The Essentials of Email Marketing and Design: 5 Tips for Marketers and Designers

Design is vital to the success of your email marketing program. But what does “good” email design really entail? How do you ensure your message is seen correctly by your subscribers? And who is ultimately responsible for the look and performance of your emails?

Is it marketers? designers? The answer is yes to both.

Marketers and designers play an integral role in the success of email marketing design. Good email design is multi-faceted and comes in the form of collaboration from both marketers and designers. Marketers keeping their eyes on improved ROI, clickthroughs, and conversions need to collaborate and work in concert with designers thinking in terms of pixels, CSS, and HTML. Here are a few tips around both aspects of creating ‘good’ email—both from the perspective of a marketer and of a designer.

Five Tips for Marketers

1.   Start with a Design Plan – Planning is key to laying the foundation of a solid email marketing program. Understand and have clear goals around the purpose of the email, the value you’re providing your subscribers and the best medium to leverage.
2.   Know Your Audience – Clearly differentiate communication going to an internal vs. external audience, B2B vs. B2C and take into consideration the specific email clients you’re sending to and the region and common ISPs.
3.   Design for your Audience – No subscriber list is the same. You might have a large amount of regional ISPs, or a younger segment skewing the domain composition of your list. Before you begin designing, make sure you know the top domains on your list. Once you understand your audience, you’ll be ready to optimize your email accordingly, maximizing design effectiveness for the majority of your subscribers.
4.   Test and Test Again – It’s important to test your design across multiple email clients and ISPs to ensure your subscribers see what you expect them to see in both the HTML and text versions. Testing design for rendering purposes is important, but it’s also critical to ensure that your design is effective—leading subscribers to convert and support the email’s business purpose
5.   Measure and Optimize – After sending your emails, use key performance metrics to identify the level of success for each campaign. Every marketer’s key performance metrics will differ. Marketers might use a variety of data points to determine the success of their email design, including open rates, click-through rates, or unsubscribe rates.

Conversion rates can also be combined with web analytics to measure an email campaign’s success, in addition to other statistics including subscriber retention, sales cycle, or downloads. Use metrics that support your overall business, analyze the results, form hypothesis on the overall performance, and measure again on the next send creating a workflow of continual optimization across multiple campaigns.

Five Tips for Designers

1.   Keep Improving – Consider your design an ever-evolving, iterative process. What works today may not work tomorrow and just when you think you’ve figured it all out, “best practices” will change. Don’t let your design get static and be on the lookout for the next iteration.
2.   Think ‘Effective’ – A common misconception about design is that it’s simply aesthetic—only concerned with look and feel. The truth is that an aesthetically pleasing email design isn’t always an effective, performance-driven design due to image blocking and other constraints. However, an effective design can—and should—also be a beautiful design.
3.   Stick to the Basics – Be mindful that many web-supported CSS properties aren’t supported in email. CSS-based layouts are only successful in the most compliant of email clients. Your design will render more consistently when HTML tables are used for layout. Limit the use of CSS to inline styles.
4.   Remember the Text Version, Send in Multi-part MIME – Though most of your subscribers will view the HTML version of your email, some subscribers prefer to receive the plain text version of your message. Use simplified copy points, different capitalization techniques, and characters such as asterisks and dashes to create headlines and visually separate areas of interest.
5.   Design with Image Blocking in Mind– Plan how to best use graphics in your design. Images should act as a supplement rather than the main focus of your design. Even with images blocked or disabled, your design should be readable and the call-to-action clear. In cases where an image must be used, don’t forget to include “alt” tags in the ”img” tag. Additionally, it’s best to use HTML text and web-safe fonts wherever possible.

Marketers, we advise you to know your subscribers, to understand what they want from you and to deliver your messages when and where your audience wants to receive them. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of creating emails that render well across various email clients and ISPs.

Designers, the most important point to remember is that the email landscape is ever changing. Each email client is unique and has varying support for HTML and CSS. Until there are industry-wide standards in place, it will remain a challenge to create emails that will render effectively across the board. The best way to tackle this challenge is through frequent and thorough testing.

If you’d like more tips on designing great email from the perspective of marketers or designers or more details and great examples of the tips above in action please download a copy of our whitepaper Email Marketing Design & Rendering: The New Essentials.

You may also be interested in ourTemplate Size Guidelines document that gives you guidelines and specifics about dimensions to reference when creating communications based on the various template layouts we provide.

We hope you find these tips and resources helpful and that you will see success in your future email marketing and design efforts!