How can you design emails that look consistent across all campaigns and segments?

Designing consistent emails across all campaigns and segments involves several key strategies: - Brand Guidelines: Stick to brand colors, fonts, and logos. - Templates: Use reusable email templates. - Consistent Layouts: Maintain uniform design structures. - Responsive Design: Ensure emails are mobile-friendly. - Content Blocks: Implement modular content blocks for easy customization. - Testing: Regularly test across devices and email clients. - Feedback: Gather feedback and adjust as needed. These strategies ensure your emails look professional and consistent across all campaigns and segments.

The style guide for email should defined as part of your brand guide for the business. It's important to have brand consistency in all marketing material regardless of the channel. Email specific styles should include: - header and footer styles - common layouts to use for desktop and mobile - dark mode styles and any alternate colors - email safe fonts when using live text

The guide should include key elements like your brand colors, fonts, logo usage, and preferred image styles. Specify how headers, body text, and footers should look, and include examples to make it clear. Also, set rules for the tone and voice of your writing to ensure it matches your brand. Share this style guide with everyone on your team so they can follow it when creating emails. Using templates based on your style guide can also help keep your emails consistent, no matter who’s designing them or what segment they’re for.

1) Develop a consistent template, color palette, and typography. 2) Use modular design for flexibility. 3) Prioritize clear calls-to-action and mobile optimization. 4) Test, refine, and analyze to perfect your email campaigns.

Utilize snippets and universal content available in many CRM platforms. These features allow you to build layouts that won't change often like the header and footer, and define the overall design. If any styles change in the future you can swap in the new designs in one spot rather than spending hours updating all your email templates.

Templates are pre-designed email layouts that follow your brand's style, including colors, fonts, and overall design. They can be used for different types of emails, like newsletters or promotions. Modules are parts of the email, like headers, footers, or buttons, that you can reuse in any email. By using the same templates and modules, your emails will always look the same, no matter who creates them. This makes your brand look professional and helps people recognize your emails easily. Plus, it saves time because you don't have to start from scratch each time.

Definitely start with a design system that requires no graphic designer to maintain. A good system would allow any marketer to be able to source images, adapt them to the brand design and obtain all the pertinent elements to create emails, with the consistency that the design system offers. My favourite tool for that is Figma

For beginners, template designs can be very helpful. These can then be customized in terms of colors and style to match your shop or website. This approach allows you to maintain brand consistency while simplifying the process of creating effective and visually appealing emails.

Testing and optimizing is not just about optimizing for clicks (although it's an important part to optimize for). It includes testing and optimizing: - desktop and mobile - the inboxes your users use - the colors on dark mode and light mode - dynamic code to ensure it populates correctly - the links to make sure they are working It's worked well for me to create a checklist to run through these pieces before I send any campaign. It's another way to have piece of mind that the user is getting a good experience.

Our team conducted many A/B tests to improve the click-through rate. Here are the quick results: - Customized content, such as dynamic product recommendation blocks in the campaign, increases CTR by 1.67 times. - Proper descriptions of items increase CTR by 1.3 times compared to just product pictures. - Iconic designs increase CTR by 1.56 times compared to text-only descriptions. Use these types of hypotheses to increase your email performance. Start with high-level changes like those mentioned above, rather than detailed elements such as the length of descriptions or button names.

Ma phrase que j'aime bien répéter : sans test, l'email marketing n'est rien. Testez tout ce qui est testable c'est la meilleure fa?on de rassurer et d'améliorer vos résultats.

To keep your emails looking good and working well, it's important to test and optimize them. First, send test emails to yourself and your team to check how they look on different devices and email apps. Make sure everything looks right and that links work. Next, use tools to track how people interact with your emails, like how many open them and click on links. This helps you see what's working and what needs improvement. Try changing one thing at a time, like the subject line or images, and see if it gets better results. By regularly testing and tweaking your emails, you make sure they always look great and perform well, helping you connect better with your audience.

Mobile optimization is a must, as more than 55% of people open their emails on mobile. I often find emails optimized for desktop but not for mobile. My checklist before sending an email campaign: - Important information and CTA above the fold - Single-column layout - Mobile-optimized layout - CTA fits on one line (especially for mobile) - Colors contrast well (so text is visible on mobile) - Text readability - Links are working - Images are compressed so they load faster. - Alt text - Send a test campaign

It's important to remember: email design is not graphic design. Some things supersede merely making an email look good. Some examples are: - Placing a CTA button above the fold (AKA: having a button visible without needing to scroll). This is key for high click rates. - Making the layout clean, and easy to follow. Sometimes focusing too heavily on graphics can distract from the actual offer or message of your email, which is not what you want. - Having the core message/offer visible immediately. Statistically, most people won't scroll down your email, so your core message and offer needs to be clearly visible right away. You can use your design skills to help highlight this, as well as the CTA button.

The world of email marketing is constantly evolving, just like fashion trends. That's why staying on top of best practices and trends is crucial. I actively research the latest design trends and best practices—things like mobile responsiveness, accessibility guidelines, and personalization tactics. By incorporating these elements into my email design, I can create emails that are not only visually appealing but also deliver a seamless user experience for subscribers across different devices It's like keeping your wardrobe fresh and modern! By staying updated on design trends, you ensure your emails stay current and engaging for your audience

The design process varies from brand to brand. Some require copy intensive emails, others rely on visuals to do the selling. Apart from your generic “above the fold” rules. Make sure to have designs with colors that mesh well together throughout a series of campaigns, season and flow series. Old customers vs new customers can receive a different line of design so they experience the different visually. There are different layouts you can do for your products and how you showcase the products (i.e with the price available or have them wait until they access the website if your pricing differs per region).

There are a few things I'd like to mention, apart from the ones already here: - Accessibility: ALT text is a must, make emails accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, by using proper alt text for images and ensuring good color contrast. - Deliverability Checks: Go for regular checks for spam triggers and blacklists to ensure high deliverability rates. - Seasonal and Timely Content: I noticed seasonal themes and timely content make emails more relevant and engaging, and generally bring good results - Benchmarking: Include industry benchmarks in performance analysis to set realistic goals and measure success against standards.

Following best practices and staying updated with trends in email marketing ensures your campaigns are effective and relevant. Best practices include things like personalizing emails, optimizing for mobile devices, and maintaining a clean email list. Keeping up with trends, such as interactive emails or AI-driven personalization, helps you stay competitive and engage your audience in fresh, innovative ways. By combining both, you can consistently deliver emails that resonate with your audience and drive better results.

Email design is different from graphic design. UX principles and UI principles change in email marketing - it's an actual skill. Designs literally don't need to be complicated. Here are my best practices: - Image as the background in the email builder with text block on top if you want text on images - Keep it accessible - always think accessibly & user first - If you're not sure - don't do it - Just because you can - doesn't mean you should

Beyond the basics, email consistency has a few secret ingredients: Invisible Design: Clean code ensures your design looks great in any inbox. Work with a dev or use code-savvy builders. Accessibility: Design for everyone! Consider color contrast, alt-text, and clear headings. Micro-Moments: Craft that preview text like a mini-headline. Evolve, Don't Revolt: Refresh your look gradually to avoid confusing subscribers.

Besides the strategies mentioned, remember to regularly audit your email campaigns to make sure they follow your style guide and design principles. I advocate for gathering feedback from your team and subscribers to identify areas for improvement. Use email marketing tools that offer design consistency features, such as drag-and-drop editors and version control. Finally, document any changes or updates to your style guide and templates to keep everyone aligned.

Sexy doesn’t always sell. When designing emails don’t automatically go for designs that ‘pop’. That plain text pop up may (and often will) outperform the one with the image. The static lifestyle hero could outperform the dynamic gif. Including one bestseller with feature diagrams might drive more traffic than 3-5 product highlights. All comes down to the data. So test it. But people are getting sick of information overload!

Equally important is to keep things fresh by experimenting and having fun with new designs. If you enjoy the design, chances are high that your subscribers will too. By balancing consistency with creativity, you can maintain a strong brand presence while keeping your emails engaging and exciting for your audience.