Source: Somebody Marketing
Although marketing landscape changes at an incredibly fast pace, but email marketing is still the most important and effective way to reach your targeted audience. When it comes to successful email marketing, you need to consider Email Design as one of the most underlying factors. Hence, it is essential for B2B marketers to adapt best practices in Email Design to increase more visibility, drive high sales conversion and get more business opportunities.
Before diving into Email Design Best Practices, let’s start with the basics!
What is Email Design?
Email design is a process of strategically designing and generating an email that resonates with your target audience, specifically your current email subscribers and clients. Hence, having a great email design is important as it engages your recipients and captures attention of your targeted audience.
When it comes to designing marketing emails, there is no magic formula that will get you impressive results all at once. But while setting up an email marketing campaign, the design of your email is definitely a significant aspect to consider. If your design does not relate to your email subscribers, then most of your emails get marked as spam, deleted, or completely ignored. To make sure your marketing emails are as effective as possible, you have to consider several different aspects of your email design carefully.
Here is the complete checklist of some important email design best practices for you to consider before rolling out your next email marketing campaign.
Use Interesting Subject Lines
Your email subject line should be something that grabs the attention of your subscribers and gets them interested enough to keep reading. Hence, make it relatively short but as informative as possible. The ideal email subject line should be a good, interesting summary that determines people what they can expect from reading your email in the fewest possible characters. Therefore, always aim to limit your email subject line to 50 characters or less. Here you can see average read rate of emails based on the length of subject lines.
Source: Return Path
If your subject line includes too many characters, it may get truncated in some of the email mailbox providers. Because of this, your email may lose its meaning and impact or even end up looking like funny or awkward at some instances. Hence, to make sure your message comes across all mailbox providers, you need to keep your subject lines relatively short.
Use Perfect Pre-Header
From a recipient’s point of view, pre header is the next thing they look after a subject line. Hence, it should be optimized for mobile, desktop, web mails as it’s the second most important thing readers make a decision to open & read the email further. It can provide useful context to the subject line and assist in increasing the open rates.
Here are the best practices for formatting a Pre-Header:
- It should be short and represents the exact point.
- Limit Pre-header length within 40-70 characters.
- The Pre-header text and the subject line should complement each other for better performance.
- System fonts are the types of fonts that can be displayed on all devices or within any application. These include Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana.
- Web fonts are widely supported, and can be rendered differently on your recipients’ device. These include: Roboto, Lato, and Montserrat.
- Implement Minimalistic design
- Don’t use complex headers, extra calls-to-actions (CTAs), or clutter
- Use High-contrast design set at low brightness for mobile screens
- Use Single column layout
- Place Easy-to-view content
- Set mobile-friendly links
- Keep Smaller image files
- Make sure that images and other graphics should have excellent resolution
- Use high quality images to get a point across
- Don’t use large image sized files as they slow down your email’s load time
- Also consider whether the images add something essential to your emails