As a small business owner, you probably understand that getting customers to engage with your email campaign is a big factor in its effectiveness. How do you design a campaign that your customers will want to read regularly? There’s one key word in that sentence: Design.
If you’ve been sending plain text emails to your subscribers, you might want to rethink your strategy. HTML emails might sound scary at first, but they have advantages that plain text just doesn’t offer. And online consumers are more responsive – one study shows that HTML transactional emails got a 50% higher click through rate than their plain text counterparts.
Trying to brand your campaign or show off your products? HTML can do that and more in your emails. Here’s how to harness that power in your own campaign.
Brand Your Campaign
HTML gives you style control over your email messages so you can design them to reflect your brand’s online identity. You can add images – like your company logo – and use background colors and fonts to match your site design.
LivingSocial uses strong branding techniques in their emails:
Their emails use the same fonts and a layout that’s similar to their website in addition to including their logo at the top of every email. Carrying your brand’s online personality through to your email campaign helps your customers recognize and recall your brand more than plain text emails could.
Learn more about branding your email campaign with HTML:
Make Yourself Memorable: Branding Your Email Campaign Email Design Tips: Leverage Your Logo
Show Off Your Products
Sometimes an image shows more than words can say. Designing your email with HTML allows you to add images to your message – images that can display your products, like this example from Serena & Lily:
Images in email aren’t just for retail stores to display their wares. Designers, artists, photographers, restaurants and other service industries can take full advantage of images for their businesses too. Think before and after shots, examples of your artwork, or photos of your menu items.
Learn more about using images in your campaign:
Are You Using Images Effectively?
Add Video To Your Emails
If images amp up your email’s marketing capabilities, video takes it to the next level. Using video in your emails is the perfect way to engage your customers with helpful, useful content. Using HTML, you can use a screenshot to link to your video in your email, like Steve Spangler Science does here:
Videos make your message more dynamic and engaging, excellent selling points for your business.
Learn more about using video in your emails:
How To Send Video in Emails
New Way to Send Video Emails?
Make People Keep Reading
Remember how HTML gives you more design options than plain text? One way to use this design power to your advantage is to create an eye path teasing your customers to read through your entire message. Here’s an example of how Lomography implements this:
This email uses a big leading image and text that’s half on the “fold” – the area of the message that displays before the reader has to scroll down to read more.
Laying out your message around the fold like this engages your readers’ curiosity, enticing them to scroll down through the rest of your message.
Unlike text, HTML emails can tease your customers to read more.
Give Your Message More Visual Impact
Even a simple, clean HTML design can give your message more visual impact than plain text, using different fonts and colors for emphasis.
TimeToSignOff, a daily curated email, uses simple design and font sizes to break up content and headlines:
