Human beings are visual creatures. We are hard-wired to respond better to information when it is represented using visual media than plain text. Good content is certainly worth its weight in gold, but when it is accompanied by mediocre design, it doesn’t leave even half of the impact it was destined to. The same holds true in the realm of email marketing. No matter how many hours you spend poring over your email subject lines, copy, and CTA phrases, you’ll never get the desired results unless you dial up your design game as well.
Simply put, the success of your email campaigns rests heavily on your design. In today’s article, we explore the underlying reasons behind the same.
How Email Design Contributes to Success
Adds Visual Appeal of Your Emails
Emails with visual elements are any day aesthetically more pleasing than those composed using plain text. As a result, good email design paves the path for increased engagement. People process visual information 60,000 times faster than text and find it easier to remember too. Therefore, the simple act of adding a hero image to your email places you in a much better position to captivate your readers’ imagination. Design allows you to implement a visual hierarchy in your emails, making it much easier for your recipients to spot the information they’re looking for.
Take a look at these email examples that have rather bewitching hero images.
Makes Your Campaigns More Impactful
At the end of 2018, the total number of mobile users stood at a whopping 2.2 billion. In the years to come, this number will only swell. That means your designs should not just be visually attractive but also responsive. To maximize the impact of your email campaigns, you need to make sure that they render successfully across all kinds of devices. Responsive email design coaxes greater interaction and engagement out of your readers, leading to higher conversions in the process.
Trackable Performance Metrics
Tracking your performance metrics is essential for optimizing or improving your email campaigns. If you have no idea how your subscribers respond to your emails, you’ll never be able to work on the requisite amendments. Sending plain text emails (without the assistance of email marketing software) will keep you from tracking essential metrics, such as open rates, thereby keeping you in the dark regarding the performance of your campaigns. However, when you use HTML emails alongside an automation software, you can build pivotal metrics into your campaigns so that you can take note of them and fine-tune accordingly.
Some key metrics that you should be tracking are open rates, list growth, conversions, clicks, email sharing and forwarding, and subscriber engagement. Before you define your email metrics, however, ensure that you have first factored in the overall goal of your campaign. This will help you match your email metrics to your goals, ensuring you’re hitting your marks.
Things To Keep in Mind While Designing Your Emails
Design is a very subjective field. What works for one might not necessarily get the ball rolling for the other. That said, there are certain standard practices that do hold true for all. Let’s take a look at them.
Keep Your Logo At The Top
For your customers, your logo is synonymous with your identity. It only makes sense, thus, that you’d want to place it at the top of your emails. That way, whenever they open the email, they instantly know who they are engaging with. To ensure consistency, you can create a separate version of your logo that is meant specifically for use in emails. You don’t have to do anything extra; just work on its dimensions and formatting. It is considered a good practice to have separate versions for each of your digital assets.
Take a look at this example to understand how you should go about logo placement in your emails.
Use High-Quality Images In Your Email
While images obviously enhance the appeal of your email, if you’re clumsy with their curation, it can have quite the reverse effect. It doesn’t matter if you’re using stock or real images; just make sure that the images are of extremely high quality. Additionally, do not include any images that have no direct relation with your brand. The objective of using images in the first place is to strengthen your messaging. Using irrelevant images will simply throw off your customers.
Here’s how the best in the business go about including images in their emails.
Be Sensible With Your Color Schemes
People associate different emotions with different colors, which makes them a great tool of subliminal communication. Hence, picking the right color scheme can do wonders for your brand. If you already have an established brand book for your business, we’d advise you to stick with that for your emails as well. If you don’t, then pick a scheme that you think aligns best with your business. Monochrome, pastel colors, moody hues- there’s a lot for you to choose from. Just ensure that the end product is not visually jarring.
Take a look at these examples that are nothing short of sheer visual harmony.
Make Sure Your Fonts are Consistent
It’s okay if you have one primary and one secondary font for your emails, but anything more than that, and you’ll be standing trial in front of the design jury. Consistent typography is pleasing to the eyes and elevates the overall visual aesthetic of your emails.
Looking for some inspiration? These examples should help.
Wrapping It Up
Ensuring that your email design is top-notch goes a long way towards sealing the success of your campaigns. But design trends keep changing all the time, and what ruled the charts last year may not grab eyeballs this year. Curious to find out what email trends will be in vogue in 2022? Check out this Infographic from Email Uplers to find out!
Source: 6 Email Design Trends for 2022
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.