To improve the effectiveness of your emails it is important to not overwhelm users with choice and to not include any content with duplicate links. This concise approach to email design will not only improve the results of your campaigns but also reduce the time it takes to create them. Keep things simple People can easily be paralysed by choice. It’s easy to be quickly overwhelmed with possible options. The process of incrementally introducing information or options has been something the web has done well for decades now. You don’t need to show every colour shoe in your email. Sell some shoes first, get the person to visit your store and only then should concise email design slowly, incrementally offer…
Design
Responsive design options for navigation in emails
Making the navigation responsive in mobile emails is a key area in improving usability by offering functional links to a message and guiding recipients to your site, even if they aren’t receptive to the particular message or offer in the message itself. Today, on average, half of all emails are opened on a mobile device so it’s critical to ensure they are easy to read and interact with whichever device they are being viewed on. Thanks to responsive email techniques you can choose different email design patterns when it comes to navigation. Reduce the number of items When you look at the mobile version of an email, the first tactic that comes to mind is to reduce the number of…
Cutting edge email design
I was recently a keynote speaker at a European email summit in Amsterdam and was asked to talk about “Cutting edge email design”. Whilst researching emails for this event it struck me that one man’s junk can be another man’s treasure. The reason I say this is because it depends on your role or skill set as to what you see as cutting edge email design. I have selected three of the emails I used in the presentation to highlight some design techniques but also to show how important it is to know your audience and to design for them, not you. The first email we will look at is a Dogs Trust email designed to look great whether images…
Email Analysis: Homebase
Welcome to the second instalment of my email analysis series! For this weeks review, I’ve picked out a Homebase email from my inbox. To view the full email click here. First Impressions My first impressions of this email were very good. I enjoy the Homebase colour scheme, the contrast of the orange and green works well for me. The email has a lot of plain text, rather than text as images and features a variety of different layout elements. I’m also glad to report it is optimised for mobile devices! Layer by Layer Now lets break the email down section-by-section. Header The header follows the usual pattern of having a View in browser link in the top right. It then…
How to design an email using Sketch
Sketch by Bohemian Coding has been gaining popularity steadily since its release and is now on its third iteration. Many very large and well know companies such as facebook, Google, Dropbox and Twitter all have designers which use Sketch now. Sketch is a great graphics app for a number of key reasons. Firstly it is a vector graphics app so all graphics are scalable, and icons and designs stay pin sharp no matter the size. Sketch makes use of objects, slightly similar to the concept of smart objects in Photoshop but essentially an icon can be made up of multiple fully editable components. Sketch also has an inspector which makes adjusting layer styles and effects very quick and easy. The…
Email design: How to improve customer engagement
Why is a good email design important? A well-designed newsletter is key to your email marketing success. A high-quality design can highlight your calls to action, prioritise your content and ensure you are instantly recognised in the inbox. Designing for email however is quite different to designing for the web, print or any other medium. Emails aren’t like complex websites or graphic heavy posters; they should be nicely designed but somewhat basic. This will make it easy for your subscribers to open, engage and click. Here are five essential tips to making sure your email campaigns are a success. Stay on-brand Most people, before they engage with an email, they want to see who it’s from. They will see…
Necessary elements of a great email design.
You can usually tell if an email has been well designed as it lands in your inbox. If the designer and coder has done their job well you will immediately be aware of a few things. The email is legible without the use of images. The text content is actual text and not hidden within an image. This is good for a number of reasons but mainly it allows the user to engage with the email immediately. The email will also employ colour in the spaces where images should be. This type of image-off optimisation encourages readers to enable images, see the email in all of its glory and continue reading. If the email is well designed the alt text…
Tips for designing great smartphone emails.
Mobile opens are on the rise, and there’s no indication of the trend slowing down. If you read your emails regularly using a smart phone or tablet, you probably know that it’s an experience that can swing from awesome to awful. While an email newsletter can look great in the inbox, when squeezed onto a small screen, it can become absolutely unusable, with small fonts, narrow columns and broken layouts being common issues. We’ve talked before about how important mobile has become to email marketers and the need to optimize campaigns for mobile audiences. So, the question is, how do you make emails more attractive on smartphones? Here are a few quick tips. Make emails Responsive Responsive emails have…