Undoubtedly your email design or email design services used will have a substantial impact on campaign performance. In the long run, it will affect the deliverability rate, conversion rate, and ROI (return on investment). Therefore, it’s crucial to design optimized, brand–consistent, and responsive emails that will provide value, attract and engage readers. In addition, the email design services you use should be consistent with your general marketing strategy and aligned with your business goal.
Email design entails three key components: copy, design, and code. Every detail is essential. Even small mistakes can lead to a high unsubscription rate, spam reports, and abuse reports. Hence, be very thoughtful, plan out in advance, and continuously run A/B testings to achieve maximum results over time.
This blog post covers the general principles you should consider and the tools you need to design high–performing email campaigns.
Build Up On–brand Emails
Create and deliver branded emails. Email recipients should know what to expect from your company, and when they open the campaign, they should be able to identify your brand within seconds. If you craft different email designs each time, it may confuse your subscribers and eventually lead to a high unsubscription rate.
To create emails with a strong brand identity, follow these steps:
- Write in a specific tone of voice that complements your content marketing strategy, company vision, and mission. If your brand stands for love, care, or providing value, show it in emails
- Use the same color pallets, fonts, and graphics defined by your brand guidelines
- In the footer, add links to your social media accounts
- Include the company logo with a link to your website
Mobile Responsive Email Designs
On average, 63% of recipients check their emails with a mobile device, which means you need to check that the design is responsive and easy to load.
- Insert straightforward to click “call to action” buttons
- Don’t put several clickable elements next to each other
- Write Alt text for pictures, so even if the picture will not load, it will have descriptive text
- Make sure your images are in the correct size: not big, not too small
- The template has optimized code, and it’s mobile-friendly
Suppose you plan to use default templates available for free on your ESP (email service provider). In that case, it will be, by default, optimized for all devices. The risk is more when purchasing HTML code or inserting a template from a third-party service provider. If an email design comes from a third party, you can also use one of several websites specializing in affordable cross-device email testing.
Make Sure Your Email Design Services are Legally Compliant
Before you send the campaigns, check that the emails are all good from a legal perspective. There are two important laws you need to consider: CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
According to CAN-SPAM regulations, emails should have a footer that includes information about the company’s address and a visible/accessible way to unsubscribe from the email list. GDPR has a more extended set of rules and requirements that you can get familiar with here.
Content Optimizer Analysis
Mailchimp has introduced a new feature, which helps to evaluate the level of content optimization. You can access the score for each campaign by checking out the “Content Optimizer.”
It includes the following indicators: Skimmability, Text & Visuals, Links & CTAs, Typography.
Even if you are not using Mailchimp, consider these four main aspects and make sure you create great experiences for your readers.
Nail Your Email Copy
Every time put thought into creating compelling and helpful email copy. Then, showcase your brand’s value to the email recipients and give them a “reason” to return to you every time.
Subject line
If you and your team have spent hours creating EPIC email content, and now you want people to read it, then you’re going to need killer subject lines. An attractive subject line will result in a higher open rate, so you will want to follow the guide below.
- Make sure to keep it short. Short email subject lines, in general, perform better. But it’s not enough.
- Pick the right words! Include some of these phrases: “shhh…”, “act now,” “you deserve this,” or “don’t miss out” to create a sense of urgency.
- Use merge tags to personalize the subject lines. For example, on Mailchimp, you can write *|FNAME|* in the subject line field to insert the contact’s first name.
Preview text
The preview text helps email recipients to decide whether or not the email is worth opening.
In the preview text, give your subscribers an idea of the email’s about and a reason to open it. If it’s exciting and attractive for them, they’ll probably decide to open. Here as well, remember to keep the text concise.
Body text
Some of the general best practices are:
- To get people to take action, use actionable language
- Establish relevancy and relationships by eliminating questions or concerns the reader might have
- Personalize and write more “You” instead of “we” or “our company.”
- Focus on benefits over features
- Concentrate on a singular goal with each email
Call to actions
Don’t use a generic call-to-action button like “Buy now” or “Click here.” Instead, get creative and write a descriptive CTA, for example, “Get Your Offer Now!
Choose The Right Email Design Templates
When it comes to crafting the design and putting together all the elements, you can go with simple prebuilt templates provided by the email service provider or get customized templates. If you want something very creative, easily customizable, and you don’t have any idea about coding, well, you don’t need to worry about it all. You can hire an expert or use third-party solutions/tools.
An example website that you can use is beefree.io. There you can access 600+ free templates. But be careful! Although it has a free trial for 15 days, if you push the design to your sending platform after the free trial ends, the campaign will not load pictures, and you may lose some subscribers because of technical issues. Hence, instead of pushing the template to your sending system, export the files and import them.
Conduct A/B Email Design Testing
If your email list is big enough and you have 1,000+ contacts, organize A/B testings. Send one campaign option to a subset of your subscribers and a different variation to another subset of subscribers. The goal of A/B testings is to identify which option of the campaign gets the best results. The testings can entail different factors: CTA, Date/Time, Design, Subject line, etc.
Depending on what you want to improve in your email design, the perspective, KPIs, and tactics will change over time. Therefore, if you’re going to improve the open rate, you will want to test out variations of subject lines. For example, you can try to test subject lines with vs. without emojis.
Get help from our email marketing professionals.
The email design process can get complicated if you are new to it and don’t access the right tools or information. Reach out to our email marketing team for help. We provide email design services for businesses of all sizes for successful email marketing campaigns. As a result, you will get high-quality email marketing services and lower your overall marketing budget.
