In simple terms, an email marketing design (or email marketing template) is a completed email marketing message that you can use to send to your customers or audience. The design contains all the text, images, and links your email marketing campaign requires.
While you don’t need to use a complex design to create a successful email marketing campaign, it’s important to have a suitable design to enhance your efforts.
Here’s a quick guide to help you create the perfect email marketing design.
1. Choose a suitable design
Your first step is to decide upon a design that will serve as the basis for your email marketing campaign. The design should match your overall brand identity and should reflect the style and tone of your content. You can also use the design to aid your email campaign’s SEO.
To create the perfect email marketing design, start with a simple, clean, and uncluttered layout that you can implement with minimal effort.
If you’re new to designing emails, work your way up to a more complex design as you gain confidence and become more experienced.
Since your customers will be interacting with your email template, you need to ensure that the design is accessible and easy to use.
Also, you want to make sure that the design is unique to you and that you don’t use any stock images or templates in your work. Not only is this illegal, but it’s also a quick way to lose credibility with your audience. If you find that you repeatedly use the same design with minor variations, consider reworking it or using a different design altogether.
2. Match the design to your target audience
Whether you’re creating an email template to promote a new product or service, or you’re using the template to remind customers of past purchases, you need to ensure that the design reflects your target audience.
When choosing the design for your email campaign, bear in mind that the recipient will be viewing the email on a mobile device or computer.
As a result, you need to make sure that the overall experience is simple to navigate and that the text is easy to read. You can use different techniques to determine your target audience, including analyzing the demographic, psychographic, and digital behaviors of your current and potential customers.
Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience’s needs and preferences, you can create the perfect email template that will serve as a constant reminder of your brand’s offerings. The following list details some of the most prominent characteristics of your target audience:
3. Vary your subject lines
With millions of emails being sent every day, your email marketing messages need to stand out to be effective.
For that reason, you need to vary your subject lines to ensure that the email is not simply ignored or marked as spam. When crafting the subject line, keep in mind the recipient’s needs and preferences. You can also personalize the subject line by adding a relevant call-to-action (CTA) such as “click here to view our products” or “subscribe to our newsletter to receive special offers.”
An easy way to stand out among your competitors is to give your emails a unique and memorable subject line. Doing this can help you gain credibility with email recipients since they’ll be looking for products or services with specific titles. If you use one of the many email marketing tools available, you can also find a list of suggested subject lines and see what else the tool recommends.
4. Build credibility
Your email marketing campaign’s design doesn’t need to be elaborate to rank well in the eyes of your audience. If you’re new to designing emails, work your way up to a more complex design as you gain confidence and become more experienced.
As a newcomer to the field, you have much to gain from taking the time to build credibility with your customers. One way to do this is to create a visually memorable email template that accurately represents your brand. Another way is to integrate your email marketing with your social media platforms, so that your customers can also learn about your brand on social media.
The key to effectively using social media to promote your brand is to engage with your audience on social media but also keep your emails consistent with your branding efforts on other platforms.
5. Make it mobile-friendly
Since most people are now accessing the internet from a mobile device, you need to make sure that your email marketing design is mobile-friendly.
To ensure that your email is accessible on all devices, create a mobile-friendly version of your email marketing design that also functions well on a desktop computer.
Since mobile users spend more time on smaller screens, make sure that your text is easy to read and that the images are clear.
6. Customize the text
Depending on your target audience, you may want to tailor the text in your email marketing design. If you’re not familiar, the text in your email marketing design is the copy that you write to encourage your readers to take a specific action (for example, to visit your website or to sign up for your newsletter).
If your target audience is very technical, you may want to include more detailed instructions on how to perform certain tasks (for example, how to access your website’s content or how to subscribe to your newsletter).
Also, if your target audience is primarily comprised of businesses, you may want to include a lot of text on how to do business with you (for example, include your business’s address, email, and phone number).
You can use a tool, like Growmap, to easily track the locations of your audience members so that you can engage with them via local businesses or organizations that support them. This local engagement is a powerful way to gain credibility with customers since they’ll be more receptive to offers and promotions aimed at helping their local businesses.
7. Link your social media accounts
To gain credibility with your audience, link your social media accounts (for example, your Twitter account) to your email marketing account. Doing this can help you establish your authority in your niche since your Twitter followers will see that you’re connected to reputable, authoritative figures in your industry (like big brand CEOs or government officials).
By connecting your social media accounts, you’re allowing your audience to follow you on different platforms and learn about your brand on social media. Since your email marketing and social media platforms work together to promote your brand, make sure that your content is consistent across platforms (for example, don’t spam your Twitter account with promotional tweets about your email marketing efforts).
8. Test various styles and templates
To stand out among your competitors, you need to make sure that your email marketing design is eye-catching and unique. One way to do this is to use a tool like Canva to create different styles and templates for your email marketing design.
Once you have your basic design, you can use Canva’s styles and templates to create different versions of your email marketing design. You can also use the different styles to highlight different aspects of your campaign.
For example, the classic version of your email marketing design can be used to emphasize your brand’s reliability and trustworthiness while a more colorful version can be used to draw attention to your products or services. Once you have various styles and templates, you can experiment with various copy, images, and colors to see which one(s) work best for your product or service.
To get started, click here to visit Canva’s website and create a free account. Once you have an account, click on the Create button to access the home page. From here, you can click on the Design button to reach the page containing the styles and templates for your email marketing design.
As a result of your efforts, you’ll have a completed and tested email marketing design that you can use to send to customers or potential customers. You can also use a tool like Email On Acid to test your emails before you send them out to your audience – the results of which are accessible in the form of a PDF report (find out more).