Amber Cleave, our Customer Retention Specialist, recently forwarded me a great article by Chad White, who writes for Smith-Harmon an email marketing agency for larger businesses. He wrote a really interesting article where he talked about how Baby Boomers are critical to marketers since they control over 80% of personal financial assets and more than 50% of discretionary spending power. Wow.

Chad is seeking to convince marketers to increase the point size of their fonts by 1 point this year, in 2015 and in 2020 to make it easier for the growing Boomer population to read and take advantage of their offers. He also offers suggestions like avoiding:

1. Reverse type, where there’s white/light text on black/dark background
2. Low-contrast text, where text and background colors are very close in value to each other
3. Text over background images with lots of bright and dark areas
4. Full caps, which is not only considered shouting, but is harder to read than lower case

We’ve written about some of these things before when it comes to designing your email for deliverability, but Chad hits the nail on the head with these design issues for readability. We’ve talked about doing this internally on our own website and now we’ll be taking these ideas into account for our email marketing.

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