Email Design Best Practices

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing, by using email to communicate with new and existing customers. But what makes a good email campaign? Why do email marketing campaigns fail? What are the design best practices for email marketing? By the end of this post, you should all be able to answer these questions.

Why use Email Marketing?

• Helps to maximise the customer lifetime value
• Create opportunities upsell and cross-promotion opportunities
• To generate repeat sales and higher conversions
• Campaigns are quick to deploy and cost effective when compared to traditional marketing
• It helps to retain customers
• Promotes brand loyalty within your customer base
• It builds an emotional connection with your audience
• Can be integrated into other marketing activities for a more successful marketing strategy

Campaign Goals

What defines a successful campaign? Success means different things to different people. Think about what you want to achieve from your email marketing activities and what metrics you will use to measure your campaign success.

Common campaign goals are:

• Increased Website Traffic
• Online Sales
• Sales Calls
• Website Enquiries
• Whitepaper/PDF downloads
• Video Views
• Social Media Followers / Shares
• Surveys Completed

Once you have identified your email marketing goals, you should use them to drive every aspect of your email marketing, as this will make for a more focused campaign.


List Segmentation

List Segmentation is one of the most important procedures when setting up an Email Marketing campaign, as it allows you to group subscribers together in order to effectively target relevant campaigns to them.  It is a proven way to get better open and click rates through in all your email marketing activities.

Subscriber lists can be segmented by various characteristics and the more segmentation you do, the more relevant your campaigns will be.

Common segmentation characteristics are:

 

•  Location
•  Gender
•  Age
•  Occupation

 

You could also segment by subscriber activities:

 

• New or most recent subscribers
• Inactive subscribers
• People who opened, but did not click

 

Sales Segmentation

• Existing Customers
• Prospective Customers

Now if we look at a more targeted example, imagine the campaign was for a clothing store, we could segment my list in a number of ways

 

• Customers who bought clothes for men
• Customers who bought clothes for women
• Customers who bought clothes for children

 

Now, we can segment each of the lists above even further:

• Customers who haven’t purchased in the last 6 months
• Customers who purchase regularly (min every 3 months)
• Customers who have never purchased

Avoiding Spam Filters

The biggest obstacle to avoid when sending out email marketing newsletters is getting past the spam filter, so your mail shot reaches its intended recipient. On average, between 10- 20% of your emails will get stuck in the spam filters, even if you have permission from all your subscribers.

Spam filters look for specific criteria to judge whether or not your email is junk. One of the first things they consider is your subject line – so phrases like ‘Click Here’, ‘FREE’ or ‘Buy Now’ are often judged to be spam. Spam filters assign points to certain criteria and if your email exceeds the point threshold, your email will go into the spam filter.

Other things to avoid are:

• Over use of punctuation (!!!!!!!!!)
• USING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS
• Using the word ‘test’ in the subject line
• Sending to multiple recipients within the same company (as company firewalls can see this as a spam attack)
• Designing HTML email’s in Microsoft Word (and therefore including sloppy code in the email)

Permissions, Reputation and Trust

Permission, Reputation and Trust are essential values to all email marketing campaign.

Permission is the first step to gaining a good reputation and earning trust.

All email service providers require subscribers’ permission to email them. Do not violate the trust given to you by your subscribers by taking advantage of their permission.  Email Service Providers will suspend your campaign if your unsubscribe rate is higher than 1% of your mailing list, that’s how seriously permission is taken.

Your reputation is related to trust, with no reputation, trust is hard to earn. With a good reputation, trust is easier to gain.

By earning Trust, you can improve your reputation one subscriber at a time.

Just because you have permission today, doesn’t mean you will tomorrow. According to leading email marketing reports, the most popular reason subscribers opt-out of permission based campaigns is that they receive too many emails. By abusing your subscribers trust, you lose the reputation you have earned and the permission to send them emails in the future. As a further result, 32% of recipients say that they stopped doing business with at least one company because of poor email marketing practices.


Design Principles

Even for experienced designers, building email newsletters isn’t easy. You can design a beautiful looking newsletter, but when you come to build it, it looks nothing like the original.

Simple Design – Emails are not like complex website designs; they should be nicely designed, but somewhat basic. Try basing your designs on a main header image followed by the main content.

The cleaner the design, the easier it will be to code, and the less chance of any abnormalities happening between various browsers and email clients.

No Wider than 600px - Many people don't actually open their email; instead they view them in the preview panel. On average the smallest preview panel is around 600px, so always design your emails accordingly.

Use Tables - Email clients live in the past, so all emails must be built using tables for layout.
 

Creating Call-to-Actions

Every email newsletter should include a call-to-action and this is determined by what you want to achieve from your campaign.

Your call-to-actions need to be clear and concise and have to stand out from the rest of the content in your newsletter. The use of eye-catching colours and imagery is important when designing call-to-actions, as you are guiding your readers to where you want them to go.


Technical Specifications

You should avoid using CSS and using tables instead. The thing that catches most web designers out is that they have to forget all the basic principles of web design and go back to basics when coding email templates.

Use Inline Styles - Unfortunately, in an email, it is not possible to use correct styling, as the email clients will strip them out. So if anything needs to be styled, use inline styles.

Give all Images Alt Tags - This is a very important step to take, but is often forgotten by many. Styling the <td> for which images are in, with font types, size and color, will allow for your email to degrade gracefully when images are off by default.

Avoid Background Images - Stick to block colours rather than images for the backgrounds for your text; only use gradients or images when no text is involved.

Encode All Characters - Although we don’t technically have to encode characters, it’s best we do. When viewing emails in various email clients, we cannot guarantee the charset every website is using, so encoding characters allows us to be certain that all characters are being displayed as they should. For example &amp; instead of just &.

No JavaScript - You cannot, unfortunately, include any type of JavaScript. So no fancy pop-ups or auto-scrolling in emails. If you do decide to include it anyway, your email may be sent to the junk folder, so it is always best to use simple HTML.


Best Practices

Include an unsubscribe link - When sending general newsletters to various clients/customers, although you have a lovely designed and developed email, that user may not want your email (hard to take, I know). Always allow them a way out, by adding an unsubscribe link to the bottom of the email.

Include a browser version - Some users may be utilizing a very basic email client – maybe they’re checking their webmail at work or on their phones. Images and complex designs may not be best for these types of clients. Consider, at the top of the email newsletter, having a link which points to the email on a web server somewhere, so the user can view the email in all its glory.


A/B Split Testing
 

What else can you do to improve campaign performance?

You can use A/B Split Testing to change simple variables in order to gain insight in how your campaign is performing and how you can improve it. 

• What day of the week gets you better open rates?
• What time of day works best for your promotional (e-coupons, special sales, "act now!" etc) campaigns?
• What day/time works best for your informative "newsletter" campaigns?
• What subject line style works best? Hard sell? Soft sell?
• Should your subject line always include your company name? Or should it be a long, descriptive subject line detailing what's inside the message?
• Is it better to use your company's name in the "From" line, or a human's name?
• Does time of day affect overall click rate?

Behavioural Merchandising

Being a specialist ecommerce provider, we have a lot of experience in using Behavioural Merchandising to help promote relevant products to customer based on user browsing behaviour and purchase history.
It’s a great addition to an ecommerce site, but it can also be used in email marketing.  Behavioural Merchandising can increase open rates, clicks and online sales through delivering highly personalised product recommendations to customers. This is the latest in email targeting and is often described as “Email 2.0”.

If you have a subscriber list of 10,000 then by using Behavioural Merchandising, you can send out 10,000 unique, personalised email newsletters, based on products they have browsed and purchased in the past. This adds real value to email campaigns, as the content is highly relevant to each customer and has been proven to generate extra revenue by promoting the right products at the right time.