Marketers short on time and resources have developed shortcuts to crafting emails, but the most common of these methods can seriously hurt performance. Fortunately, there are alternatives that can help, and you can improve performance by altering your approach based on whether your company is CPG, eCommerce, or B2B.
Common Mail shortcuts that hinder performance
First, let's see what's wrong.
Mistake: Image-based emails
The biggest shortcut we see is brands relying on image-based email sends, which means they don't incorporate live text, dynamic elements, or personalization — for example, they can't swap out a specific image, customize the text, or dynamically insert loyalty points.
Sure, image-based designs are brand-approved and quick to produce, but in addition to the creative limitations and lack of personalization, they turn off many people who never download images in their emails in the first place — and they're completely non-ADA compliant.
Mistake: Poor rendering
Your emails should look beautiful on mobile and desktop, and we’re not expecting that in 2024. But these days, you need to consider and test how your emails will look across different ESPs, devices, and settings (e.g., dark vs. light mode).
We've also seen some brands offer overly streamlined, overly simplified templates that minimize rendering issues but do nothing to benefit the brand. The best-case scenario is to create a compelling design that is on-brand and includes a rigorous QA step that renders the email across all variables.
Mistake: Truncation
If you're a Gmail user, you know what I'm talking about here. Sometimes your email gets truncated before it gets to the end of the text – not because the text is too long, but because the code is too long. If your message gets truncated when you test how Gmail displays your email, see if you can send the same amount of information with less code.
Read more: The 8 biggest mistakes in email marketing and how to avoid them
Building a brand-friendly foundation for your email creative
Creating compelling emails that look good across your entire audience takes time. Instead of starting from scratch every time, we recommend a template approach: design templates with email building blocks that fit your brand perfectly, then review, approve, build them to dynamically pull in your own content, and test them to look good across the variables listed above.
It's a lot of work at first, but it saves an incredible amount of time in the long run. When constructing a base of building blocks, the work comes down to choosing the right blocks and bringing in the right images, avoiding the rendering and stiffness issues mentioned earlier.
Once you have a foundational template set up, you can really increase the level of personalization by putting together an archive of images that help you appeal to different audiences (kids vs. general public, groups vs. individuals, etc.) A balanced mix of lifestyle images, product in use images, product bundle images, etc. will give you a lot of great options for matching your email list segments with relevant email creative.
Another thing to consider is whether you need different email themes. SaaS companies might need different designs for their enterprise and free starter products, especially if the products are branded differently. This scenario is rare, but if you can identify different themes that require some foundational creative work before you build your emails, you'll be glad you did when the day comes.
Learn more: 5 Effective Ways to Level Up Your Email Marketing Design
Fine-tune your approach vertically
Different industries have different user expectations, so you need to incorporate that into your email design.
- B2B relies heavily on process and explanations, requiring text-heavy design and dynamic visuals. (And remember, we talked about rendering earlier, but B2B users are much more likely to use Outlook, so make that a platform you test on consistently.)
- With CPG, it's important to embed your brand into the user's lifestyle. For a food brand, this might take the form of recipes.
- For brands with a strong social standing, delivering relevant messaging around relevant holidays (e.g. Earth Day for eco-friendly brands) is a smart strategy.
- In e-commerce, users want to see CTAs, promotions, and even items they left in their cart.
Deeper Look: How Persuasive Email Design Impacts Ecommerce Customer Experience
Create high-performing, brand-approved email designs
Running email campaigns in a hurry or with scarce resources often leads to skipped QA and poor design, so it should be avoided whenever possible.
In the rare situation where you need to act quickly, taking the time now to build design blocks and rigorous QA processes will ensure you have high-performing campaigns when the time comes.
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