Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing continues to be the most popular direct marketing channel for businesses around the world.
With that comes a lot of competition in your customers’ inboxes seeking their attention, meaning you need to stand out amongst the sea of other marketing emails.
Discussed below are some of the main areas you should consider, to ensure your marketing emails not only reach your target audience but look great on different devices.
Fonts
Too many typefaces can make your emails look messy and load slower. When designing a marketing email, it’s usually best to stick to using just one or two web safe fonts between size 10 to 12 points.
This helps ensure that fonts load easily and quickly on different devices, while reducing the clutter.
The longer your email takes to load, the less likely the customer will read the email.
Columns
Multiple columns may look great when building an email on a large desktop screen, but it’ll show a different story when viewed on a mobile device. It’s always the safest option to stick to one column in emails to reduce the chances of overlapping elements, rendering the email illegible or making links unclickable.
Two column designs often look better and give more flexibility for design but require a lot more testing to be confident it functions well on all devices.
Conducting appropriate testing to see what design works best for you and your email lists will guide you in your decision to design single or two column emails.
Bought Contact Lists
Avoid any contact lists being sold by third party organisations. Not only are they often not GDPR compliant, but they can also contain outdated and poor-quality data.
Contacting customers that did not opt in to being contacted is a great way to damage your brand’s reputation. The more reports of spam your emails receive, the more likely it is that any future campaigns may have worse deliverability.
Bought email lists are not only made up of poor-quality data, but the engagement rate will also be low as your contacts won’t be exclusive.
It’s always best to internally build and maintain your own contact lists, made up of customers who wish to receive your marketing emails. While it’s more time consuming, updating and cleaning your own lists will give better results in the long run.
The Fold
The fold is the invisible line between what the customer sees when they open an email and where they have to scroll down to view.
Keeping the important content, such as your main marketing message and the call-to-action buttons above the fold is always best practice.
It’s always important to consider where the fold is on certain devices and screen sizes, so testing is a must!
Testing
A lot can go wrong when building emails on platforms. Links, images and elements can break and overlap, while certain elements may not show at all in some apps and browsers.
It’s incredibly important that before any email campaign goes live, that it’s rigorously tested on different devices, browsers and operating systems.
While an email may display perfectly in the Gmail app on an Android device, it may not load the way you want it to on iOS or Outlook on desktop.
SmartSend
SmartSend simplifies the creation of highly complex emails with bespoke content sections, personalised to each customer. It allows for vast customer sets and extensive data permutations. SmartSend also allows you to communicate with customers via Direct Mail and/or SMS.
It provides clients with the flexibility they require to process sensitive communications within the privacy parameters that are required from both a legislative (GDPR) and risk point of view.
Are you preparing to alter your email communications strategy with better, more reliable templates? If so, contact us today on +353 1 8041298, or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form.
