Email Design (Someone not so famous)

Fact – The right Email Design is crucial to the success of your campaign.

Some questions on email design to consider :

• Is your email design representative of your core business design value and guidelines?
• Has content and imagery been positioned within the email to ensure you get the best results? Has it been designed to maximize key real estate within the email campaign?
• What is key real estate?
• Is it designed so that it’s easy to work through and click in and out of?
• Has it been designed to convey a message if the recipient has their images switched off?
• Has it been created in an html format that has been tested and you know will render in the recipients inbox?

If you’re a business to business marketer going out to a supplier database to talk about your products or services, you can almost certainly get away with a pre-templated solution that may only require a design refresh every 3 to 6 months by a graphic designer BUT if you’re a business to consumer marketer, more often than not, you’ll need to design each campaign according to the campaign brief.

The design strategy necessary for your emails will depend largely on the type of communication you are going out with, for example, if you’re emailing a Monthly Book Club, it would be wise to make each email look similar to enable the person anticipating it’s arrival to quickly identify the piece. However, if you are a fashion retailer with seasonal changes to your ranges, it would be more appropriate to design to the season, the clothing, any themes around the range, integrated campaigns etc.

It never ceases to amaze us when we meet email marketers that have been using the channel for the past 5 years and are calling us now to enquire about pricing to refresh their email template. The odd thing is that these companies often have a beautifully designed website, meaning every time a link is connected back to that website there is awful display of brand disconnect and inconsistency.

As you can see by the opening questions, designing for email is niche, to get the best delivery, rendering and best response, our advice is engage a specialist in the field, after all….

Someone famous (maybe Winston Churchill) once stated….”if you’re website and email communications are crap, the perception is often that your business is the very same thing”!