Email is the easiest, fastest, cheapest, and potentially the most effective way to connect with your customers. The way you design your emails has the biggest impact on how well you are able to reach, communicate, and interact with your customers.
Emails, when opened, give you a brief opportunity to create an impression on your customers. Just like how the first time you meet someone, first impressions are important. By designing emails that your customers love, they’ll open them again and again, driving customers to your website and generating sales.
With the rise of mobile phones, email opens are as diverse as ever, ranging from phones to tablets to desktops and other clients. As you can see, mobile opens have largely been increasing as the use of mobile devices has been on the rise.
Tip #1: Be Transparent
Customers appreciate it when they know who the email is from and what it contains. Take the two emails below, for example. One email clearly indicates what it contains and the other is vague to try and wrongly entice the customer into opening the email.
Tip #2: Be Consistent
Come up with a standard practice for designing your emails so your customer doesn’t have to struggle to decipher them. Make your emails easy to read.
Some ideas for consistency, include making all of the buttons in your emails big, so they can easily be clicked by older users or someone on a phone with a small screen. Additionally, use colors that build brand recognition, and bold important titles and information. Make sure links are far away enough from each other so that a customer doesn’t actually click the wrong link by mistake.
Tip #3: Say More With Less
People are often in a hurry, and customers, once again, especially mobile, don’t have the time to read long emails. Keep your emails brief and to the point. Don’t load them down with unnecessary verbiage.
If your email has a purpose, get to the point. The more time spent building up to the point, the more likely the reader is to just move the email to the trash.
Tip #4: Be a Skim Enabler
Let’s face it – sometimes people don’t have the time to read an entire email. By making your emails easy to skim, you allow your readers to still the important content without having to read everything.
The best way to enable skimming are to use bulleted lists, headlines, and clear indicators of what really matters. See the email below from Geico demonstrating this (although the button could use some work).
If you’d like help designing emails to please your readers, we’re here to help. Using email design tools such as Constant Contact allow you to get the most bang for your buck and maximize your reach.
We’ll have more tips coming soon! Stay tuned.
