Marketers have the power to send flashy Emails with advanced personalization, amazing creative and gripping copy. However, it is easy to get caught up with pushing the boundaries in your campaigns, and even easier to forget the basics of what should be best practice. The aim of this blog is to remind you of three important tips you must remember when putting together your campaigns.
- Remember the journey to open
When checking their emails most people think of three things: who is it? What is it? Where do I go from here?
There are three things that need to be in place to ensure a successful open rate. Your friendly from name and domain should identify who you are as a sender; the copy of your email should state your message clearly; your call-to-action should clearly tell the Recipient what you would like them to do.
The call-to-action should be:
- Above the fold
Allow the recipient to click through without having to scroll to find a button or a hyperlink.
- Compelling
Give the recipient a real and urgent reason to act straight away.
- Catchy
A good call-to-action should prompt the recipient to click immediately and not move on.
- Frequent
Give the recipient more than one opportunity to click through.
- Balance between images and copy
An image can make your email look super sexy and sleek, or break it.
Make sure you choose an image that’s correctly sized so it doesn’t take too long to download, and ensure it’s in the appropriate file format. A general rule of thumb is: you can use JPEG’s for photos, and GIF’s for everything else.
The most important thing is to make sure your email works just as well without the images. Several email clients have images turned off by default, which will obviously change the way your email will initially look. Header text and alt tags should be visible when images are turned off to provide context. Only Taylor Swift likes a blank space!
In dotmailer, you can preview your email with images turned off prior to sending. Pretty handy, huh?
- Don’t forget mobile
Recent research from the DMA shows that the share of smartphone usage is now just shy of the desktop, with almost one third of consumers (31%) choosing smartphones as the main device to click through and buy.1
When building your campaigns, remember that most mobile users only see 100 words per screen, and patience is low when on the move. This also applies to your subject lines – for example, iPhone users only see 30-40 characters of a subject line. Optimize your content to meet the requirements of a mobile user, with concise, clear copy, scalable images, and tappable CTAs. Check out how your emails look on mobile in dotmailer, prior to send, with our Litmus partnership.
Ultimately, the best person to tell you how your emails should look is your recipient. Split-test your campaigns, listen to your customers, and test how they respond to your creative with reporting metrics. Optimize your design strategy from the results, and watch your campaigns thrive.
Looking for more design inspo? Check out our 15 minute cheatsheet: On your marks: race to better emails with these 5 steps.
1Source: DMA Consumer Email Tracking Study 2016 – https://dma.org.uk/research/consumer-email-tracker-2016
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