see. While having this element is important, more important today is to lead with what is in the email, the offer or the value of what is below. With so many people reading emails on mobile devices and processing emails faster, getting to the point in a clear manner is the way to go. They should add a text pre-header to the top of the email to focus on this, then follow with the “If this is all messed up or your images are turned off” method. Leading with failure is a failure with the goals of the campaign.

2. Font weighting: Your lead font – aka the headline for you old skool copywriters and DM’ers out there – is a best practice I would like to see used more. Let them know what the message is about right off the bat and allow them to process that message as they move through the rest of the content you have crafted. Other copy can slowly decrease in font size as you move down the areas of importance.

3. Send to Friend: The orginal social media… right? Make it easy for them to pass the email on. It does not have to have hooks to FB or Twitter or digg, but showing or reminding someone that they might pass it on is a good idea that should not go away. If the goal of your campaign is to get more people to read it, they stop with the simple footer based text line and devote some real estate in the email to call it out with a graphic or area of your email that has greater visibility.

4. Experiement: Just this past week they added Twitter to the email campaigns. Nice touch to see how they might have some reach with this user base, before diving deep into adding social media intergration. If you want to dip your toe, simply adding the well recognized logo to those in the know is the right way. You do not need to create something new that does not have mindshare. Use what they give you. If it is facebook or Twitter use their logos. I have seen people that want to take the route of making it look different. No need.

In the end there are many things I like about this email and with a few changes to the execution I believe it would be even stronger and deliver the results of heads in beds.