Taking email Design to the Next Level

An email user can either send transactional or marketing emails depending on his intention. However, you must use the right email design if you wish to complete a successful communication process.  Email design keeps on evolving to meet the changing needs of the market. For instance, you cannot hold onto the traditional email marketing strategies if you expect to succeed in the modern market. The challenge is that most people don’t know how to send winning email messages. This article presents some of the golden tips of taking email design to the next level. However, you also need to understand whether you are sending transactional or marketing emails before you choose an appropriate design.

Transactional Vs. Marketing Emails

Transactional emails comprise of individualized emails that are triggered by the action of the customer. It is typically a reminder to renew a subscription or the confirmation of a purchase order. Transactional emails are usually direct and straightforward and have light content, colors, and images. The message that transactional emails carry should be unambiguous. On the contrary, commercial or marketing emails can have a lot of content, heavy images and full in color. Marketing emails should also have an appealing call to action.

Simple Basics of Modern Email Design

First, professional emails should be uniquely designed and personalized for your target audience, if you want to be successful. It’s also prudent to add alt text and background colors to attract your audience to the message. The way you design the email will determine the bounce rate. The email design should be highly engaging like other platforms that succeed because of high levels of engagement.

You cannot run from the fact that most people use their mobile devices to access the internet. Therefore, you must learn how to code emails that are mobile responsive. The standard in the market is responsive HTML. Be sure to develop all your emails using different ISPs and make sure you test all your emails on Outlook, Gmail, Apple mail just to name a few. We use Litmus for all our testing, and that tool rocks! How different email clients display and read your HTML or email rendering is a critical element in email design. Therefore, you need to make sure that the email templates you are using covers all the above basics.

One challenge with emails is how design content that the audience can engage with. Its critical to keep a balance between your images and the content so that they are highly engaging. Remember ISP will always mark outlandish messages as spam. Therefore, the sender should make sure that the email is not only engaging but also relevant.

You can add Glyphs to your pre-headers and subject lines to brighten up your inbox when sending promotional emails. Another technique is to use GIFs to merge different pictures together so that they can appear as a moving image. This art of animation will breathe some fresh air to your audience. GIFs can significantly enhance the value of stationary images. However, you should not exclusively rely on images. You can still use background images to enhance the design of your emails instead of fully relying on images. You can hard code a button instead of using images to a call to action. You can make use of HTML to include elements like a highlight or hover over the text button to emphasize the call to action. Finally, be keen to test the email design with your target audience before rolling out.