Improving Your Automated Emails
Automated emails (also known as triggered or behaviour-driven emails), are email messages automatically sent from an organisation’s email service provider (ESP) in direct response to an individual user’s specific actions made on your website or app.
Email automation continues to be a very popular way for organisations to build their brand, establish credibility with an audience and keep customers engaged with products and services.
Discussed below are some of the many ways to improve your organisation’s automated emails.
Responsiveness
Emails are viewed on different devices, browsers, apps and screen sizes. Your automated emails need to adapt to each of the devices’ variables to ensure it’s being displayed appropriately, with no elements overlapping.
Regular testing of your automated emails on different devices and platforms can help your organisation know where changes need to be made.
Knowing which devices your subscribers are using to open your emails will help you determine which devices you should be testing and what type of design works best.
Design
Matching the look and feel of your email’s design with your other marketing material is a great way of ensuring your audience recognises an email immediately.
Selecting the right colour palette that matches your branding and ensuring the company logo is visible will instil a sense of familiarity upon opening the email.
It’s also important to consider whether to use a single column or multi-column design. Single column design is a simpler approach and is less likely to cause any accessibility issues but restricts how creative you can get with your email design, compared to a multi-column approach.
Ensuring your emails are skimmable is a great way of getting your message across. Text and image heavy emails can be overbearing for recipients, potentially negatively impacting your future open rates.
Clear CTA
If your automated email intends to invoke an action from the recipient, a clear call to action (CTA) is necessary. A call to action is a key element on an email, acting as a signpost that lets the user know what to do next. Without a clear CTA, users aren’t likely to visit your website or go beyond opening the email.
As you want the call to action to be seen immediately by the recipient, your primary CTA should stand out in your email. Styled like a button using a contrasting colour to the background and placed above the fold to avoid needing to scroll are all effective ways of including a good CTA in your automated emails.
Personalisation
Effective personalisation has been proven to increase open rates and drive revenue by as much as 760%.
Automated email messaging should be humanised and not look like an obviously automated email which has been sent to thousands of others. The use of merge tags is an effective method of improving personalisation and humanising the messaging of the email.
Including the recipient’s name, company or even recent items purchased/viewed is far more likely to catch the attention of the reader, rather than a standardised canned message.
Accessibility
With approximately 15% of the world population suffering from some form of disability or impairment, accessibility needs to be greatly considered when designing your automated emails.
It’s incredibly important that your automated emails are easy to view, read and click for those with disabilities.
A complicated email design may look good to some users, but if it’s not accessible to all it can have a negative impact on your current and future campaigns.
Are you preparing to alter your email automation strategy in 2022? If so, contact us today on +353 1 8041298, or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form.
