iContact & Email on Acid - Email Design Essentials
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iContact email marketing and Email on Acid email render testing team up to discuss common email design questions, how to optimize your email templates, and optimize for the inbox.
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iContact & Email on Acid - Email Design Essentials
- 1. Q&A: Email Design Essentials - Your Questions Answered with Lauren Harold and John Thies
- 2. BEFORE WE BEGIN… Audio Issues? Let us know by typing a message into the questions box. Questions? We’ll address them during Q&A in the order received. Want the Recording? We’ll send a link to your email address within 2-3 business days. © 2016 iContact LLC. All Rights Reserved.
- 3. PRESENTED BY: Lauren Harold is Manager of Strategic Services at iContact. Lauren combines her love for marketing and extensive experience in account management to help iContact's customers create beautiful, effective email marketing campaigns that increase engagement, ROI and overall conversions. Lauren Harold John Thies is the CEO and Co-Founder of Email on Acid, a service that gives email marketers a preview of how their emails are displayed in the most popular email clients and mobile devices. He resides in Denver, Colorado with his wife and son. When he isn’t working he’s either on the golf course or snowboarding in the fresh Colorado powder. John Thies © 2016 iContact LLC. All Rights Reserved.
- 4. How can marketers use animation effectively?01. QUESTION
- 6. NOT supported in Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 for Windows First frame should include crucial info & CTA Animated GIFS [continued]
- 7. CINEMAGRAPHS
- 8. 26% GIF emails increase a click through rate up to
- 10. How many products should be included in email? What number is too much? 02. QUESTION
- 11. IT DEPENDS…
- 12. What are the top 5 best CTA Practices? 03. QUESTION
- 13. Size MATTERS
- 14. How MANY?
- 17. CTA Placement
- 18. What are bulletproof buttons and why use them? 04. QUESTION
- 20. How has mobile influenced email layout? 05. QUESTION
- 21. Single COUMNS
- 24. Why does email look different in different clients and how can marketers ensure their emails look great across all of them? 06. QUESTION
- 26. v 80% of emails are deleted if they don’t render correctly of those people will unsubscribe DID YOU KNOW… 30%
- 28. What are the most common template trends and how can marketers ensure their templates don’t go stale? 07. QUESTION
- 29. SCALABLE
- 30. FLUID
- 31. RESPONSIVE
- 32. v THIS JUST IN…
- 33. FLUID-HYBRID
- 34. What’s a good text to image ratio? 08. QUESTION
- 35. AVOID using an all image design
- 37. What are the best practices around social share buttons?09. QUESTION
- 39. QUESTIONS? © 2016 iContact LLC. All Rights Reserved.
- 40. THANK YOU! © 2016 iContact LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Notas do Editor
- Another super easy way to give the illusion of video in email is to use the ever-popular animated GIF.
- support and how-to
- Do they work? Yes. Experian has reported that 72% of their clients who have used animated Gif’s or cinemagraphs in emails see higher transaction-to-click rates. And last year Dell saw a 109% lift in revenue when it tested an animated gif campaign. Unfortunately, animated gifs don't work in Outlook. All you'll see of an animated gif in an Outlook client is the first frame of the gif. While that's a significant limitation (especially for B2B marketers, who usually have a larger percentage of Outlook users than B2C marketers), there is a work-around. Just create a first frame that also works as a static image.
- Do they work? Yes. Experian has reported that 72% of their clients who have used animated Gif’s or cinemagraphs in emails see higher transaction-to-click rates. And last year Dell saw a 109% lift in revenue when it tested an animated gif campaign. Unfortunately, animated gifs don't work in Outlook. All you'll see of an animated gif in an Outlook client is the first frame of the gif. While that's a significant limitation (especially for B2B marketers, who usually have a larger percentage of Outlook users than B2C marketers), there is a work-around. Just create a first frame that also works as a static image.
- Prospects are opening less than 24% of promotional emails. You have 8.25 seconds to capture your audience’s attention. 80% of people don’t actually read your email, they skim it. There is no right answer to this question as it varies based on the goal of your campaign. With studies showing that prospects are opening less than 24% of promotional emails, and the amount of time you have to capture an audience’s attention is 8.25 seconds , it’s important to get to the point, and fast. That’s why with every campaign you make, you need to define one goal around it. Whether the goal be a click, a share or a monetary transaction, your end goal must be supported whether you feature 15 products or 1. Industry also impacts how many products you showcase. For example, if you’re in retail it’s common that more than a single t-shirt or dress would be highlighted in the email. When you open an email from your favorite clothing shop, you want to browse the new items they have, instead of just staring at a single pattern or design. Other questions to ask yourself when you’re deciding on the # of products to features is, “Is this a brand new product you’re launching?” “Are there monetary goals tied to the campaign?” If so, you wouldn’t want to distract from your new product by throwing in other shiny objects to distract the reader from you #1 purpose. If you overwhelm your audience with clashing products and CTA’s that interfere with one another, they won’t be able to consume the information in the short window of time you have. Finally, it all depends on email layout. If your email layout embraces negative whitespace and uses lines to create order, it will be much easier to feature multiple products. However, if the format of your email isn’t clean and orderly, anymore than 1 product will look like too much because of poor design.
- Color elicits emotional responses from individuals. If you know what emotion you are trying to evoke for a conversion, understanding the psychology behind particular colors can be an incredibly useful tool. THREE DEEP made a fantastic clockwork conversion color model laying out how to use all the colors in your email or landing page in unison for maximum effectiveness. From the chart above, you can decide what your CTA color should be based off of the main color in your template or vice versa. From the graph above, you can see that if you have a blue background, an orange CTA is recommend to maximum conversions. Choosing the right color can have a great impact on the success of your campaign, but it’s important to remember that color is very dependent on personal experiences. So test, test and test again to uncover the color that will speak the strongest to your audience.
- 85% of email clients block images by default. That means that unless your readers opt to download your images, they might be missing your primary call-to-action. In order to ensure your message gets across loud and clear, code your buttons to be bulletproof through HTML. Above is an example of a campaign we sent out when image blocking is on. As you can see, the buttons are still visible! For the code you need to create bullet-proof buttons that are visible in the most popular clients and devices, visit http://bit.do/bulletproofbutton
- single column design. Using a single column will help your email to fit the screens of smaller mobile devices well, and it also allows you to draw the reader through your content in a linear fashion.
- Having a clear and concise message should be a staple of any email, but it’s even more important when designing for mobile. Screen real estate is very valuable on mobile (this is going to be a common theme), so keep the design very clean and simple and focus on the essentials.
- Make sure your text can be read easily. Use a minimum of size 14pt font for body text and 22pt for headlines. We also recommend using a strong contrast of colors, like dark text on a light background. Many people turn down the brightness level on the mobile device to help conserve battery—and they are often reading on the go outside in the sunlight—so a strong contrast of colors will be easier to read.
- Every email marketer has their own pre-send checklist of sorts, but far too often marketers miss the mission-critical step of thoroughly testing their email across multiple devices and clients before setting a campaign to send. Many think ad-hoc testing their email by sending a test to their iPhone or Gmail inbox will do the job, but this isn’t always the case. Why? Because every email client’s rendering engine is NOT created equal. Almost every email client displays HTML differently because each client has its own unique way of interpreting your HTML. That is why your HTML code can get all jacked up in different email clients even though that very same code looks like pixel perfection in another inbox. For example, your text could be left justified in Outlook but look beautiful in your Gmail client. If you don’t test to diagnose coding and deliverability issues before you send, your marketing ROI could take a major hit. Above is an example that even bigwigs like Google can forget to thoroughly QA their email before they send. And on the right, here’s another email display mistake with this section’s vertical alignment off.
- Testing platforms like Email on Acid allows you to test across the most popular clients and devices in minutes. When you run your email through our platform you can start a test by sending directly from your ESP, building your email within our Email Editor and seeing your test results all in one place, copying/pasting a URL or uploading a zip file. Within seconds of running the test, previews of your email will appear, allowing you to trouble shoot any issues you see on the fly. Plus we offer a code analysis of the different clients to give you solutions to common code issues and recommendations for solving them. You can even mark up issues you see within the actual test results and share the results with your co-workers to put your workflow of troubleshooting and fixing client quirks on overdrive.
- Scalable design can be defined as any design that works well across both desktop and mobile without using code to adjust table or image sizes, or display or hide content between the two platforms. typically the easiest to implement. Since scalable emails don’t adjust the widths of tables or images between devices, and don’t use CSS media queries
- Mobile technology is an integral part of our daily lives and there’s no doubt about it, your subscribers are opening emails on their phones and tablets. If your emails aren’t responsive, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of the market. 71.2% of readers will immediately delete emails that don’t display correctly. That’s why designing email also means designing for mobile first. The first way to design for mobile first is keep your layout simple. To do this, make sure you utilize a single column design. Using a single column will help your email to fit the screens of smaller mobile devices well, and it also allows you to draw the reader through your content in a linear fashion.
- Another good trick to keep in your tool belt is hiding content on mobile. This can be especially useful for content that links to a page that's not mobile friendly. If it's not the main objective of the email, you may want to just hide it from mobile users. This can really improve your click-through rate on your main CTA, by just giving mobile users less options. Above is the code to do so!
- Another good trick to keep in your tool belt is hiding content on mobile. This can be especially useful for content that links to a page that's not mobile friendly. If it's not the main objective of the email, you may want to just hide it from mobile users. This can really improve your click-through rate on your main CTA, by just giving mobile users less options. Above is the code to do so!
- A best practice floating around the emailsphere is that marketers should have a 60/40 text to image ratio in their email file for optimal deliverability. To find out if this was fact or fiction we made 16 different content-only files that ranged from 168 - 111,190 characters. It wasn’t technically possible to test an email with 0 characters because it would have no content, so our smallest was a bare bones email at 168 characters. We then cloned each file three times and added images so each email had either no images, one image, two images or three images. Previous research showed us that image size does not affect deliverability, so we did not vary the image dimensions in the tests. By leveraging our SPAM reporting, which tests against 23 of the most popular SPAM filters, we found that if your email has 500 characters or more, content to image ratio does NOT affect deliverability! This finding was contrary to what we'd heard from many marketing resources, so we were surprised to say the least. All of the emails we tested with 500 characters or more got the green light from all the SPAM filters, regardless the number of images added. It’s critical to note that HTML emails of 500 characters or less are very rare. SPAM filters probably have no problem flagging emails under 500 characters as SPAM because emails structured around this character count usually are SPAM! A SPAM email often consists of 1-3 sentences with a single link within it. It took me about 5 seconds to search in my junk folder to find a SPAM email structured this way. Check it out above. So, don’t send emails under 500 characters and your text-to-image ratio won’t affect deliverability.
- Even though the number of active users on social media is constantly on the rise, 77% of consumers still prefer to receive permission-based marketing through email! That’s why you shouldn’t look at it as either social or email in your marketing strategy, use both and integrate these channels together. A great way to do that is by adding social share buttons within your email template. This allows you to take your email marketing beyond the inbox with a quick and easy way to share your emails on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can place Social Sharing buttons anywhere on your email. The most common place to place them is towards the top of, or, the bottom of your message. If the goal of the email isn’t to have the reader share your email, you may want to stick it down towards the bottom as to not distract from your main CTA. Here are some other tips when integrating social share buttons in your template: Provide text alternatives to social share buttons - Always design your email template so that there is a text link alternative for joining or sharing content via social networks. It may seem unnecessary, but you will absolutely see improved social sharing if you do not rely on images in order to convey the message to your users or subscribers. Use a CTA — otherwise your subscribers simply might not realize what you expect them to do. Incentivize - If you want your subscribers to share your newsletter, give them a good reason to do so. Size - To be effective the button needs to be noticeable. Too small is not worth including at all – no one will look for it. Test social buttons and link placements as there isn’t a right or wrong place to put them.