Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 32, Meeting Title: EP 32: 5 impactful ways to level up your email marketing designs
– Visual design is crucial for engagement and conversions
– Mobile responsiveness is a must
– Trends include brand consistency, personalization, and compliance
– Tools like Canva and Adobe Spark help with design
– Personalization and dynamic content enhance relevance
– CTA placement is crucial for driving action
– Interactive elements and dark mode can boost engagement
– Best practices include avoiding deceptive subject lines and purchased email lists
Summary notes from Episode 32:
Full Transcript:
00:01
Welcome to the demandgen pod. My name is Ryan, and today we’re talking about different ways to level up your email marketing visual designs. And let’s just get right into it. All right? So, you know, visual design of email campaigns is pretty important. And you really want to be thinking about not only sort of, if you think of a design aspect, I don’t just necessarily mean big, impressive, beautiful designs, you also have to be thinking about the design in the context of what you’re trying to accomplish. And specific. Specifically. Sorry, specifically. Right. What if it’s a sales email? It doesn’t make any sense to have a big marketing style design. Right. Big visuals. Right. So that in itself is design.
00:50
Considering the type of email that it is and the type of communication you’re trying to get across, is this supposed to be quick and simple until a point or it supposed to be more built out? And that might be simply because you are trying to identify maybe what somebody is really interested in. And so you need a bit more content for people to choose from to engage with. So that’s kind of what I mean. I mean, when you’re thinking about what goes into email content, you can also be thinking about the design and vice versa. When you’re thinking about the design, you can be thinking about the content that’s going to be going into it. So it kind of goes both ways.
01:21
But regardless of where you head with this, it’s so important for engaging audiences and in driving those conversions because it can help establish your brand identity, it can capture attention. And again, I mean that both ways. So brand identity, you can still get passed through with a rare, with a very simple sales email, even if it has a logo in it, or it may not even necessarily need a logo in it. And then, you know, also different brand aspects can capture attention and then it can also help you to communicate key messages more effectively. So just like as an example here, you might have a slightly different design or leverage different colors inside of your brand toolbox for different types of messages. So if you have a newsletter, maybe that is always a one color, say a purple. Okay.
02:06
And then if you have announcements, maybe you have a different header which is a different color, maybe an orange, something like that. Okay. Whatever kind of falls under your brand identity. And then people can start to recognize, even if it’s subconsciously, they can start to recognize that when they see that orange header, it’s because it’s announcement and that might grab their attention and make them more likely to read also, you know, just kind of make a difference in these crowded inboxes that we have now, I get hundreds of emails every day. It’s kind of insane. Businesses should really differentiate their email designs with different sorts of creative, personalized content. You can also leverage different kinds of interactive elements.
02:45
And I think the most important part here, which honestly should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, is making sure that your emails are mobile responsive. There’s a lot of strategies that you can leverage here to make emails mobile responsive. You know, for example, making sure that if you have two things side by side on desktop, that you stack them on mobile. There are even ways where if you have your setup so that you’ve got your text on the left side and an image on the right on desktop. The standard for that because of how emails are built with HTML tables that would stack where the text is on top and the images on the bottom, but you can change that.
03:23
You can write code that makes sure that the image still goes on the top on mobile, but it stays on the right on desktop. So there are different ways to manage that. And all of those should be considered because it can be kind of confusing if you’re thinking that you’re reading from top to bottom, that you see text and then an image that’s actually supposed to go with the text that was above it. So just another example, you can also build emails in a way that you don’t have to be doing any of that stuff by making sure that the images are always on the left on desktop. And then when they stack, it’ll automatically, without any additional work, go on the top on mobile. So something else to consider.
03:55
But, you know, some of the top trends that I’ve noticed in the strategies for email design, brand consistency, kind of already chatted about that really quickly optimizing for mobile, personalizing content, utilizing those interactive elements, and then also complying with some basic design regulations as well. And sort of what I mean by that is, you know, what types of things can we do to make sure that people of all different abilities are able to read the emails that we send? So that might be alt text on your images and you can do link text as well. So that when somebody hovers over a link, it will tell them not only what the button says, especially if it’s an image, keep that in mind.
04:33
If it’s an image, someone who may have trouble seeing and may need a visual aid, they are not going to be able to understand what that button says. You have to put that in alt text in order to do it. And then also if they need to understand where it links to, you can add also link text too. So something else to consider. So with that said, then you can also take a look and prioritize elements like logo placement, color schemes, typography and the imagery to actually reflect your band or your brand. Right? And you can use simple tools like canva. We use canva here. You can use other tools like Adobe Spark come to mind. And you can also design these style guides too.
05:18
Or you can get help designing a style guide to help create a more cohesive visual and understanding about what being on brand means for you. So what about responsive email design for mobile? I cannot stress how important this is that you design emails that are mobile optimized. As a matter of fact, it’s so important that all of our clients at the moment are designing emails for mobile first and desktop second. And that’s a pretty good way to think about it. And it’s actually a really good example that I had already used, which is saying that if you have an image on the right, it’s going to natively go underneath the text that’s on the left from desktop on.
05:59
When you go to mobile, if you were to design mobile first, I mean, it’s just kind of like a fun little saying to think, you know, let’s design what it’s going to look like on mobile and then it will just fall into place what it looks like on desktop. If you were to do that on mobile first, you would be putting the image on the left or above the text first, and then you would be having that show the same way basically in desktop. And I’ve noticed that a lot. If you pay attention to the emails that you’re getting, I think you’re going to find that more and more emails are just stacked vertically rather than having left and right boxes or being split 50 or 60 40 or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. I think more of that’s going to happen.
06:43
But even when you, if you do need to leverage something like a 60 40 split on mobile, you can have that be 100% width so that it is going all the way across. So what is split on desktop 60 40 is 100%, then 100% below it on mobile. But it really does help you to reach a broader audience because most of us are accessing our emails on mobile devices. That’s certainly true for me and most likely true for you. And then furthermore, best practices also include using responsive templates and they can come with your marketing automation tool. You can also use other email building tools that will then spit out code. So drag and drop editors that spit out code that you can drop into your marketing automation tool.
07:31
If you’re not happy with how your marketing animation tool works on a simple editor, I know that even the big guys, some of the mobile responsiveness is certainly kind of a problem, even with something like marketing cloud or eloqua, honestly, it’s just not great at it. And if you want to do things that are relatively complex, particularly with marketing cloud actually over Eloqua, but even like par dot, I mean, you have to code it. You can’t do a simple drag and drop editor for it. They’re just not advanced enough. There are other tools out there that are slightly more advanced and can get you a little bit farther. And you can kind of do a combination of the two as well.
08:09
So what we normally do, and this is really just to save time and money for the client, but what we normally do is we might build an email in a drag and drop editor and that gets you say 80% of the way there. And then we extract that code and we edit the code. So we’re editing all of the native code for the platform and that really helps with the QA process and making sure that everything renders properly in outlook and Gmail and mobile android and iOS and all of those things. So you can sort of do a hybrid model, which is what we really do. If were to code an email from scratch, it would take dozens of hours.
08:42
And that’s a lot of effort for not a lot of gain, but by kind of taking a hybrid approach and utilizing a drag and drop editor for the structure of the email and then editing that to give you what you really want in terms of mobile responsiveness, that’s a really great option. But when you do that extra work, what it can mean is that you are making it easier for people who are receiving your emails to be able to read and interact with them on all their various mobile platforms. Another thing that you consider is like optimizing images and font sizes for mobile too. So when you’re testing on mobile, think about how big is that font on my phone and how easy is that to read, and what does my audience require.
09:28
So if your audience is older, for example, email is still a super viable platform, but if their eyesight may potentially be getting worse as they get older, which is certainly most likely true, then you can leverage having larger font sizes on mobile and you can change that using CSS. That’s another example of something that is really difficult to do with drag and drop editors. They’re just not really built that way all the time. But it’s much easier to do when you’re custom coding something. Or again, that hybrid option. And then what about some personalization? Dynamic content. So personalized content, dynamic content, it always makes emails more relevant. Anything that you can do that is designed around what we know about each individual recipient is better. So if you have sort of five or six different data points, you could build dynamic content around that.
10:14
You could personalize it not only with their name, but you could also personalize it with things that you know that they have viewed recently. You could use personalization and dynamic content to not show them things that they’ve looked at or links that they’ve seen based on what the engagement has been on their website, on your website, by each individual person. And obviously you can’t do that in total broad strokes, or I guess I should say you can’t do that so specifically for everybody and unless, you know, you’ve only got so many pages. But you could pretty easily say that if somebody’s visited these pages, you know, pages a, B and c, then don’t show them those, show them page d and sort of any of those combinations.
10:55
But you could see how maybe that would get out of hand pretty quickly but still really helpful. You can also do something like if somebody’s already downloaded some sort of asset, a PDF or they’ve watched a webinar or whatever, don’t send them that asset. You could still send them the email that has the, you know, the top and the bottom for the opening paragraph, the closing paragraph, but then the actual piece of content that’s specific to the webinar that they saw, you could not show that if they’ve already seen. You can also use customer data to personalize emails based on preferences as well, which can be really crucial. And then you can also leverage dynamic content like personal product recommendations, location based offers and all of those you’re going to see increased engagement on. And I think that’s really important to mention.
11:40
What I do want to point out though, is that, but through all of this, consider where your call to action is. And before we get into that, and before I forget, I really appreciate you taking an opportunity to subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. It certainly means a lot to us. So within the call to action, CTA, right, your visual hierarchy guides recipient attention and emphasizes key messages within your emails. And what I mean by that is, depending on where you put things inside of your email and the design of those things, it will emphasize key messages to whoever’s receiving it. So if you have your CTA all the way at the bottom, you are kind of doing two things.
12:26
One, you’re either doing not a great job, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, if you’re really trying to drive people to your website, or you could be saying, well, I really only want to drive people who are super engaged in the email to our website. And we do have clients who do this. They actually have so many leads that they want to weed out leads in every opportunity that they can by making it actually kind of difficult to convert, which is a problem I think we all wish that we had. So they might put a CTA lower at the bottom of an email because they want to make sure that people who are clicking on that have actually gone through the email to get there. So just something to consider. Most of us, I think, would be preferring to put CTA’s higher.
13:03
And in addition to that, we might leverage different contrasts, larger font sizes, additional white space, and all of these can optimize the CTA placement inside of our email layouts. So clear CTA buttons and strategic positioning really help improve that CTA visibility and can drive action. So you can use that to drive action, or you can use it to limit action, I suppose. And then finally, interactive elements and engaging design. So interactive elements like surveys, gifs, videos, animations, these all enhance the email engagement, interactivity. And I say videos, but I really mean gifs because you cannot embed a video inside of an email. What you can do though is you can take a gif of the video that you are looking to play.
13:51
You can put that to have play inside of your email and then have a play button on top of it, and that will increase engagement substantially. It’s a great way to leverage it. But animations inside emails, I think, really go a long way. They make it pretty interesting. They make it feel much more interactive than just a stock standard static email. And then the other thing that you might want to consider is something like dark mode compatibility. Do you have dark mode options for the logos? Another thing that drag and drop builders are not very good at is designing around dark mode, because you can actually have the logo switch color if you need to, for dark mode as well as the text. And that is how you design the email and what goes into the background colors and alternates and things like that.
14:35
Then there’s also really cool things. And certainly there are multiple tools that are doing this. But marketing cloud, I think has kind of been the pioneer for amp and amp script inside of email and you can use that to have many more interactive elements. You can use amp for all sorts of stuff. You can also use it for like countdowns and timers. So all those are options as well. There’s even a process of implementing forms inside of email. You can do that with amp two and HTML five. The only problem with a lot of this stuff, the more advanced topics like this, is that it only works in certain email clients and you really need to keep that in mind. So if you’re doing, let’s say like the form, so forms I don’t believe, work in outlook.
15:15
So if you are a b two b company, probably not a great process to be sending emails with content that won’t display for 70% of your recipients because, you know, just so many companies use office 365. So take these on to consideration, right? I mean it is really, really neat to be able to go through and look through a design. Think of like what does the design actually mean, what does it actually accomplish? And then if you’re not sure what a design is going to accomplish, then you can test and you can a b test to use whatever you can to identify possible improvements. One thing that will hurt you though, when you’re designing an email is things like deceptive subject lines or misleading content. I wouldn’t bother if you can help it with purchased email lists.
16:06
Certainly that goes against most regulations that are in place for marketing automation platforms. But not only that, but they just never really, they never really work. Right. It’s better to work organically or through paid media to drive conversions and then email them. Expensive? Yeah, it’s expensive, but the ROI theoretically is better at the end of the day. So that’s kind of a quick overview. We’ve got brand consistency, mobile optimization, personalization, thinking about the visual hierarchy and where your content goes and the CTA’s go and interactive content ten. So sorry that I’ve been gone for a couple of weeks, but back at it now and we will catch you next week in June. All right, you have a great day.