Designing High-Performing Email Campaigns

Nowadays, when it comes to promoting a website on the Internet, many companies employ both SEO and SEM marketing techniques. The former is a good way of improving your site’s rankings both in the short and long term. The latter, when supported by a tremendous power of Google Adwords is one of the most effective tools to supply your website with that much needed traffic.

But what do those enterprises often miss out are all the benefits of Email Marketing. It’s fast, convenient and very effective way to find new customers online. In year 2014, McKinsey & Company made an interesting conclusion. When it comes to finding new clients, email marketing was found to be 40 times more effective than customer acquisition via Facebook or Twitter. In our opinion, this is one of the many great reasons why companies should consider email marketing in their current and future marketing plans.

The proceeding sections of this article are going to introduce you to 10 best practices of crafting a well-designed email templates which will help you in achieving specific marketing goals and targets.

So without further ado, let's dive into it!

Best practices for designing a winning email template

1. Ensure your messages have optimal dimensions. One of the main characteristics of a good email are its optimal dimensions. Always remember that your job is to capture the user’s attention right at the moment he/she sees the preview of your message. Therefore, it should contain your own value proposition, call-to-action, and any important information. Apart from the need of formatting your letter, try to avoid any graphical elements which can potentially fail to display in one of the popular email clients.

2. Make your links visible. If your mailing campaign is targeted towards an improvement of the site’s CTR, pay attention to the links. They should be clearly differentiable from the other parts of the message. How to make your links stand out? Either make them underlined, bolded or highlight those elements in a different color.

Visible Links in the Email

3. Insert as few images as possible. Images are no doubt one of the best ways for illustrating the unique features of your product or service. However, when it comes to crafting your message, always remember that some of your potential customers will not be able to see them. Another important suggestion is to accompany your pictures with the respective alt tags to ensure those users who would not see images will at least be able to read their alternative description.

4. Don’t stuff your messages with too much text. The best converting mailing templates should contain a detailed product description which is considered to be one element to trigger customers’ attention. However, we would like to advise you not to include too many details because your sales pitch will have a greater chance of either (a) going straight to the Junk folder before being opened by a potential reader or (b) bore your users with too much information. Instead of that, give your potential customers a short text-based presentation just to get their initial attention and offer a link to a page with more information. If you succeed with the former task, your readers would be willing to step forward to learn more.

5. Make it easier to unsubscribe. According to US and European law, if you are engaged in any mailing activity, your readers must have an option to unsubscribe from the electronic mailing list by either hitting the “Unsubscribe” button or sending you an unsubscription request. Don’t force your users to report you as a spammer. It is much better to stop any unwanted activity as requested and come back later with a personalized pitch.

The Unsubscribe Link in Email

6. Create personal touch on the subject line and email body. This means using your reader’s First and Last Name in the subject line and email body. It will take time to make your emails personal but also repay itself with the higher probability for the email to be opened and read.

7. Make your email format easier. Try not to use any complex CSS styles. Some of the popular email clients might have troubles displaying your texts and pictures in the correct way. This especially concerns the email’s body and subject line. However, if you absolutely must use CSS, insert all of your styles as inline CSS.

8. Avoid using spammy slogans. Spam filters can sort all of the upcoming emails according to their content. Therefore, your job as a marketer is to use as few spam words as possible in order for the email to have the maximum probability of reaching the subscriber’s email Inbox. Some of the examples of those spam slogans include the following statements “Act now! Don’t hesitate!”, “Free Access”, “Click here” and so on. If you absolutely have to use those words, do that moderately. Otherwise, avoid using them completely.

Emails with spam subjects. Credit: wordstream.com

9. Ease the actual email creation process. Let’s consider the following situation. Your company owns an online store and there is a need to change something in the content of the emails you would like your business to promote with. Normally, to make those changes in bulk, you would need to write a lot of new emails which will obviously take an effort. But for the purpose of changing your emails in bulk, what you can do is to use some of the Email Templates Manager extension for Magento 2 which are currently available on the Internet.

10. Perform some prior testing. When you are done creating a new template, test your emails by sending them to a small group of friends, colleagues or relatives before delivering your message to your final customer. By doing this, you will get a chance to make sure that the whole message will be displayed across the most popular email providers and (b) the actual email will get to the user’s Inbox rather than his/her Junk folder. After that, you will be able to make all the necessary text adjustments to your future campaign both quickly and easily.

Conclusion

So there you have it. In order to enjoy the most successful email marketing campaign, you need to create the best converting email templates. The most important things to keep in mind are their optimal dimensions, personal touch, visible links, right amount of content and links and the possibility to unsubscribe from mass email campaigns.