Email Design
Aesthetically and financially effective emails require a thorough understanding of your brand and its values. Our email specialists and creative team work to realise this, building on your branding and developing elements and templates that strongly reflect your product, in accordance with best practices for design and optimisation.
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 optimised with versions for desktop and mobile viewing. We’re almost at the tipping point in 2020, where mobile opens actually surpass desktop. According to HubSpot, 46% of all email opens now occur on mobile devices, making it increasingly important to consider the mobile design of your templates.
Whether you have some, all, or none of these in place already, our audit process will assist you in identifying areas for improvement. While services, products and brands hugely vary in terms of messaging, there are some underlying basics that it is essential to use and get right.
Strong Subjects 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 Co’. 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 reminder of your brand, best placed at the top or header of your email, linking back to your site
Header image banner - These increase visual impact of your emails, and should be changed up across new email campaigns and email flows. A perfect place to showcase hero product imagery relevant to your messaging
A link bar (navigation banner) - This is a place for website links, directing people to key areas of your site. A maximum of four links is optimum here for Desktop viewing. You might pull out your key product categories, contact link or blog - it all depends on your priorities
A footer with links to your social media, and the all-important unsubscribe link
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.
