Email design matters: learn how to craft designs that look great, boost engagement, and drive conversions.
Email Design: How to Create Emails That Convert
Email design starts with steps that may not look like design elements – and they aren’t. But these crucial strategy steps lay the foundation for creating emails that look great and meet your customers’ needs.
1. Know Your Audience
Spend some time getting to know your audience. Build a buyer persona to learn more about their habits, interests, concerns and objections to buying from you.
By defining your audience, you’ll have better data to approach all aspects of marketing and not just email.
Along the way, you’ll also get a chance to understand various audience segments so you can design emails that resonate with various pockets of your audience and their unique needs and interests.
2. Review Your Email Data
Sit down and review results from previous campaigns. Don’t just skim. Dig deep to look at what’s worked, what topics resonate the best with your audience and your most successful subject lines.
If you’ve tested sending from a specific person, check if those stats are better than when the from line bears your company name.
Look at the text-to-image ratio on your best emails. Some audience segments might resonate more with the written word, while others appreciate visuals that tell the story.
3. Review the From Line
Go into your email marketing system and review your from line. This is some of the first information a customer sees in their inbox. While it might not influence their decision to convert, it will influence their decision to open the email, making it a crucial element you should pay close attention to.
While you can adjust your from line to match your email, it should always be recognizable. So if it isn’t your company name, make it something that the reader knows, such as their salesperson or their company representative that they interact with when they have a question.
4. Write Compelling Email Subject Lines
The second element that will dictate whether your recipient opens their email or not is the email subject line. This is text that tells them a little about what’s inside the email and gives them a reason to open it.
As you write your email subject lines, keep these aspects in mind.
Keep it short: Try to write your email subject line like a headline with no more than seven words or 50 characters so that no matter the device your recipient uses to review the email, they see the full subject line.
Make it actionable: Active verbs can help your audience feel compelled to open the email. Include words that will also encourage immediate action, such as “Don’t miss,” “Limited time,” or “Expires soon.”
Incorporate personalization: People love to feel like an email was written just for them. Using personalization in your emails can help do that. Consider doing more than their name. Make it relevant to what you know about them or an interaction they’ve had with your company.
Use A/B testing: You’ll never know what resonates with your audience if you don’t try it. A/B testing subject lines and personalization can help inform future decisions and ensure good interactions. Test whether your audience opens more emails if there is an emoji or if certain phrasing encourages a response. Your audience might not like sensationalistic subject lines in the way that other audiences do. But you’ll never know until you try.
5. Make Your Email Layout Captivating
Once you’ve built a strategy for good emails and encouraged the recipient to open it, you’re ready to focus on email design that truly captivates your audience.
Email design requires attention to many elements.
Mobile responsiveness: Mobile clients make up more than 40% of all email opens. Webmail accounts for another 40%. You can’t ignore these customers and their preferences for where to open their emails and should start with a mobile-friendly design that caters to smartphones.
Design in line with your brand: Your emails should be easily identifiable as your brand. Make sure you’re using colors and fonts that speak to who you are and match what the customer sees on other platforms, such as social media or paid ads. Keep a professional appearance to show the customer that they can trust you.
Include white space: Be careful that you don’t over-design your email. Allow the elements to breathe by using white space. When design elements constantly bleed into one another, it can be more challenging for the reader to make sense of.
Build a clear hierarchy of information: Tell your reader what is most important in your emails with clear hierarchies of information. That means including headlines, subheads and colors that direct the reader’s eye. Make sure your call to action (CTA) is clear and bold so the user knows what next step they should take.
Include high-quality photos: Images are powerful. Make sure that they resonate with the reader and optimize them for your emails. The larger the email, the longer it might take to download so size it appropriately.
6. Make the Content Engaging
People are opening your emails because they are interested in the information. You can’t just make your subject line engaging. The whole thing must speak to the customer and their interests.
As you make your emails engaging, consider these factors.
Offer value: Don’t just advertise your business. Give the reader something of value, such as content that helps them or a special offer they can’t get elsewhere.
Make the email scannable: Readers are in a hurry. Make the email simple to scan. This means including bullet points, short paragraphs, headings and simple language. That way, recipients can consume the email quickly.
Include compelling copy: People love stories. When you can, tell stories in your marketing. Appeal to the customer’s emotions and connect with them on a deeper level.
Use personalization: When appropriate, use personalization to connect with the reader. This might be products based on their purchasing history or it might be content that’s unique to the recipient’s location.
Customers can’t convert if they don’t know how or if they don’t feel compelled to do so. If you want higher-converting emails, you need to make the call to action clear and compelling.
Several call-to-action elements will ensure greater conversion in your emails.
Use buttons: Buttons are an element that users are accustomed to. They know that a button will take them to the next step in the process. This can help take them where they need to go. Use bold colors and easy-to-read text on top to encourage clicks.
Ensure language is action-oriented: Using action-oriented language will further encourage your audience to clicks. Examples of action-oriented text include “Claim Your Discount,” “Get Your Guide,” and “Find Out More.”
Place the call-to-action above the fold: While emails don’t fold, this carryover from newspaper days is still relevant. Ensure that customers can easily click your emails by placing the call-to-action in an area before they would need to scroll.
Still Not Seeing Results? Bring in the Experts
If you’ve gotten to the point where it feels like you’ve tried everything and yet you’re still not seeing results, bring in the experts. The team at New Light Digital can help you see a greater return on investment from your emails – and all aspects of your digital marketing.
