The basic layout of your campaign is very important. The images, color schemes and content help readers identify what type of company you are, how creative your business is, and where your values lie. Every company’s email campaigns are different, and that’s simply because every company is different. Ensure your campaign is user-friendly and has personality, as though you’re meeting your reader in person for the first time. Remembering that your layout is a direct representation of your company is the key factor in motivating and guiding designers to create a campaign that accurately exemplifies your company’s character and ideals.

1. Simplicity

It sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many email marketers make this mistake. From a reader’s perspective, a cluttered email is uninviting. If marketers use too many colors, images, or content, it is more likely that the campaign will overwhelm their readers, causing them to ignore or delete it. This basic and vital concept has popularized in recent years, which is the reason why the simple minimalistic design style is one of the most beloved by email marketers.

2. Images and Text

Simplicity and valuable content go hand in hand. Another aspect of this fundamental design tip is ensuring that whatever content you provide is necessary and imperative for the main purpose of your message. If there isn’t a specific goal to your company’s campaign, this means that you are sending a generic email to your customers, with the hopes of driving traffic to your website. When it comes to establishing customer loyalty and deliverability, this is not ideal. Protect your brand name and reputation by only producing and sending content that your readers want to read.

Images play a key role in campaigns as well. By balancing out your images and text, your campaign will look clean, enticing and organized to readers. Based on eye-tracking studies, research shows that readers focus most of their attention on the left-hand side of the page. It also showed that most people are drawn more to images than to text. Email marketers can utilize this information by either placing images on the left-hand side of page, or by placing visibly appealing images within their email campaigns. Moreover, a very crucial tip to keep in mind is to always provide “alt text” with images, in case those pictures are unable to load on your reader’s email. Email marketers have a very small window when it comes to capturing their subscriber’s attention. It would be catastrophic to a campaign’s success if images didn’t load and your email wasn’t readable without pictures – so plan accordingly!

3. Call To Action

Another important tip is to provide calls-to-action at the beginning of your campaign. Since the attention spans of your readers are commonly very low, positioning a call-to-action at the top of your email will more likely lead subscribers to where you’d like them to go. Another useful positioning technique is to place a second CTA at the very bottom of your email for subscribers who made their way to the end of your campaign. This will make it more convenient for readers to direct themselves to your website without having to scroll up again to the initial CTA. The goal is to ultimately elicit a response from your readers, which in this case is in the form of clicking on your CTA. Make these buttons large, noticeable and compelling!

Researchers found that vibrant colors attract people’s attention the most, such as red, blue and green. The color red is one of the most used colors in marketing due to its powerful effect on customer’s attention. Creating a red CTA–as long as that color goes along with your overall branding–for your readers could be a huge advantage. Other studies have also shown that the color blue is commonly used by marketers who want to instill trust in their clients, and green promotes a sense of warmth and comfort. Simultaneously, the color green subconsciously reminds clients about money and wealth, establishing this color as an all-around practical resource. Utilizing vibrant colors such as red, blue and green, in conjunction with other complementary colors will be extremely useful when it comes to driving customers to click on your CTA.

4. Titles, Section Headings and Footers

The title of your email is the first thing your subscribers are going to see. Use pivotal terms that will encourage customers to read more. As mentioned before, if each of your campaigns have a specific purpose and goal, then it should be clear which aspect of your email should be highlighted in your title. Once this is decided, focus on producing a concise and engaging phrase that illustrates the true character of your company. Same advice holds true for your subject line.

Section headers are essential in breaking up the content of your message, and in highlighting the crucial ideas that are presented in your campaign. Eye-tracking studies have found that readers focus primarily on the left-hand side of the page and skim content rather than read word-for-word.  For this reason, section headers are useful in helping readers navigate through your message, and increases their chances of seeing something that catches their eye.

Footers are the content placed at the very end of your email. This is your chance to provide contact information and an unsubscribe button for readers who would like to be removed from your emailing list. It’s necessary to have only subscribers that want to receive your information in order to build strong personal relationships, and to promote positive word-of-mouth marketing. Just because the content in this section is usually mundane, doesn’t mean the design and writing tone can’t match your brand.

5. Responsive campaigns

A beautifully crafted campaign should be responsive on any device. Nowadays, most people view majority of their emails from their smartphones. Pew Research Center has done a colossal amount of research on this topic, showing that 88% of people viewed their emails at least once on their smartphone. It would be unwise to create a campaign that wasn’t responsive to a mobile device, because you would essentially rule out the chance of properly communicating with the majority of your mailing list.

The truth is, today’s consumers and decision makers live in a multi-screen, on-the-move world. Responsive email design is about more than just looking good on any screen; it is about being accessible to your contacts whenever, wherever—delivering an experience that meets their expectations.

– Mailify US CMO, Eric Krattenstein

This is where an email marketing software provider–that’s mobile-responsive–comes in handy once more. First, it’s important to distinguish between mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive designs. If an email service produces mobile-friendly designs, that just means when viewed on mobile the campaign is resized and minimized to fit on whichever device you’re using without “breaking”. This has major drawbacks because the majority of the time, this results in your reader being unable to read the content or text within the images without having to zoom in on the message. Since reader’s attention spans are very low, the likelihood of them making an active effort to read your campaign is not likely.

Mobile responsive email software, on the other hand, is able to rearrange images and content appropriately for the specific device you’re using. In other words, a responsive email campaign shows different layouts of your email to different recipients, based on their device. In Mailify’s EmailBuilder you have the option to view how your specific template will look on different devices, like computers and smartphones. If there’s a certain display issue for one particular device, you can always go back and change the part of your template that’s not viewing properly, before sending your campaign. This eliminates the fear of sending a faulty campaign, and enables you to be well-informed and conscious of how your subscribers will interact with your campaign.

Ensure you are utilizing this remarkable marketing resource properly by following these five basic design tips for your future campaigns. Using Mailify as your email marketing software provider will allow you to easily create responsive designs, send, and track campaigns successfully. It will also guarantee that you will have an incredible customer service team available to you whenever you need help!

Get to know Mailify by downloading the app for free! The first 1,000 credits are free for new users, with no credit card information needed. Contact our customer service if you have any questions–as always, we are happy to help 🙂