How to generate better responses through your email designs.
Email marketing campaigns typically yield high ROIs only if the campaign is properly conducted. It’s critical that your designs don’t get filtered into spam or bulk mail, but rather end up front and center in front of your target readers.
While a great deal of people have their own perceptions about what will and will not work, here are 10 tips that have been proven to boost response rates that every web designer needs to know.
1. Make your email readable.
Our average attention span is now approximately 8 seconds, which doesn’t give you a lot of time to get your point across. Make your email easy to read by avoiding large paragraphs or heavy use of text. Simple sentence structures and easy to read fonts will take you very far in your email marketing campaign. You need to get your point across quickly before the recipient becomes bored and moves on.
2. Use a nice header.
In email marketing, the header is the first section that people see. It needs to be an attention-grabber, without being flashy or over the top. Make sure that the colors you choose contrast with your logo and have enough information in the header without allowing it to be too packed with content. The point of the header is to grab the attention of your reader so that they become interested in reading the rest of the email.
3. Use simple colors.
Email marketing is all about attracting people to your website in order to gain more business. People are attracted to color, but too much color overwhelms the senses. It is highly recommended that you use the colors that are already within your logo to dictate the colors used in the entire email. Restricting the amount of color in an email will enable it to be visually appealing, rather than a shock to the senses. Two to three colors is the maximum you be using.
4. Avoid crazy fonts.
There are literally thousands of fonts available to use within your email, with more and more being created every day. When designing an email, the use of wildly different fonts will make your email stand out from others, but it also has a greater risk of turning potential clients off. All fonts used need to be completely legible and sticking to one or two fonts will gain more attention than changing the font up for each individual element.
5. Section off content.
An email newsletter does not need to read like a book. Use text boxes to add a degree of separation within your content. The sectioned off design creates interest without the page becoming too cluttered. You want to pique the interest of the customer to send them to your website without giving away all the information, so the use of text boxes will allow you to cover the highlights without overwhelming the reader.
6. Nest your tables.
When thinking about your email design, it is important to get a professional web designer on your team who understands that people will be viewing emails with differently sized screens on tablets and many other devices. Traditionally, orientation of objects has relied heavily upon “div” elements and the standard orientation buttons of the software. In today’s world, it is not efficient to use such methods, as the objects are apt to relocate themselves haphazardly on the page (which of course would take away from the aesthetics of the design). One solution to this is to nest your tables to ensure that your objects and data are in a fixed position regardless of the screen resolution or the orientation of the device being used.
7. Be mindful of the preview pane.
The recipients of an email likely get hundreds of emails in a day, and it is estimated that 70% of email recipients use the preview pane in order to work through emails more efficiently. When designing your email, it is important to understand the use of the preview pane and plan accordingly. You want to test your design in order to make sure that your logo is visible within the preview pane. In addition to your logo, you want to maintain vital information within the preview space that will grab the attention of your prospective clients and entice them to read further.
8. Use high-quality, relevant photos.
Photos within an email are usually attention grabbing, but you need to ensure that the photos presented convey an important point about your message. Providing irrelevant images can confuse someone reading the email and use up space without providing value. Be sure to crop images to ensure that the main point of the picture is easily seen, rather than a lot of background information within the photo making your entire email appear cluttered and unorganized. Not to mention, readers these days dislike stock photos, so use interesting, eye-catching, and authentic photography instead. As always, when working with images through email, make sure that all pictures have high DPI and are of high quality. With the images being stretched and squashed to fit all screen sizes, you never want an image to appear fuzzy or pixelated when it is blown up on a large screen.
9. Allow for whitespace.
Many email marketing campaigns fail miserably because the email is so packed with information that the reader becomes disoriented and does not know where one image or text ends and another begins. It is understandable that you want to get as much information to the user as possible, but when it comes to email marketing, more often than not less is more. Make sure there is plenty of white space to give the reader’s eyes a break from the images they see. Remember, the point is to get them interested enough to go to your website, not overwhelm them by giving them all the information within the email.
10. Do not use embedded images.
It is important to understand that every person that receives your email will not have the same settings that you originally intended for the email. Many companies make the mistake of embedding images when they design the email. The problem comes when most of the email recipients have their default settings to not show images. By not embedding images within the email, it gives the user the option of viewing the images rather than having them receive an error message and not being able to view the email at all.
Email marketing does not have to be a difficult or confusing aspect of running a business. The point of marketing in general is to get your brand name in the minds of prospective customers so that when they think of their need for a product you provide, your company’s name will always be first in their minds.
It is important to keep things simple, but you do want to have the email to have enough appeal to make the reader want to know more and therefore go to your website. Keeping your logo as the first thing the customer sees when the email is read will assist in this. You brand is your livelihood, no matter what you are selling.
