Scottish Apartment

Scottish Apartment is Edinburgh's largest serviced apartment provider. Their regular advertising emails promote their services to past, present and future guests, guiding customers to different areas of their website. Andrew Seel looks at how to improve the general layout and design, maximising click-through rates from their email list, marketing their services effectively and increasing those all-important bookings.

Current Design

1. A common problem with advertising emails that are built using 'off-the-shelf' templates, like this one, is that they don't always allow you to tailor your content in the most appealing or efficient way. The information in this advertising email could be structured better - currently it's not clear what the central message is. To give the email more focus the content needs to be prioritised and presented more digestibly.
2. The template has also forced Scottish Apartment to use a very linear format, which makes the newsletter seem lengthier than it is. You could actually include all the information in this advertising email in a much smaller space.
3. Overall there is a bit too much text content. Successful email list marketing doesn't force recipients to scroll in order to find the information they're looking for.
4. The presence of a link doesn't necessarily guarantee a click and, while there are lots of links through to the website, the calls to action could be more effective at advertising. The email isn't inviting the reader to 'find out more' or 'book now', for example.
5. Another common problem with working off an email list marketing template like this is that after multiple uses the html can end up in a bit of a mess. You can see the hallmarks of this in discrepancies within the layout of the advertising email. For example, there are no margins around the text headers and some of the spacing is not as uniform as it could be. The html needs to be clean and tidy or advertising emails can fall foul of spam filters.
6. While it's good that a summary has been included at the top of the e-shot, it could be clearer. Clever headings work well in magazines but tend to be confusing in advertising emails, where the main aim is to get information across fast and efficiently.
7. There are a few too many images here and they take up too much room. Images draw the reader's eye and usually denote where the focus should be. However, with so many here, the email suffers from a lack of focus. What's more, images can present issues because they can be hard to download for some recipients and spam filters are suspicious of them. So avoid including too many.
8. The Book Online promotion is a little confusing because it refers to only the Castle Apartments. The advertising email makes it seem as if you can only book one type of apartment online, which is misleading.