Embedding Graphics Within an Email Message
One of the best techniques to make a message look more appealing from a professional point of view is to add your company’s or organizations’ logo.
Go to “Insert” -> “Pictures” (Illustrations) -> This Device -> And browse to the location your logo is saved and select it.
Make sure that the dimensions and placement of the logo is appropriate and fits within the entire formatting of emails. There are lot of options to manipulate an embedded picture or graphical element of any sort.
- Manually drag the picture from its corners to adjust the size
- If you drag it from the corner, Outlook maintains the images’ proportions and only changes the size
- Dragging from right/left or bottom/top makes the image disproportion and the original dimensions ratio is changed, which can be helpful if you think the image has a weird width or height.
- Right click and select how you want to wrap the text around the image. This is really crucial and make a big difference in making the message look symmetrical and neat.
- Right click the picture and click “Format Picture” to bring up all sorts of various options to format the picture, such as:
- Add shadow, glow, reflection, rotation, etc.
- Fill the picture or add an outer line/border
- Adjust sharpness, brightness, saturation, more.
- Add an alternate text (which is helpful to recipients who cannot see the picture)
- Select the picture once it is inserted and then go to ‘Format’ tab on the ribbon. Here too you have myriads of artistic control on how you want to make it look like. Most of the settings here are repeated; they have been discussed above.
Other than your logo, you can also add graphs, icons, symbols, and many other graphical details to your email messages. Making an email look more professional with the help of images can backfire if you overdo it. So, keep it neat and use the graphics in a smart way. It takes a bit of a trial and practice and also depends on the type of audience of your emails to perfect this.
Some More Generic Suggestions and What to Avoid!
- Don’t overdo anything
- Keep the width of an email limited (like commonly those of web pages)
- Increase the font of a headline at the top of an email message
- Add sub-headlines if possible
- Add plenty of whitespace. Don’t fill the email with text.
- Keep enough space between lines and paragraphs.
- Only use two or three different colors for font, just for contrasting the important with the not-so-important.
- Only add message related images and take care of the context. Out of context images can be distracting to the readers and not professional
- Keep the email message readable from left-to-right as that is the most common way of reading online. Center oriented or from right-to-left alignment are confusing.
As a tip for the beginners, keeping it simple is always the best, until you get more trained with it. And always keep the users in mind who are meant to read your email. Students and professors, IT experts and computer beginners, kids and adults – everyone has a different preference and different things appeal to them.
Both text formatting using HTML and adding images is not a binary thing for the goal of making an email look more professional. Images or not, richly formatted text or not – neither one condition can magically do the job for you. So, give it a go and see what you come up.