When you send out your IMN newsletter, what your subscribers will be receiving is an email containing your HTML Cover Page. With this in mind, there are some traps that are easy to fall into when setting up the Cover Page that may result in a quick delete by your subscribers.  In this column, we'll look at some of the most common ones and provide a few tips that can save you from them.

The Deep, Deep Logo

As an experiment, change the size of the IMN newsletter email we sent you to about half the window height that you normally view your email in.  Can you still see all of the IMN logo and masthead? Can you see any of the content underneath it?  You should be able to, but it's important to keep in mind that not all computers are updated as often as they should be. Consequently, you will most likely always have subscribers that view your email at very low resolutions, with a small window in which you hope to grab their attention, both literally and figuratively. Unfortunately, these subscribers may be unable to see anything beyond the masthead and they may end up deleting your email because they think it is spam. 

With a logo that is too wide or too deep, there’s no room for your valuable content to be viewed.   So try keeping your logo or masthead at the narrowest height possible while still making it wide enough to span the page.  This is a good way to make sure the full masthead, as well as your first few headlines and synopses, get through to the reader when they first open the message.

Information Overload

Another common pitfall is putting too much information on the Cover Page.   Many publishers think that lots of content will ensure that you catch your readers’ eye.   There are two pitfalls with this, though. First, if there's a lot of information in an email, how can you be sure they'll find it? And secondly, you may encounter a mental shutdown factor. When you place more information in front of your readers than they can handle, you run the risk that they won’t actually see any of it (think of being in junior high and opening a college physics book…)!

There are two solutions here. The obvious one is to be very judicious about the content on your Cover Page. Check the Content Popularity reports of your previous issues and see what garnered the best response. You can then place articles similar to those successes on your Cover Page and have the rest accessible through the Table of Contents and Topic Pages. This step can be hard, because all of the messages you have for your readers may be important, but they aren't doing any good lost as the 17^th article in a long line of 20 on the Cover Page.

The other solution is to make sure that the information you do have on the Cover Page is organized in such a way that it's clear and precise.  If it’s crammed in, it will look like you're just trying to squeeze as much as possible into a limited space. The featured article on the Cover Page can be placed into its own region of the layout by using the Special Content process that you can find in our Knowledge Base.  Or you could simply add a distinction by adding text or background colors.

The Tiny Blur

If the article introductions on your Cover Page are using images in the synopses, be sure they look good at the size they are displayed. Many times, the same image is used on the Article Page at full size and is used at a smaller size on the Cover Page. It's not a bad idea, but if you leave HTML to resize the file, all it will do is leave out every-so-many pixels of the image to get it down to the desired size. The result is a rectangular image with some colored dots in it that may – or may not – resemble the original image.

The best way to deal with this is to go into the layout, edit the Multiple Article element, and suppress the display of the article default image by unchecking the "Display Picture" option. This will get rid of the HTML-resized image you don't want. Next, take the original image file and, if available, use an image editing program such as Photoshop to resize a copy of the image down to something suitable for the cover. Now, take the copy of the image and place it in the article's synopsis (you can use the online HTML editor, with directions found in our Knowledge Base).   

Want to learn more from Trevor?  Here is a library of his most recent tips: