How could it be improved?

1. Choose one main area of focus for the email. List your marketing topics by importance, making the focus something which serves a really effective purpose and offers something valuable to the recipient. In this case make the competition the main event of your email – advertising it with a really eye-catching promotion to encourage traffic from the advertising email to Scottish Apartment’s Facebook, Flickr and blog pages.
2. Make advertising emails easily digestible. Prioritise information carefully and lay it out thoughtfully being aware of how your reader’s eyes travel across the page. The special offer and the book online call to action should be have the top spot, since they’re most likely to drive traffic to your site from your email.
3. Advertising copy doesn’t have to be lengthy – try not to include too much text. Give the reader a taster and then guide them through to the site to find out more. This will also dramatically reduce the length of the eshot and the need to scroll through your email.
4. Advertising links are handy but make sure they are clear. When you scan through an email, the links are the first thing you see because they stand out – so it’s important to make sure they can stand alone as useful nuggets of information and are effective calls to action. ‘Click here’ is particularly ineffectual as it doesn’t tell you where or what you’re clicking to – or why. Whereas ‘book now’ or ‘secure online booking service’ tells you a bit more.
5. Make sure there’s a bit of ‘white space’ in your design. If text and titles are all bunched up together an advertising email can look busy and impenetrable.
6. Give readers the info they need at a glance by including clear headings that describe each section of your advertising email. They don’t need to be catchy or clever. But they do need to be informative.
7. Choose one (or at most two) main images that really serve a purpose and complement the copy and key focus of your advertising email. Here, the competition image is both functional – because it provides information – and interesting, because it’s unusual.
8. The internet is making it increasingly easy for people to see what they want and buy it almost instantly. It’s essential to give recipients a clear, visible opportunity to book any kind of apartment. So make this a key focus of your advertising email and give an alternative method of getting in contact – such as a phone number.