Thursday, May 8, 2008

Design Your Email Message For Different Types Of Audiences

When you send out an email to your list, you usually send a particular type of message. However, different email recipients usually perceive the email differently. Hence, the importance to design and draft your email message in such a manner that the majority of the recipients understand the crux of the message.

Keeping the same email recipient satisfied from one email to the next is also difficult. This can be a Herculean task, as a person's perception changes from email to email, depending on his mood and availability of time. However, you can resolve this issue by catching the pulse of the majority. To do this, you need to know the different types of recipients.

Usually, email audiences are of eight basic types. These are: Identifier, Skimmer, Reader, HTML Reader, Mobile Reader, Searcher and Desk Reader.

An identifier will usually check the sender's address and the subject line before opening the email. If he recognizes the sender's address and finds he subject line interesting, he will open it. Or else, he will delete the email along with other unwanted emails. That is why is so important to have a great subject line, so that your email is among the few that get opened.

A skimmer will open your email and make an effort to skim through it as fast as possible. He will take note of headings, sub-headings and call for action and accordingly make his decision. Most skimmers to dot enable images, so don't try to win them over with fancy graphics. Outstanding and concise content usually does the trick.

A reader will study not just your email address, but also your subject line and first few sentences of your email, so he can find out exactly what the message is about. He will make an effort to read the contents between the headline and the call to action. This type of recipient also likes to click links and images within the email.

If you have been satisfying the cravings for just HTML readers, then you better think twice. Many people are now using portable devices for checking emails, so it makes sense to have a HTML as well as text version of your email message.

Those readers who use PDAs may or may not get the HTML version of your message correctly, as displays vary from brand to brand and model to model. Although you cannot satisfy every single mobile reader, you should make an effort to draft and craft an interesting message so that this reader will be forced to later re-open your email on his computer.

A searcher usually stumbles over something interesting and then saves it to read it later. That is why your email message should have an excellent subject line along with your email address, so that the searcher can retrieve your email without any problems.

Finally, the desk reader forms the major part of your audience. He is quite likely to act after reading your email. That's why it is important that your message has a clear and eye-catching subject line, along with a catchy heading and call for action.

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