Email has become one of the most popular forms of business communication, but with so many emails flooding inboxes daily, it can be difficult to capture readers' attention. This is why it's essential to design your email with efficiency and readability in mind. By doing so, you can help your audience learn what they need to know faster, with a look that's both visually appealing and proven to be more effective.
To achieve this, it's crucial to follow a process that applies to all aspects of business and technology. This means collaborating with your team to develop frameworks, workflows, and strategies that allow creativity to flow. By doing this, you can create a design system for your communications that includes a modular framework to turn your vision into reality.
Keep in mind that each email is a step in the overall customer experience, so it's essential to design every message to fit in with all the other communications your subscribers could receive from your brand. Make the look and feel consistent, so it's easy to identify any newsletter, onboarding welcome, or password reset as your content.
In today's mobile-first world, it's crucial to ensure your email looks great on any device and every email client. Provide an elegant mobile experience from your initial welcome email to ensure you capture your subscribers' attention. Use a tool like Litmus to preview your email on multiple devices.
Adding context and interest through photography or illustration is an excellent way to appeal to your subscribers' emotions and communicate functionality. However, beware of stock photography that doesn't align directly with the message and the subscriber. Additionally, distinguish your call to action through color, placement, and text treatment to ensure readers understand the purpose of your email and can act on it quickly.
Consumers tend to scan emails for important points that pertain specifically to them. Therefore, it's essential to divide your email into bulleted text and short paragraphs for better readability. And while doing so, ensure that your messages are built for everyone in your audience, considering individuals' needs, including alt tags, readability, black text on white backgrounds, and other features that make your emails accessible to all.
Finally, it's crucial to preview and review your email before hitting send, considering every variable in the content. Test with images turned off to see what your email looks like with a weak connection, and build a checklist to catch everything as you review.
Designing your email with efficiency and readability in mind is crucial to capturing your audience's attention and delivering your message effectively. By following the tips discussed here, you can create visually appealing emails that are proven to be more effective, ensuring you get the desired engagement from your audience. For a guide to improving deliverability for email, click here.
Summit Technologies LLC can help you implement a marketing automation platform such as Marketing Cloud or Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) and provide consulting services to ensure your emails are designed for maximum impact. Contact us today.