The success of a company depends on how we succeed in creating a lasting impression in the minds of a customer through our electronic communication medium. Any brand needs to identify its target client and make an impact that is visual, engaging, and leaves a lasting impression on our client’s mind.
There cannot be a better option than the electronic media, to have a quick and apt mechanism, a message/statement that can reach the potential masses in a most effective way and in a minimum amount of time.
What Email Marketing is all about?
HandySends Email Design & Development
Email marketing has been a proven medium behind successful brands, for decades. It depends completely on the expertise and experience of the technical service provider, who creates, designs, and distributes these emails on behalf of the companies and enterprises.
Several criteria make an email design and development campaign a successful exercise.
Apart from the content used for email marketing, other key elements give the email its identity. Email design and its development have been layered in ten simple parts, so it is easy to understand and chain the progress.
Key Elements of Email
- Look & Feel
The design of the email page plays a vital role in the entire success story. The modern-day designers have been very innovative with brilliant ideas that make the entire presentation most appealing and attractive. The bottom line is that the content of the email page should attract the attention of the target customers, which means the 1st impact is the most vital. It’s a matter of a few seconds; the customer makes a presumption about the brands, after just getting a glimpse.
- Attractive and Colorful
This is another vital component to make a mailer/newsletter more appealing to the customers. The use of colors leaves a psychological impact on the human brain and makes it more appealing & attractive. The service provider should know what the right choice of color for a particular product should be.
- Simplicity Wins
The simplicity of the design and the subject should be the main mantra when a mailer/newsletter is created. The entire page should not be a cluster of ideas and convey multiple things that confuse a customer, to a point that he decides to leave the page and dump it. A simple and smart statement leaves a lasting impact on the human brain. Also important is to ensure the language used is simple and crisp.
- Use of Appropriate Fonts
The designers have to know what is the best font to be used in an emailed page so that it does not create issues of alignment. It is also important to know if the fonts are compatible with the common ESPs available, like Gmail, Hot mail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. Similarly, the fonts used in the page have to be uniform and size, widths & height.
HTML Compatibility
There has to be in-depth knowledge of the compatibility of HTML page design and the ESPs. Often it becomes a challenging task if the right balance is not struck. The designer should know how to design an HTML page so that it looks great on all platforms, across all the ESPs. It’s a tricky business but the key to success lies in the experience of the designer.
⦁ Know your Competition
It’s a key winning point to know which ESPs your customers are using to view emails posted/send by your competition. For example, if your target audience views all emails on Outlook, then your coding has to be such that your emails open smoothly without any interruption on an outlook page at one click with no indication of spam or any other notification.
- Logo
If you have a Logo and you want to display it on your email page, we highly recommend that it should be of appropriate size. The Logo should be visible on the email page as one of the points of attraction for the customer. Email design does largely complement the logo and its positioning.
- Layout Design
As simplicity remains the keyword, the design email layout should be such that it’s compatible with most of the common platforms / ESPs. Some emails have multiple column layouts on the email page. It often makes the page much more difficult to skim. Also, a multiple-column page design may not have the clear rendering that you want with alignment issues. Another important aspect is the usage of table tags. It’s seen that table tags are more compatible across all platforms and email clients instead of div tags.
- Perfect Width
An experienced email design developer would always recommend a width of 600 pixels so that the rendering and fitment in the page are just perfect and the size fits perfectly across all email service providers. Even if your email is displayed in less space due to the display mechanism of a particular service provider (Example Outlook), your emails can be viewed perfectly.
- Styles
If you want to make a unique style to your HTML page, you can apply Inline CSS. You assign CSS to a specific HTML element by using the style attribute with any CSS properties defined within it. You would never want an email service provider to detect your page as a potential security threat and your email land upon the junk box. It’s highly recommended that all styles should be Inline and not have an external style sheet.
It is important to view your email on different screen sizes & handheld devices, one cannot ignore the fact that your emails would be viewed or opened on a mobile device or any other desktop/laptop or digital screens. To fit the size of the mobile screen and to enable a flawless rending of the complete email on the mobile screen, it is advisable to set the media query to a width of 480 Px. Also at the time of design, the email designer and developer have to be aware of the way your emails are to be viewed, either on a PC or handheld device. A responsive email is the best that be desired to yield the best value for money.
Remember, testing your email before launching is important after all the hard work is done; now it is time for the test run.
A responsible email designer or a developer would test or run the emails simultaneously on multiple platforms, which were of any doubt. There are several tools available to check it so that the rendering is flawless across all service providers. Litmus, Email on Acid is a few names of the tools that can do the tests. It is important to know how the email page would look before it lands in your client’s Inbox.
What are you waiting for? Put the important insights into proper use and get your work going….
Are you all set to start?
