We’re on a real roll with email-related posts–see our tips here and here from the past two monthly columns–and since good things happen in threes, we thought we’d cap the series with some email tips related to design.
Mobile matters most
As I said in October, your analytics may not tell the whole story when it comes to mobile. You undoubtedly have a significant portion of your audience who, even if they open your email on their desktop, will have done triage on a mobile device.
They may not engage fully with any non-essential email on their mobile device, but they’ll prune anything they can while they’re waiting in line at the pharmacy, the deli, or the doctor’s office.
The key is to not give them any excuse to lop you out of their inbox. You want to survive to the desktop where engagement for an email newsletter is more likely.
That means testing on mobile devices to ensure your email lays out nicely on mobile devices and lays out in a way that makes it clear what value the message contains. As I said in October, relevance is likely to be the deciding factor between survival and deletion.
Stick to a single column
This might seem like it belongs above in the mobile section, but even on desktops, many email programs have so many other panes open that the inbox itself is pretty narrow. Make it easy for folks to scroll through your messages in one direction. And make it easy (or easier, at least) for your coding team to make the emails work as well as possible on all devices and email programs. The more complicated your coding gets, the less consistently it will display properly across all devices.
Design is in the details
The desire to keep your coding simple likely means you’ll want to keep your design simple. That doesn’t mean it has to look like a page from Craigslist. It does mean you should place a premium on great typography and design details that aren’t as intricate as you might have on your website.
Go big or go home
Home as in your website. (Though probably not to your home page.)
That is, you should think of email newsletter as either a digest that includes highlights from that week’s (or month’s) content, or as an opportunity to dive deep into one topic.
If you go deep, you’re giving your audience everything they need right there in their inboxes and you’ll want to think about a call to action that goes beyond the information you’ve presented.
If your approach is to create a digest, you’ll need to stick to executive summaries for each topic, and Read More links back to the full articles on your website. For most marketers, those articles should also have calls to action (CTAs) that go beyond the article’s content, but those CTAs are likely to be different than the CTAs you use in your emails.
(Your decision between digest and deep-dive should be based on the A/B testing you’re doing. You are A/B testing, right?)
