How Good Email Design Boosts Your Campaign’s Effectiveness
While content is certainly important for your email marketing, it’s important you not overlook the importance of good design. This is because design is essential to the success of your campaign in a number of ways. First, good design accommodates ensures your email marketing remains legible no matter the type of device they’re using. Responsive design, for example, is an email marketing technique that will adapt your email’s design to different screen sizes.
Why is this so important to email marketing success? Because most email is opened on mobile devices, not desktop computers. Chances are, an email that looks good on a desktop could be a garbled mess on a smartphone. When integrating mobile into your email marketing strategy, responsive design is a good tactic. But it’s not just about the structure and layout when it comes to mobile email marketing: an image-heavy email marketing design can also be tough for users to load depending on their access to data.
In addition to accommodating users on different devices, email design is also important for encouraging users to engage and ensuring it doesn’t fall prey to spam filters. Both of these points will improve the ROI of your email marketing strategy by encouraging open rates and CTR’s.
How Email Design Relates to ROI
An engaging email design encourages draws users’ eyes and can encourage them to click through—for example, through animated assets or dynamic, interactive content. For example, interactive content that provides a sense of fun and whimsey lets your users really engage with—not just passively read—your email marketing. Consider some ways you can provide some deals to subscribers.
While you could simply segment your list with a different deal for each, there are more fun, interactive ways to encourage readers to click though. For example, you could have an image of a box of fortune cookies, asking users to “open” one for a sales-themed fortune. Tapping a cookie would then send the user through to your web store, where you can also provide some personalized product recommendations to seal the deal once they’ve received their discount.
Including user-generated content is another way to strike a real connection with your readers. UGC might be a better fit for some types of brands than others; clothing and food brands in particular can go far with UGC because they align with industries that thrive on photo sharing: everyone loves to snap a selfie in a good outfit or a photo of a particularly delicious-looking dish. Including UGC in your email design can not only inspire purchasing decisions in a relatable way, but also encourage readers to share and interact on social media.
How Bad Email Design Sends Your Mail to the Spam Folder
There are several ways that email design can trigger spam filters. Whether your email marketing is labeled spam can be either algorithmic (based on automatic filters that label without human input) or from readers. As many readers mark a message as spam, it will trach filters to treat messages from the sender as spam.
Vocabulary also plays a big role in whether your email marketing is marked as spam. Don’t rely on “salesy” words—anything related to cost, gambling, or other terms like “act now,” “order now” or mention of credit cards.
Finally, keep email under 30kb and don’t use attachments with email marketing. These tips will reduce the likelihood that your messages will reach readers and result in better email marketing success. Many of the features detailed here—like responsive design, interactive content, and design tools—can be found in a good email marketing platform, making it easy for marketers to design a stellar and engaging email marketing campaigns.