Why Your Email Layouts Are So Important
Have you got your call-to-action button in the right place?
Designing your marketing emails is completely different to designing a website or leaflet for direct mail. Subscribers and audiences react differently to your emails than they do to any other form of content. Get your layout wrong, and your campaign could be completely disregarded.
How Is Email Design Different?
Firstly, subscribers tend to open email campaigns in three stages: envelope, content and landing page. If you fail to optimise your subject line, pre-header text or sender information, then your audience could be dissuaded from opening your email in the first place. To get people to continue reading your email, you will need to design the content so it matches any promises made in the pre-header text. Your landing page will also need to build on those promises as well.
Secondly, you could struggle with the difficulties associated with coding. There are no standards for email coding between inbox providers. As there are ever more inbox providers, there are numerous codes to consider and therefore, getting your emails to display as you intended on all inboxes can be problematic.
Finally, the growth of mobile devices has made it more challenging for businesses to produce email designs that perform well on all devices. Emails are being opened on mobile devices more often than on desktop devices, so a mobile responsive design should be a priority.
Image Implementation Matter
Another consideration is that some email inboxes will automatically block images which can make certain email designs look ugly. A design that isn’t visually appealing will not attract your audience to take the next stage of the sales path.
Another consideration is that if you contain all the content in images, this can reduce the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Also, because there is less speed on mobile devices, campaigns might have very small open rates.
Therefore, while images are important, they should also be used sparingly – when they will be most effective.
Reading Heat-Map
How we read documents on computers and mobile devices is vastly different to how we read documents on paper. While on both sets, the reader is most likely to scan the document first to pick up key points, the reader is likely to see the whole page on a paper document. In contrast, on a digital document, the reader tends to look at what is in the left column and at the top of the page the most.
The bottom section of any page is often disregarded. Another consideration is scrolling. Most readers will not scroll down on a computer to continue reading. Therefore, the majority of the information should be contained above-the-fold.
The call to action button should also be above the fold and to the left of the page to encourage more people to click through.
Top Tips For Email Design
There are many considerations for you when it comes to designing your email. Here are some top tips for you to use in your next email design:
- Ensure all links are obvious on the page.
- Be CAN-SPAM compliant with all the necessary information included in the email.
- Minimise image use and ensure they are optimised for download and quality.
- Always have the call to action and link above the fold.
- Minimise your text. Keep it to below three hundred words.
- Minimise the use of spam words (i.e. free).
- Test your emails on multiple platforms and email clients.
If you follow these design tips, your emails will be more acceptable to your audience, and you will see better results.
What design tips do you have for email? What results do you get?
Let us know in the comments below.
Tagged in: email campaigns, email design, email success, email templates