15 Tips for Designing a Marketing Email

Email recipients will often quickly scan information and are likely to just abandon any emails that don’t appear to offer them any value or have too much information that is going to take them a long time to get through.

Because of this, it is more important than ever before to have a great email design, especially nowadays, where people are getting more and more marketing emails from various businesses on a daily basis.

Great email design helps you grab the attention of your email recipients and engage with them. Email design refers to the process of designing and creating marketing emails that resonate with your target audience. It should be aesthetically pleasing, attention-grabbing, and consistent with your brand.

How to Design Email Marketing Subject Line

The email subject line is going to be the first thing that any recipient sees when you send an email to them. This is a brief statement that should be designed to get your recipients interested in opening the email and finding out more. Your subject line should capture the attention of the recipient so that they want to open the email and read more.

A great subject line should provide enough value to make the recipient want to open the email, grab their attention in as few words as possible, and summarise what they are going to read when they open the email.

Write an Interesting Pre-Header for the Best Email Designs

The pre-header of your email is a preview of the email, and the second thing that the recipient is going to see. You can customise the pre-header to provide an insight into what is included in the message.

Be Clear and Concise

Most of the time, people aren’t interested in reading deep and lengthy marketing emails. When designing an email, make sure that you are providing the recipients with the information that they want or need without going into all the finer details. Along with being easier to read, this demonstrates that you value your subscribers’ time, which can help to retain subscribers.

Stay On-Brand

Whenever somebody opens an email marketing message from you, it should be clear that it was sent from your company. Your email should always be branded. To achieve this, consider using a tone that complements your other marketing materials and content such as your social media and website, and using the same fonts and colours as you use in other marketing and branding materials.

Make sure that your logo, a website link and relevant calls-to-action (CTAs) are also included. This will help you boost brand awareness while boosting conversions.

Keep it Organised – Get Email Design Inspiration

A cluttered, disorganised marketing email is not going to get much attention and is only going to increase abandonment and even unsubscribe rates. Make sure that you organise the layout of your marketing emails with the user experience in mind.

Leave plenty of white space and make sure that all written and visual content is placed strategically to make it easy to navigate and read.

Include Personalisation

An email message should always be customised and tailored to your recipient. This will ensure that the message feels more personal, professional, and thoughtful.

Email personalisation is not difficult to do these days with plenty of tools to help you achieve this, and it will allow you to humanise your brand and encourage better relationships between your company and email recipients.

Ecommerce Email Design Inspiration: Include Visual Content

When recipients open an email, if all they are faced with is written paragraphs of information, they are likely to lose interest and attention very quickly. If your emails look like this, then it’s going to be hard to keep your subscribers interested in your message.

Instead, make sure that you include engaging, on-brand visual content such as images, animations, GIFs, videos, and more to break the written content up and provide a more interesting and appealing experience.

Sign up Design Inspiration: Add Some Emojis

Emojis might seem like an unprofessional or unnecessary addition to an email, but this really depends on the type of email you are sending and the kind of brand you run. In many situations, it can actually be helpful to add emojis to emails, particularly email subject lines, as this can actually help to increase your open and click-through rates.

Make Sure It’s Responsive

All marketing emails should have a responsive design, which means that the format of the email will change to fit the screen that it is being viewed on, whether it’s being read on a desktop device or a mobile app. Recipients will be able to view and read your emails easily no matter where or how they are reading them.

Use CTAs

Calls to action are necessary in all marketing emails to convert your recipients. You should add a CTA to encourage your readers to do anything that you want them to do as a result of the marketing campaign such as following you on social media, contacting your sales team, buying a product off your website, or reading your blog posts.

In marketing emails, all CTAs should be visible and enticing, and it should be made clear why the user should click on them.

Add an Unsubscribe Option

Bear in mind that email marketing is only an effective marketing tool if you are sending emails to people who actually want to hear from you. Along with this, it is also a legal requirement to have an unsubscribe button clearly displayed in your marketing emails so that anybody who is no longer interested in hearing from you can easily opt out.

Conduct A/B Testing

Marketing email design, like many other marketing strategies, is an iterative process. Most of the time, your first email design is not going to be perfect, and you might decide that changes and updates need to be made in order to make sure that you are getting the most out of your email design.

Whether that includes changing certain colours, adjusting the layout, changing the tone of your email or using a different CTA, A/B testing can be a useful way to determine which version is going to work best.

Create an Email Signature

A great design for your email signature is another way to add a more professional and personal feel when sending marketing emails. Your email signature shouldn’t just include your name; add some further memorable and defining characteristics about the company, your role, contact information and more.

It may also be worth adding social media links and a link to your website in your email signature so that recipients can easily click on these to find out more.

Find Email Template Design Inspiration

If you’re planning to get started with designing some marketing emails for your next campaign and aren’t sure where to start, the good news is that there are plenty of options for getting inspiration. A quick online search for email design templates will bring up a lot of options that you can get some great ideas from.

Marketing sites and educational blogs will often publish articles and videos with some ideas for email marketing designs based on what tends to get the best open and click rates and the most conversions, which can be an ideal place to start.

Email Marketing Inspiration Designs – Using Templates

If you use an email marketing tool such as MailChimp or MailPoet, you can get some inspiration for designing your marketing emails from the range of templates that are available.

These services are often an ideal place to start when it comes to designing your email marketing messages since they are experts in email marketing and know what works and what doesn’t and use this knowledge when putting together templates for their users to customise and use.

The best thing about using email marketing templates is that anybody can successfully do so even if you are a complete beginner. All you need to do is choose the template that you like the most and customise it so that it is on brand for your business and includes all the information that you want to put across to your readers.

You will usually have the option to change everything from colours and font types to the images and content that you add in an easy marketing email building tool that does not require you to have any coding knowledge.

If you want to start sending marketing emails to grow your brand, it’s important to consider how the design of your emails can impact your success.