Designing is about more than just the visual.
The purpose of your email is to market your company, service or product, right? (That’s why it’s called email marketing!) So why leave it up to your designers to create the email? It’s time to get your design and marketing teams collaborating – their different approaches and views are sure to leave you with not only a visually exciting newsletter, but one that’s also targeted towards your audience.
Your email newsletter design includes everything: From the imagery to the subject line; from the fold to researching your reader. It’s time to change your design strategy.
The look:
Contrary to what you might think, emails aren’t judged by their looks. Yes, looks are important – no-one wants to read a drab newsletter – but in this case, people judge by the cover: The ‘From’ and ‘Subject’ lines displayed in their inbox. Even more than a sexy body, your email needs an intriguing, inviting face to ensure your subscribers choose to ‘open’ rather than the dreaded ‘delete’.
The most important thing to remember when you do design the body (it still counts for something!), is that what you think looks pretty, fun, sophisticated, easy-to-use or exciting might not necessarily look that way to your reader. You need to be in touch with what makes them tic. It can also determine whether they just open and scan or actually read the content. Try to use images in such a way that the reader needs to scroll down a bit further…a little further…aaand right down to the end of the email.
The rule book:
We always encourage our clients to stick to industry best practices in their campaigns, but at the end of the day these practices are guidelines, not rules. Sometimes, only sometimes, it might be to your advantage to throw the old rule book out the window and try something completely new with your design. Who knows, it might convince your readers that you have the most talented design team they’ve ever had the pleasure to welcome to their inbox. Worst case scenario, you notice a drop in your readership after an email or two and go back to your original format. That’s where all those reports we supply you with come in handy.
Email marketing guru Mark Brownlow wrote this article suggesting areas where it might be time to reinvent the email design rule book – it’s well worth reading.
The target:
Wooing your subscribers is everything.
For an effective email marketing campaign, you need to know what works and interests your subscribers – and to know that, you need to research them. Yes, there are effective research methods such as questionnaires and A/B split testing, but you need to really know your s
ubscribers. That means talking to them, making direct contact and watching them. Subscribers aren’t necessarily email marketers themselves, so when you ask them questions about how they interact with your emails, they might try to be helpful with their answers, but the truth is that they don’t know what is crucial to you. So why not actually sit down and watch them read your emails to see how they engage with it? That way you'll know whether they actually clicked on that link or forwarded to a friend, or whether they were just sparing your feelings when they said they did.
The bigger picture:
Ideally, subscribers open, read - and then, they click. The aim of your emails is to spur the reader into action, and usually this involves clicking in links on your emails or visiting your website. There’s no point in a sterling email if the end destination, the landing page, doesn’t uphold the same high standards you’ve set in your newsletter. Your subscribers will only become clients or customers if they appreciated the entire experience, not just the few lines in the email.
Speaking of experiences, we’ve been going on and on about social media integration – and by now I’m sure you’ve picked up on it in other marketing and business news too. Social media is one way to expand your reader’s experience, but it takes some planning to bring that into your email. You need to think carefully about whether and how what you’re sharing is relevant to your emails. Most importantly: How you’re going to make that call to action clear in your emails? Take time to decide on things like where you’re going to place the icons and how prominently you want to reflect your social media presence in your emails.
Bit more to design than you thought? These are just a few hints and pointers to maximise the impact of your newsletters. Keep it at the back of your mind when designing your next newsletter.
Don’t forget: There might be more to think about regarding the anatomy of your newsletter, but the actual visual design doesn’t need to take more than a few minutes - with our wizard drag-and-drop editor, of course.
Why not browse through our template library for a range of free templates? From funky to sophisticated, trendy to classic, there’s something for every occasion or industry.