Email Design
Aesthetically and commercially effective emails require a strong understanding of your brand and its values. Our email specialists and creative team work to bring this to life, building on your branding and developing elements and templates that clearly reflect your product, while following best practices for design and performance.
How Can We Help?
Included in our initial setup are four email templates to cover your campaigns, welcome series, abandoned cart and post-purchase flow, fully optimised for both desktop and mobile. Mobile now accounts for the majority of email opens, making it essential to prioritise responsive, mobile-first design across all templates.
Whether you have some, all, or none of these in place already, our audit process will help you identify key areas for improvement and optimisation. While services, products, and brands vary in their messaging, there are core best practices that are essential to get right.
Strong Subject Line And Preview Text
This is the first messaging your subscriber sees when your emails hit their inbox, so they need to be engaging to encourage a strong open rate. Arguably, these are more important even than content within the email, as it’s rather hard to market your products if your emails aren't opened! Keep subject lines bold, succinct, and personalised. Inboxes automatically pull in the first line of text from your email as preview text if you don’t set it - don’t let this be your header categories or privacy policy wording.
Use Dynamic Fields To Personalise Emails
Personalising your subject lines or preview texts with specific data is a surefire way to genuinely pique interest. Seeing your first name in your inbox automatically makes you more likely to click, and dynamic tags can also be used to pull in product names of items viewed or added to cart in order to create a sense of relevant urgency. Use them, but the trick is to not overdo this.
Default Sender Name
Your company name may differ from how you refer to yourself socially. Refrain from including ‘Ltd’ or other business terminology in your sender name. You want to arrive in inboxes sounding friendly and contactable as possible! You might even want to consider including a personal name too, for example ‘Lauren from Eastside’. This would prove beneficial for high end, luxury brands where consumers value significantly their personal relationship with the brand, or for small start-ups that want to communicate on a personal level.
Prepare Email Templates And Stick With Them
Your aim across all emails, regardless of content, is to present them in such a way that they are undeniably your brand. Your subscribers will quickly come to expect a certain layout, functionality and style to your communications, so it's essential to invest time and resources into getting these right. Once your elements are set, they can be saved for future campaigns. This affords you freedom and flexibility to focus on your content.
Whether we’re talking about campaigns, a welcome series or post-purchase flow, templates give structure and format to your messaging. They're a visual reminder of your brand, so don't need to be complicated, just considered. In addition to your key message, they provide:
Your logo: A visual anchor for your brand, best placed at the top of your email, typically linking back to your homepage
Header image or banner: Helps increase visual impact and should be refreshed across campaigns and flows. A strong place to showcase hero products or key messaging
A link bar (navigation): A space for key website links, directing users to important areas of your site. Keep this concise, prioritising your most important categories or pages, such as product collections, contact, or blog content
A footer: Includes links to your social media, key information, and the all-important unsubscribe link, helping to build trust and meet compliance requirements
Email Body
Use high resolution imagery: To demonstrate quality in your brand, this is incredibly important. If producing this content is outside of your capability, give our creative team a shout! From product imagery to lifestyle shoots, they can work with you to create adaptable creative content.
Minimal text: The days when subscribers were happy to receive a lengthy newsletter are gone. Most likely, they are expecting striking imagery - a picture really is worth a thousand words.
One main call to action: This is how your subscribers will engage with your message: it's the button in your email they want to click to find out more, or to buy the products you’ve just told them about. It’s important it is stylistically clear and easy to find. One key message within your email copy only needs one CTA.
Our talented team of email marketing specialists and creatives have experience creating beautiful and effective template designs that result in opens, clicks and sales. If you need help getting your email strategy in order...drop us an email and let’s start the conversation.