People don’t limit themselves to reading emails online. Many of us choose to print out email newsletters.

Emails are often printed out as part of the online research collateral brought into meetings, for reading in transit – or are brought into a shop to show sales staff.

Printed emails play direct and indirect roles in a sales process, so you should optimise your email newsletters for print to take full advantage of having them viewed on and off line. A few tips for designing:

• Have the template designed no wider than 647 pixels. Do a test print to make sure it works.
• Make all the elements of a page are meaningful when read offline. Instead of using “email us” as the link cover – which won’t mean anything on a printed copy – use the real address as both the link and the cover.
• Have the complete URL to your website is listed somewhere on the page.
• Don’t confine responses to email. Have other contact points such as a phone number.
• Create measurable ‘print this’ links. The technology is available to offer links to printer friendly versions of an article that will register as a click metric. Even taking in to consideration this figure will only represent a portion of “print” actions (many will use their browser) this is still an interesting metric to measure.

Posted on November 18th, 2009 under HTML email newsletters, email design .
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