The funny thing about technology is regardless of how it progresses to advancement on a daily basis, pushing its way to the top, it still becomes difficult to let go of the basics that we have made ourselves used to over the time. Similarly, even though it seems so outdated to use in today’s day, the email facility still seems to be of great use, be it for professional use or for regular use. Although, when marketing emails come to our mind, we think an HTML email is our top preference than plain text.
Designing an email requires no extra superhero skills; just one shot is all it takes! It should be all about conveying your message in the simplest way knocking off all the tricks in the book. Judging by the amount of emails one tends to receive regularly that it is not necessary one must give enough time to go through your entire email no matter how interesting it might get in the future.
If the starting paragraph is not interesting enough to grasp one’s attention, you may end up losing a possible reader and end up wasting their time massively. Hence, the only most important point to keep in mind whilst designing your email is that you have a fraction of a second to catch their eye in the first glance.
Start-up
First thoughts to come at the initial stages of designing your email are like; how many colors should I use? Wait, what fonts would go well? Should I use images to relate to this? Would it look informal? Should there actually be an image included in every email? There are so many thoughts that come to our mind while designing the perfect email that we often overlook the important details for the minors. Allow me to help guide you through that rough patch into La-La land, where everything is perfect!
This Design is Giving Me a Headache
Point of advice; run as fast as you can to escape this line, for it shall doom you for good. The fact that it is not always possible or even necessary to nail things on the dot at the identical point in every email client all the way down to the very last pixel. Any design of this sort just gets on the viewers nerves. You may be a perfectionist, but your design would touch the height of perfection if only it would ease a headache instead of increasing the severity.
Any design that appears to have at least some space to breathe is worth keeping an eye out for in general. However, you still might want to refrain from being super meticulous and add all the tiny details that could come off as unnecessary or they will look plain out of place if they are missing on a single pixel.
Let’s Optimize, Shall We Now
Technology these days has made its way up to the top of the line, being a part of your daily activities, carrying a higher importance than what we ever thought. Due to its significance being so great in our life, everything we do need to ensure everyone that his or her device has full optimization.
Your email should have fully integrated to operated just about anywhere and not become a loss for you whatsoever.
Say it all With a More Responsive Design!
A responsive design is likely to pull off the practical look for most of your emails than layouts that simply resize. The reason behind this being; on a tiny screen the email will obviously shrink down and eventually become nearly impossible to read, hence driving away a potential reader.
Your email needs a design that is extremely mobile-friendly, which has a strong layout suitable to adjust itself to any size screen without going through any sort of hassle.
The top things to include your layout:
- Large fonts to make it readable
- All clickable areas should have a tap-friendly response
- Narrow layout – in the range of 500-600 pixels as a standard
- Lastly, there is no harm in utilizing the ‘display: none’ in order to hide away unnecessary elements on the mobile layout.
This Email, That Email, Wow So Many Purposes!
Each email has its own purpose, and each one should have a design that best serves that purpose!
- Newsletters
The most common kind of way to engage your readers is with the help of the newsletter that consists of many links with chunks of text here and there to give details on the content the links withhold. Try to avoid writing a long body of text or using just one big image or PDF for your entire newsletter as that could come off as irrelevant or very boring. Instead, you could start by choosing a color palette and stick to a color or two and not more than that, giving it a smoother look. Gradually keeping each paragraph short and snappy, prioritizing your content to push all the important topics up at the top in the spotlight.
- Notifications
This email being also called the trigger email, works relatively similar to as the emails you tend to get from Facebook, Twitter etc. These are also in the form of announcements as they might be simple notifications but they also serve a very important purpose to trigger an action on your part. Keeping these to the point as much as possible is the wiser decision.
- Transactional emails
This type of email is used when a user interacts with a website or company in some way, be it for the purpose of signing up or making a purchase of some product, or even it could pull the trigger if a user abandons something in their shopping cart without completing their purchase. Their purpose is either to provide information, supposedly an order confirmation, or to retain the customer from navigating away from the site without completing the transaction.
A Universal Tip You Will Thank Me for, Surely!
Do not hesitate to set someone free. If someone wishes to leave even after your efforts, avoid the insecurity of sharing the unsubscribe information. The more confident you are about your content and the followers/readers already hooked in deep to every post of yours, then surely, the loss is theirs if they choose to leave not yours!
In general, if someone for whatever reason wishes to unsubscribe from your newsletter and you try to retain them and keep them from doing so, then forget the idea of them going to go back to being the happy subscriber they were or could have been. That will backfire for you causing the word to get out, as it will come against you as a brand that forces them to continue processing your emails. You would not even know whether half of them have just set a filter to send your messages directly to trash. Trust me; of all things, you would not want that!
Make Clicking Obvious
At this point, you have to agree that you need as many hits as you can possibly score! The creation of these big, easily clickable and tempting buttons for your links; consider them as a necessity. What is annoying is when you are on your phone trying to click on a link but just because it is too small or does not acknowledge a click too easily, you decide moving on is much more easy than actually trying more angles.
Save Some Words for Later!
Not to put a stop to your wordy interpreting a lengthy content style of writing that many of your readers might tend to enjoy, but the point of advice here; is email marketing is not exactly an ideal location to show off your skills.
You can never be too sure of the location of your reader or the situation they are in whilst going through their emails until they stumble upon yours. It could be on the go, in between some meeting, during lunchtime, while waiting for their ride at a subway station, or as disappointing as this may sound, some may even be in the bathroom. However, again, the point is catering at such a higher perspective could come off as difficult, but not impossible.
In order to grasp your readers’ attention regardless of where or when they read it, you need to start with the cheesiest, shortest, to the point and topmost punchiest information. This will be a blessing in disguise as first assuring yourself first that this will guaranteed catch their attention long enough to move down to the more detailed and lengthier content below. By using this method of writing you are not at all forcing anyone to read it all the way down to the bottom but you are engaging them in your detail enough to keep them hooked to until they reach the last word!
Author Bio:
This contribution is made by Asad Ali. He is a professional internet marketing expert currently working for GO-Gulf Dubai, a professional web design company with offices in more than 25 countries.
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