It is no secret that email marketing is one of the biggest contributors to the success of a business. According to HubSpot Blogs, email marketing is responsible for 92% of all digital marketing activity.
Businesses of all types have known the power of sending out emails on behalf of their brand. But what is the secret to creating high-quality, impactful emails that will engage and retain your audience?
To find out, we spoke with five email marketing experts about the best way to put together a marketing email.
1. Develop a clear message
The very first thing to do before you start designing your email is to develop a clear message. You want to ensure that every aspect of your email is contributing to the goal of delivering your message to your audience effectively. This starts by defining what the email is trying to achieve and what the recipient should expect. Every aspect of your marketing email – whether it’s the subject line, the opening paragraph, or the call-to-action (CTA) button – should support the development of an clear idea of what you’re trying to communicate. Without a clear message, it’s difficult to create an effective design that will engage your audience.
Let’s take a look at how ClearChannel uses email to promote their businesses:
2. Create a design that will engage your audience
Now that you have a clear message, you can move on to the next step of designing an effective email. When done well, your email will effortlessly pull the reader into your content and provoke thoughts and feelings of excitement about your product or service. To create a design that will engage your audience, you need to consider a few things:
Size
First, you’ll want to consider the size of your audience. The larger your audience, the more you’ll want to consider when designing your email. It’s important to have a good grasp on your audience’s demographics and psychology when designing your email – what would make them tick? For example, you may choose to use smaller type sizes for shorter sentences and larger type sizes for longer ones. This can be adjusted to suit your audience’s needs.
Colors
Next, you’ll want to consider the colors that your audience is more likely to engage with. For instance, black is a popular choice for websites and emails because it is easy to read and unclutters the screen. But if your audience is more likely to be distracted by green, consider making your emails more subtle and less intrusive. You can use color theory to determine the best and the brightest hues to use for your design. Consider Pantone’s color wheel when selecting your primary colors for the email’s design.
Lighting
When we receive an email in the morning, we often find ourselves checking the lighting of the email. If the lighting is good, we are more likely to read the content easily – even if it’s an email that is several years old. So, too, with our digital devices. Consider the backlighting in your inboxes as you read through emails. If the lighting is bad, you may want to adjust your device’s brightness or contrast.
Typeface
Last but not least, you’ll want to consider the typeface that you’ll use for the email. There are several things to think about. First, will you go with a serif or a sans serif typeface? Second, what are the sizes available? Third, will you go for a condensed or a full version? Fourth, will you go for a thick or a thin line? Finally, will you go for a bold or a soft variant?
Each of these factors will impact the overall design of your email. But you don’t want to select a typeface merely based on its look – you want to consider how well it works in combination with your message.
Style
As we’ve established, sending emails is one of the biggest contributors to the success of a business. But it’s not the only one. How your email is styled is also key to engaging your audience and increasing the likelihood of them reading and acting on your message. The decision-making process for email design should involve both functional and aesthetic concerns. For example, you may want to use all uppercase type for the subject line and the first few paragraphs of the email to grab the reader’s attention, before transitioning to lowercase for the rest of the email. This is a popular method for writing letters because it makes the writer’s letter more apparent. Transitions like this can help improve the readability of your email.
3. Use effective composition
Now that you have a clear idea of everything you’re trying to achieve through your email, you can move on to the next phase of composing an effective email. When done well, your email will contain a number of small and large compositions that will lead the reader down a path of curiosity about what you have to say. This is made possible through effective use of various techniques, including:
4. Keep it short
An effective short-form email is a common and popular choice among businesses. These emails are exactly what they sound like – short. Shorter emails are easier to read and maintain than longer ones, making them ideal for anyone with a demanding work schedule. If you have a lot to talk about, create a detailed email with several paragraphs. But if you want to keep things short and sweet, use the fewest possible words to get your point across.
An example of a short-form email is the hello message that you may receive from a website or email service when you log in for the first time. This may be followed by some content focused on why you should continue reading, what kinds of products and services the website or email service offers, and so on.
5. Ensure that the email leads to some sort of action
Last but not least, you’ll want to make sure that your email leads to some sort of action. This could be anything from clicking a link to signing up for an email list to downloading a file or document. Ensure that the action you desire from the reader is something that is easy and straightforward. You want to avoid making people click through several links before getting what they came for. It’s also important to keep the action concise and simple enough so that even people with short attention spans can understand what they’re supposed to do.
Designing an email that will engage your audience is not as difficult as you may think. With a little bit of planning and a lot of creative thinking, you’ll be able to send out that email and have your audience beg you to send more.
Wrapping Up
As you may have guessed, creating an effective email that will engage your audience is not as easy as it sounds. But with a little bit of planning and a lot of creative thinking, you’ll be able to send out that email and have your audience beg you to send more. In addition to the steps outlined above, make sure that you are testing various styles and messages to determine which one is best suited for your audience. And don’t worry – mistakes and learning from them are a necessary part of the process.