Good email design focuses on driving conversions, not merely aesthetics. It is both a technical skill and an art, with coding, layout and rendering supporting the look and feel of an email, and all elements working together to motivate a reader to act.
This report, part of Econsultancy’s series of Email Marketing Best Practice Guides, looks at the principles that guide effective email design and the new challenges marketers and their design teams must conquer. It covers:
- Master templates: These are the staple of any marketing department’s email programme, allowing for the rapid design and deployment of campaigns. What are the key considerations for building and testing templates for different marketing emails?
- Persuasive design: Readers seek visual cues to help them digest content at a glance. What devices can marketers use to help draw the reader’s eye through an email to those all-important CTAs?
- Layout elements: Certain features within an email can be easily overlooked, but designers should pay just as much attention to creating eye-catching banners as they should to informational footers. Both can help drive engagement in different ways.
- Accessibility: As well as designing for different email regulations, marketers must ensure their emails are accessible to a broad audience of users. From accommodating dark mode to the inclusion of ‘alt text’, what are the key considerations that need to be taken on board?
- Pre-deployment testing: With the customer experience a key concern, how should marketers approach rendering and testing to ensure emails display correctly across different devices and platforms?