Email Design Tips and Common Mistakes to Watch out For
One of the perks of email marketing is that even if you are not an expert designer, you can craft attractive emails with customized templates and drag and drop editing features. To make you appear professional, you need to follow the email design best practices, and you are required to avoid any potential mistake you may commit.
People pay more attention to the visual elements than the text. The same is the case with email marketing. Your email design includes the font style, color and size, background image, color combination, and optimization for mobile. These things define whether your audience would finish reading your email or not and whether they would act upon the desired action or not.
Email design improves the perception of the recipient and enhances the reputation in front of mailbox providers, who mark the emails with mistakes to be spam. This is the main reason you should focus on improving the layout and design of your email. This article by CBT mass email senderaims to disclose some common mistakes that you may commit and the tips that can help you design visually attractive email campaigns.
Best practices to follow
Following are some practices that you can adopt to ensure the email best practice.
- Design an email template that is consistent with your brand. Use your brand colors and logo.
- Conduct A/B testing of your campaign to figure out which practice drives the best result.
- Your corporate design should be the same for different campaigns with different templates. This helps your recipient to recognize you each time they receive your email.
- Place the CTA at the appropriate location and make them prominent. Your email should have a balanced look throughout.
- Use good contrast, a bright background against dull content, and the dull background against bright content.
- You need to make proper use of images. Not too much, and not too less. It is suggested to use an 80:20 or 60:40 text to image ratio.
Mistakes to watch out for
Following are some common mistakes that people often make while crafting an email.
Grammar & Writing Mistakes
While typing, we often make typo mistakes that we cannot avoid despite the utmost effort. When these mistakes are not resolved, they affect the reputation of your brand. So, try to avoid any grammatical error or spelling mistakes like "its; it's, effects; effect, etc.," as some spam filters also catch the emails with many such mistakes. To avoid spelling and grammatical errors, you need to install some tools that can help you refine your content. Grammarly is widely in use for the purpose said.
All Caps Subject Line
It has been observed that the emails whose subject line is written with all caps on receive a much lower response rate as compared to the sentence case. It appears in-appropriate to write the subject this way as it gives the impression as if you are imposing something on the recipients of your emails. Instead, it is recommended to compose a compelling subject line.
Confused subject Line
Don't write confusing subject lines, use clear and concise words, don't make false offers and promises on the subject line as offering to provide what you actually cannot, badly affects your reputation. Craft an interesting and attractive subject line that must deliver what is in the email.
Etiquette Mistakes
It might feel time-consuming to use common courtesies while crafting an email. But, these must not be ignored as these are worth the time as they improve the impression
Avoiding CC and BCC
Using CC and BCC is essential in case you are sending email to a lot of people. Avoiding it means your all recipients appear in the "To" section, which creates a messy look. CC means carbon copy, and you add those recipients in CC to whom you want to show the email. Any recipient can check the other recipients in the CC list. BCC means blind carbon copy, and it does not disclose all the recipients in the list due to privacy concerns.
Ignoring segmentation
Segmentation is very important for sending specific messages to aparticular audience to ensure a better click rate and maximum conversion rate. You need to segment your email list based on their interests. For example, if you are a clothing brand, you can segment your list based on gender. Women are not interested in men's wear, and men are not interested in women's clothing sales.
Inappropriate sending times
You may think that Monday is the start of the week and the most appropriate time to send an email marketing campaign. Actually, this doesnot work. Monday is when people trash out a lot of emails to empty their mail box for new emails for the rest of the week. Sending an email on Monday morning can lead it to not only get ignored, but the chances of getting deleted are also high. You need to figure out the best day and time to send marketing emails for the business you are running as it varies. However, Tuesday and Thursday mornings are considered to be peak days.
Ignoring Mobile Users
Most of the emails get opened on mobile phones. Many email marketers design emails that don't fit the mobile screen; however, best for desktop screens. These include font size or font style not appropriate for cell phones or the use of very large images that don't fit the mobile screen.
Ignoring proper formatting
Have you ever received your email in the form of big paragraphs, no attraction, no separation into bullets, only text and text? The probability of skipping such an email is very high. So, you need to craft a well-formatted email. Use bullets, bold and italicize your text where required, use colors and text separated by proper blank space.
Inconsistency with brand
People want to listen to your brand. Inconsistency with the brand, like using different colors than brand colors, leads the recipients to lose interest. You need to stick to your brand colors and should use your logo while crafting an email.
Hiding the unsubscribe link
Sometimes people don't want to listen to you and unsubscribe you to avoid getting your emails in the future. You must add an unsubscribe link so that such people can unsubscribe you instead of reporting it as spam or blocking you.