Did you know that we receive, on average, between 20 and 80 emails a day? If your inbox is full of everything from birthday invitations and meeting invitations to newsletters and offers emails, then you are far from the only one. But. this is where email design comes into play.
Email marketing has become an increasingly popular marketing channel, and with the enormous potential of email marketing comes fierce competition.
More than 70% of all businesses use newsletters to communicate with their customers. That’s why it’s never been more important that your emails stand out from the crowd.
On this page, you can find out why email design is important for your marketing, and you will also get five good tips for a good email design.
What is email design?
Imagine you have to buy a book. Do you go for a book with a boring and perhaps a little bland expression, or do you grab the book that really sets the mood?
Probably the last one. A good cover for a book is thus decisive for whether it reaches its readers. It is the same with email design that aims to capture the recipient’s interest.
When you use email marketing, it is essential that your recipient actually opens your email. Therefore, pay close attention to your email marketing, and generally make sure that the subject lines of your emails are right in the cupboard. The subject line is what the recipient sees when they open the email.
A good subject line can make the recipient open your email, so it is important that your email design plays a. In this way, you can increase the chances that the person will perform an action by, for example, buying a product, using an offer code, contacting your company, or something completely fourth or fifth.
Design can be difficult because while I may think something is nice, my neighbor may think it’s absolutely terrible – and vice versa. Tastes are different, so it is important to think carefully before embarking on an email design.
Tips for a good email design
When establishing an email design, there are several tips. In the end, your creativity is your only constraint. If you want your design to be successful, however, you can benefit from the following good tips:
1. Create an eye-catcher in your header
Your recipient must be able to decode who is the sender of the email quickly – therefore, it is important that you place your logo as one of the first things.
After this, your message must be in focus with, for example, a graphic as the email’s header. Only your creativity sets the limits, and you can use anything from clean environmental images to a GIF.
2. Design with purpose
Customers open emails to find specific information. For example, it could be “Your order is on its way”, “Your password has been restored”, or “Here is your discount”. It is, therefore, important that there is a clear purpose for the design. Cut to the chase and make it easy for the customer to find the information quickly.
3. Make your text easy to read
When you insert your text, you must make sure that it appears easy to read for the recipient. You do this by choosing the right text size and a simple and easy-to-read style.
Make sure you have line spacing between the lines and plenty of air on the sides. The air around the elements gives your recipient a better overview. If there are parts of the text you want to emphasize, headings are a great tool – play with the size, spacing, formatting, and color.
4. White space
Don’t be afraid to use a lot of white space in your email design. White space is the space around different design elements. White space is far from wasted space. On the contrary, it becomes easier to decode the message in your email. So remember: Less is more.
5. Optimize your CTAs
If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your CTAs, they should be designed as actual buttons. It might sound impractical, but it makes a big difference to your design experience if the CTAs do not just link. Make the buttons large enough on the mobile so that you can easily click with a thumb.
6. Mobile-friendly design
Make sure your email design looks good on all devices and with all email clients. To put it in good Jutland: It just looks boring if some of the design is compressed.
7. Follow the standard and help your recipient
There are some elements that you cannot avoid having to implement in your design. Your contact information and a link where your recipient can unsubscribe are a must.
The standard is to place the information in your email’s footer, and most of your recipients will also expect to find it there. By keeping that location, you increase the usability of your design and help your recipient. It will also be an obvious location for your other links.
8. Test and adapt your layout
When you are on target with the content, the next step to a beautiful and converting email is testing the design.
But before then, go through all the elements on your template and ensure that you have inserted relevant links and alt tags (a text that appears in the event that the element does not load) on all of your elements.
Finally, it would be best if you run your emails through a test program that tests whether your emails end up in the spam filter of the recipients and whether your layout works on mobile and desktop devices.
The most important point is that you have adapted your layout for viewing on mobile, as most of your recipients open their emails from there.
Therefore, the rule of “mobile first” must be written behind the ear:
The design must first and foremost work on mobile. Then desktop.
But of course, some will view your email via desktop, and it is possible to create a design that works on both devices. And by designing for both, you ensure that your design is appealing and user-friendly regardless of which device your recipient opens your email from.
Email design is of great importance to your email marketing
Building a good email signature design can be a time-consuming pleasure, so why even spend time on it? Yes, because visual content gives you a unique opportunity to capture your target audience.
Every day we are exposed to tons of content, and it goes without saying that we can’t take it all in. Something catches our eye, and others we scroll straight past. For example, we only remember 10-20% of what we read. Conversely, we remember as much as 65% of what we see.
Email design can therefore help ensure that your brand and message are actually implemented in the customers’ memory – and not just lost.
It is good to use visual aids in your emails if you want people to respond to your messages. Visual content is processed in the same place in the brain as our emotions, which automatically creates faster and stronger reactions in contrast to the text.
When you need to find out whether your email marketing is performing, you can look at the open rate, click rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, and much more. Learn when your email marketing is successful and get more out of your email efforts.
Conclusion
It’s not expensive when it comes to tips and tricks to succeed with your email design. If you want to be completely on target with your email design, there is good reason to consider the following:
· Make it easy for the reader to unsubscribe.
There is nothing more annoying than emails that are difficult to unsubscribe from. If the recipient does not want to receive your emails, then your efforts are really worth nothing. Therefore, it is important to consider in the design that it must be easy to get the option to unsubscribe.
· Use personalization.
The recipient would like to have the feeling that mail is now arriving that has been sent especially to him or her. Therefore, make sure to make the design and content as personal as possible by, for example, starting with “Hello (name).”
