When I say "old school" what I’m referring to is the fact that I still see many email creative designs with BIG images. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - some email marketers can get good results using large image-based emails. But you want to ensure you are bridging the gap between images and text. In other words, you should have a reasonable image-to-text ratio within the email.

The most important thing is to be very clear about what you are promoting to the customer and what the offer is. Email readers today almost always hit the “spam” button if:

a) the offer is not something they are interested in, or
b) they are getting too much mail from you.

If you’re worried about your creative and not sure if the ISPs will accept your mail, then I suggest you look into using a deliverability tool such as Lyris’ EmailAdvisor. For instance, my clients use EmailAdvisor to see if their content is being flagged as spam. Furthermore, knowing whether or not your HTML creative is of good quality should be standard practice. The Content Analyzer portion of EmailAdvisor can also be a great tool to tweak your message prior to sending to ensure you make it into the inbox.

When it comes to email content the phrase, “less is more”, definitely seems to work for most online marketers. But to get past the ISPs, it is also good practice to use a deliverability tool to thoroughly review your email design and content prior to sending to ensure inbox placement.

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