Visually appealing emails win every time

How to make your email pop in the inbox

We’re big fans of style, particularly when it comes to making your email stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes. Your brand is unique, and as you’re crafting the perfect email, pay mind to carrying over the look and feel of that branding you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Let’s focus on some ways you can improve the look of your campaign without breaking a sweat. Implement these, and your subscribers can’t help but pick up what you’re putting down.

It all starts with a branded stationery design. A custom stationery will add polish to your marketing message. And whether you have a keen eye for HTML or don’t have a clue about design, we have options to make sure your brand stands out in the ocean of emails an average person receives each day.

• Make use of Emma’s world-class design team. One of our designers will work with you to create a design that reflects your brand’s personality. A custom, recognizable stationery establishes your campaigns in the mind of your customers, so they’ll take the extra moment to pay attention. Request your own Concierge-level Design or Studio Design today. Oh, and do you already have a stationery design, but want to freshen things up? It’s a good idea. Read about one customer’s email makeover.
• Make your own stationery header, DIY-style. Even if you’re not a Photoshop pro, you can use a tool like Picnik.com to create your own stationery header, which can be uploaded into a blank stationery. If you’re particularly fond of your design, our design team can also turn it into a permanent stationery option (removing the need to upload it each time). Submit your design through our online request form and we’ll get to work.

Consistency is key. When your campaigns have a consistent look, both throughout your email and also from one campaign to the next, your readers will become familiar with your style and appreciate it. Find a format that works for your brand to make your campaigns more readable. If recipients recognize and grow to trust you, the odds are in your favor that they’ll take the time to read what you’ve got to say.

• Format your text to work for you, not against you. You may be a fan of bright, bold multicolors, but they don’t always work in an email — at least not when it comes to its main text. Leave the rainbows behind and create a consistent look to your campaigns with a nice, readable font type, color and size throughout the email, perhaps with an accent color thrown in to draw attention to links or important bits of information. Your judiciousness will make your email easy on the eyes and also keep the attention of your readers.
• Consider putting a little work into your images on the front end. A consistent look and size of images will create a campaign that is pleasing (and easy!) to read. Our image editor offers the option to resize images to small (120 x 120 pixels), medium (240 x 240 pixels), large (360 x 360 pixels) and x-large (480 x 480 pixels). If these sizes don’t work for you, or if you need to crop the images, we recommend Picnik.com, an easy-to-use online image editor where you can upload, resize and save your images (and also add fun filters, text and borders), and then upload them to your campaign.

Your email is good enough to eat — so make it easy for your readers to digest. We’re busy. We’re bombarded with emails, social networks, phone calls, texts, you name it, all day long. If you have a lot of information that needs to be sent in an email, you can help out your readers by using a table of contents and landing pages to get them to the good stuff a little faster.

• Use a table of contents to help your readers get to the articles they’re interested in right away. A table of contents at the top of an email can easily direct a person to exactly what they want to look at without needing to scroll through everything. You can use Emma’s jump link feature to easily add a table of contents to your campaign.
• Use landing pages to tell the rest of your story. It’s an email, not a novel. Landing pages and “read more” links are used to shorten the email that’s sent to a person’s inbox while still giving them the option to click to view all of your content. It’s also a great way to measure the popularity of your content with Emma’s click-through reporting. Read about how to create a quick landing page using Emma.

Of course, there’s always a little wiggle room for you to add your own stylish flair to your email campaigns, but if you keep these tips on your radar, your emails will be runway-ready in no time. And if you’ve got some more tips for creating visually appealing emails, please share in the comments here.

This is part five in our holiday series where we answer email marketing questions provided by our customers. Visit part four here.

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