Category Archive: Stuff that’s stylish
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How to expand the reach of your campaigns on social networks
When I was 13-years-old, I thought I’d marry a Backstreet Boy. I had their faces plastered on my bedroom walls, and I knew their middle names and birthdays. Since I was such a big fan, I talked about them all the time because that’s what we do when we love something: We tell everyone.
Fans of your product, service or content are likely already chatting you up to their friends, and that can be very good news for your business. Take advantage of this by making your brand and message as visible as possible, and your fan base will grow even larger.
Need some ideas for expanding the reach of your email campaigns? You’ve come to the right place.
Post your signup forms (almost) anywhere
I’m always surprised to talk to Emma customers who haven’t yet made use of their unlimited signup forms. They’re included for free in your account, easy to create and allow you to pick up new subscribers wherever you interact with folks — in store (via a tablet at the register), on your blog, on Twitter, on LinkedIn and more. So, go ahead: post those forms all over the place and watch new subscribers roll in. When you create separate forms that filter to separate audience groups, you’ve built in automatic audience segmentation, so you can eventually send separate campaigns to your Twitter audience versus your in-store customers, for example.
Another way to attract even more new contacts? Offer discounts or exclusive content during the signup process, and then set up a trigger campaign to make good on that promise once they’ve subscribed.
Target your subscribers by interest
Just as you might send unique content to folks based on how you met them (or where they signed up), you can show subscribers how well you know them by setting up trigger campaigns based on their interaction with the first few campaigns they received from you. The Direct Marketing Association’s Email Experience Council reports that triggered campaigns had a 96% higher open rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 than typical email campaigns.
Let’s say folks clicked a campaign link to read about the seasonal trees your nursery just received (we’re fans of the pink dogwood, by the way). Set up a link-based autoresponder so those folks also receive information about soil treatment. When you connect with your audience in this way, they’ll be likelier to open your next round of campaigns — and to start telling others (via email forwards or social shares) about your campaigns.
Use email + social together
Stop using Facebook to creep on your college boyfriend’s recent antics (man, he really hasn’t grown up, has he?) and create a Facebook business account for your brand instead. Add a tab for your page, and post an Emma signup form to it. Set up a Twitter account and cross-promote your website, email campaigns and Facebook presence there.
With Emma’s social posting feature, it’s easy to post your email campaigns to your Facebook and Twitter pages, right after you’ve sent them to your audience. And make sure to enable social sharing in your campaigns, so recipients can click to share your newsletters on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Be likable
This one seems obvious, but seriously: Don’t be an email sender that your audience starts to ignore — or dislike. Prune your content for relevance, and stick to your editorial calendar. Ask subscribers how often they’d like to hear from you, and respect their preferences. Sending frequency — whether you’re sending too often or not enough — is the primary reason for opt-outs.
And make sure to treat brand new subscribers and your most loyal customers differently. New folks need an introduction to who you are and what you do, while your biggest fans likely want to get more involved in product sneak peeks, giveaways and events.
Remember, your audience is letting you rent space in their inboxes — so strengthen those relationships into something that builds your business. If you build it, they will come; if they like it, they will share.
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We’re giving you even more ways to perfect your email strategy: Download our guide to email marketing success.
Sexy, new-fangled email statistic
OK, maybe it's not new, but ...
Sometimes we get caught up in so many of the *other* reasons that email marketing makes sense, that we lose sight of the one that really matters: email works. The DMA estimates that in 2011, it brought back over $40 for every single dollar spent.
It’s staggering, right? While this $40 is certainly an average and not a guarantee, it’s a sign that if you learn about how to do email marketing right, you’re about as close to a marketing sure thing as you can get.
In fact, I feel like it’s almost unfair to put all of these channels in the same category for comparison. When you think of even the simplest of sales funnels, email is always happening much further down in the engagement process than most of these other tactics. It’s no wonder it’s more effective.
Your audience is engaged, they’re committed, they’ve indeed asked you to send them your marketing materials. That’s some opportunity. Make the most of it.
How can you make the most of it, you ask? Here are some tips and tricks from the Emma team:
- Designer Kelly McClain shares five tips for creating visually appealing campaigns.
- Kelli Liszka gives even more pointers for creating visual appeal.
- Susan Blue encourages you to tell your company story in the inbox.
- Hilary Smith writes about the effectiveness of landing pages.
- Agency relations member Cody De Vos highlights lifecycle mailings for different stages of the subscriber relationship.
If you have questions along the way, don’t hesitate to ask. We’d love to hear how we can help with your email marketing plans.
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Not yet an Emma customer? Send stunning emails that get noticed.
Email: the genre everyone reads
Tell your company's story, right there in those inboxes
Editor’s note: This post was originally published as a guest post on Social Media Explorer.
In many ways, content strategy is about finding the most effective and memorable ways to tell your story. And the inbox is an ideal place to do just that. The problem is, most companies send promotion after promotion, and they forget they’ve got a bunch of real humans out there just waiting for something worthwhile to show up. They forget to make things personal. They forget to make things interesting. Eyes glaze over. Expectations are lowered. Emails get deleted.
That’s a shame because email really is the genre everyone reads — inbox-checking is some kind of national pastime at this point, somewhere between baseball and apple pie. And if someone is on your list, they’ve invited you to their inbox. You’ve made a connection with them (yay, you!). So don’t become one of those automatically deleted emails. Engage those folks. How? Craft your campaigns with a story in mind. When you tell a story instead of just selling a product or promoting a cause, your audience tunes in.
Three ways to tell a story about your company
Tell a slice of your story
You know those email campaigns that are so broad they basically mean nothing? They may say something like, “Introducing our new collection: We have something for everyone!” or “It’s springtime, so come back and visit!” Yeah, don’t do that. It doesn’t give your audience anything concrete to think about. Instead, pull out one particular glimpse of who you are.
That’s exactly what the store Anthropologie does with this dreamy slice of an email. Before this campaign arrived one day, I didn’t know I wanted to “indulge in a land of lemon and cardamom.” But I do now, officially and forever. I’ll admit that I think about this email nearly every time I walk past (or, more likely, walk into) one of their store locations. Instead of selling clothes, those Anthropologie spell-casters lured me in with a story. Does everything they sell have something to do with lemon or cardamom? Definitely not. It’s a hook, and a poetic hook to boot.
Not every snippet has to be that evocative, though. Agencies can use this technique by focusing on one particular client success story. Nonprofits likewise can tell the story of one person they’re helping or one volunteer who’s making the world a better place every other Saturday morning. The New York Times recently ran a story about how one person telling her story about donating a kidney created a record chain of organ-related altruism.
Stories aren’t math, but they do add up over time. And, as my closet will attest, stories sell clothes.
Hint at a story that could unfold
Let’s say you sell scarves. You could send an email with pretty pictures of your scarves. Sure, why not? You could announce that you’re selling your scarves for half-price. Sounds fine. But your readers have likely seen pictures of scarves before, unless they’re living in some kind of dystopian society where the vampire overlords have outlawed scarves. (Note to self: Write next teen novel sensation with vampire twist. They no longer sparkle, but they hate scarves!) And they’ve also likely seen scarves on sale before. Again, unless … oh, never mind.
But what if you think of the scarf as more than a product? What if your audience could see themselves enjoying that scarf? You could create a stylish how-to video that shows how to tie that scarf and look like a sophisticated Parisian. Or you could take pictures of your customers wearing your scarves around town. Either way, you’re setting a story in motion.
Latch onto a bigger story to be relevant
The most obvious kind of relevance happens every time Valentine’s Day or any other holiday rolls around. But you’re not limited by the calendar when it comes to connecting what you do with whatever’s happening in the world. You can also look to current events. When everyone in the entire world seemed to be talking about the royal wedding last year, Saveur food magazine emailed tips and recipes for hosting a British afternoon tea. When legendary chef Ferran Adria announced he was closing his restaurant in Spain, one travel magazine included trip itinerary ideas for Barcelona in its weekly email a few days later.
By finding a connection to what’s already on their minds, you’re giving your audience a way to participate in whatever the bigger story is — you’re tapping them into the zeitgeist. They’ll appreciate you for that, and they’ll remember that you’re a warm human, not just a sender of emails with one promotion after the next.
So what’s next?
Set aside some time to think about the stories hiding amidst the products or services you offer. Help your audience experience what you’re all about, instead of telling them. This extra effort will give your audience a reason to pay attention — because, as everyone knows, even scarf-hating vampires find a good story irresistible.
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Become an Emma Agency: stylish email marketing for you and your clients.
Video: Quick tips for nonprofits
Spring break is behind us, and we’re moving toward summer. Whether you’re heading into your slow season or ramping up for a donation drive, now’s a good time to polish your email marketing campaigns. I’m here to share three tips for nonprofits to make the most of email marketing dollars:
- Put a donate button in every email, and link it to your online giving form. Our designers can build this into your stationery to ensure it’s never overlooked. Just as important — think about the placement of that button. It should be at the top, so even recipients who read your email in a preview pane have the opportunity to make a gift.
- Enlist help. If you have a small staff, consider asking a volunteer to manage your regular email campaigns. You can still send out timely event notices and fundraising appeals, but if the idea of writing a monthly newsletter is daunting, tap that board member with a marketing or writing background and let them run with it.
- Go beyond the newsletter. By using your Emma account for invitations, volunteer registrations, surveys and membership renewal notices, you’ll save money on extra services and vendors, and you’ll also probably save a few trees along the way.
I hope these ideas inspire a few of your own — if you have thoughts or ideas to share, please comment below. Or give us a shout over on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you!
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We’re giving you even more ways to polish your email strategy: See our guide to email marketing success.
Announcing a change to our opt-out process
A new required button allows subscribers to confirm their opt out
Editor’s note: This change actually only applies to customers who have been moved to our all-new platform. We’re in the process of migrating all Emma accounts to the new platform, which allows us to build and release new features (like the new opt-out process) more quickly.
I’m here to share a change to Emma’s opt-out process, effective today. Historically, unsubscribing from an Emma email has been a one-click process; a recipient of an Emma email clicked the opt-out link to unsubscribe immediately from the list. They saw this confirmation page:
This afternoon, we’re releasing one more step to the opt-out process: a simple screen with a required confirmation button to ensure that the recipient of the email really intends to unsubscribe.
Then, once the confirm button is clicked, they’ll see this page:
So why the change?
Well, we’ve noticed a recent trend of email servers implementing anti-phishing software to verify the authenticity of the emails they process each day (read more about phishing here if it’s an unfamiliar term). One of the ways this software verifies the email is by clicking through each of the links to make sure they don’t redirect somewhere malicious.
When the anti-phishing program clicks on Emma’s opt-out link during this verification process, the end recipient of the email is opted out before the email even lands in their inbox. By pointing the opt-out link to a landing page where another click is required, we’re adding a step beyond the email that the anti-phishing software can’t click on. It requires the button-pushing prowess of a real live human being.
Anti-phishing software is nothing new, but our research shows that these types of programs are being more widely adopted, and we didn’t want our customers’ subscribers to miss out on emails just because a piece of software was verifying an opt-out link. We put our heads together, revisited federal CAN-SPAM regulations to ensure we were following the law and email best practices, and revised our opt-out experience to address the changing email landscape.
Any plans for further changes to the opt-out process?
We never want to compromise our simple opt-out process, but we recognize that there’s always room to fine-tune things and help our customers better understand their audience’s preferences. Feel free to share your comments and suggestions here or via email. We’d love to hear from you.
Death to bot talk
Tips on voice for anybody who writes web stuff
Editor’s note: This post was originally published as a guest post on Social Media Explorer.
The bot problem
Let’s face it: most companies write marketing copy for the web and email that reads like it was written by a robot.
And nobody likes bots. (See: spambots, twitbots, fembots, that 80s movie with Emilio Estevez where all the semi-trucks come to life.)
photo by davedehetre
“The objective of our organization is to provide best-in-class e-commerce solutions that facilitate bottom-line growth.”
Okay, fine, but don’t you just help people sell more stuff?
When we marketing-types talk about content, we talk a lot about relevance and architecture and SEO optimization, but we don’t talk much about voice — that intangible quality in writing that shows off your company’s personality.
And that’s a shame, because voice drives how people feel when they read what you write. And when you can evoke a feeling in your customer, you’re closer than ever to a sale.
A few organizations have parlayed a memorable voice into brand distinction that delights their customers. (Moosejaw, Innocent Drinks and 826 Valencia come to mind right away.) But anybody can strengthen their company’s voice with writing that’s simply more conversational.
Three ways to fix it
Think, then talk, then write.
Writers often mistakenly believe that writing is about writing. It’s not about writing.
(It’s not about caffeine, either. Most days, anyway.)
It’s mostly about thinking.
When I haven’t thought enough about a piece, I know it. I find overwrought sentences, rambling paragraphs, lazy word choices and ill-advised Dolph Lundgren jokes. Those writerly fits and starts add up to a stilted, distant voice that bores readers faster than the plot of Rocky V.
To fix it, I call a smart friend and talk through my idea. A living, breathing audience asks questions and checks assumptions better than a blank page, and the dialogue always helps distill and refine my main points.
Best of all, it tricks my brain into approaching the problem conversationally, so I end up writing the thing considering what my reader wants, when she hesitates and how she reasons.
Ditch the multisyllabicness.
In email marketing — and really, in any marketing channel — your words have a few seconds to grab and keep your readers’ attention. And even then, people don’t really read so much as scan.
So when you write multisyllabic words overwrought into convoluted sentences with which one requires assistance in comprehending (you see what I did there), you lose readers.
Use simple words instead, words you can read at a glance. It’s the surest way to copy that’s warm and friendly since it reflects how we actually talk.
It helps me to read my stuff out loud. Thesaurus-y words and convoluted phrases might sneak past my eye, but my ear will catch them every time. If I stumble over a phrase, I rework it. If a sentence stalls the whole paragraph, I rework it. If it’s another Dolph Lundgren joke, I rework it (begrudgingly).
Okay, two caveats. First, we web writers have to keep our copy keyword-rich and shiny for the Googles, so if your industry’s vernacular includes five-dollar words, try offsetting them with straightforward sentences and brief paragraphs.
And second, I’m not suggesting you dumb down your writing. Keep your sentences varied, your adjectives meaningful and your verbs brimming with life. Just put clarity and brevity before the fancy stuff, okay?
Have fun. Seriously.
Although the cats are giving us a run for it, I believe humans are the masters of humor.
Humor erodes our defenses. It makes us feel good. It puts us on the same team.
These qualities are wonderful for humanity and whatnot, but they also come in handy if you’re trying to sell something.
Humor isn’t right for every brand, but it shouldn’t be reserved only for the energy drinks and beer conglomerates of the world, either. Add simple, friendly asides to your writing or build your whole brand around a laugh-out-loud silliness — whatever seems in line with your company’s values and goals. Either way, readers will know that there’s another person behind the writing.
You know, talking about humor gets a little humorless, so I’ll point you to an essay I came across earlier this month by author, writing instructor and all-around badass Anne Lamott. Her style keeps you reading and makes you love her, but her humor never upstages her point.
What’s next?
It’ll take you fifteen minutes to apply some of these thoughts to your latest blog post or a landing page. Try it this week.
When you do, remember it’s not merely writing. It’s your company speaking. And your readers aren’t merely listening to what you’re saying. They’re reacting to how you say it.
Show no mercy to robotic words and phrases. Replace ‘em with words that show your humanity. Shape and refine your company’s voice, and your readers will respond.
You’ll boost your pageviews, I promise. You’ll sell more stuff. And you’ll make the world a less robotic place.
Plan your next event with Emma’s help
Tools for creating invitations, managing RSVPs and more
Emma loves a party. And a webinar. And an open house. Emma’s a pro at planning events, and all the tools you need to promote, invite and create follow-ups for your own in-person or online event already exist in your Emma account (and are included in your monthly pricing) — no need to turn to a third-party solution to handle e-vites. Check out these simple steps for planning your next event with Emma.
Build anticipation
Leverage the power of your audience for event promotion. Send a special save-the-date campaign or simply include information in your regular newsletter. If you’re looking to expand the invite list, enable Emma’s social sharing tool in your campaign so recipients can share the event with their social networks. (And consider drawing attention to your signup form in the campaign so new folks can easily sign up to learn more about the upcoming event.) Emma will track the reach of your campaign on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so you can see where the most buzz is generated.
Craft a stylish invite
When you’re ready to send the invitation, you’ll be able to create it as a campaign in your Emma account — either on your custom stationery or by coding your own HTML. Or if you’d like our design team to create a new custom stationery for you, fill out our online design form. To help recipients remember your event (and add it to their online calendars), include a link to a downloadable .ics file. You’ll have tracking information at your fingertips when you send from Emma: see which invitees are receiving, opening and clicking on your campaign.
Find out who’s attending
So how will folks RSVP to your event? In the invitation campaign, simply include a link to a survey form. It gives recipients an easy way to RSVP, and it allows you to include fields for any information you’d like to gather from them: name, number attending and more.
Once you’ve collected details about who’s attending, segment your audience by creating a special group for confirmed attendees and one for folks that might need a follow-up invitation based on their responses.
Send a reminder
Emma’s handy scheduling feature takes the work out of event reminders. Simply create a couple reminder campaigns ahead of time, and set Emma up to send one a week before and another the day before your event. Include additional information, like directions or last-minute changes. Once again, the design and branding will be distinctively yours, and you’ll see who’s opened, clicked and socially shared right in your Emma account.
Thank them for coming
Once the event is over, don’t miss a great opportunity to strengthen your relationship with attendees by following up with a thank you note via email. It goes a long way to cementing brand loyalty. Plus, it’s an ideal time to get feedback. Simply tuck a new Emma-powered survey in the email and let folks rate the event. You’ll be able to view and export their comments right from Emma’s response section.
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If you have an upcoming event and you’d like to chat about the specifics of setting up any of these steps, feel free to reach out to us. And if you’ve already used Emma to plan a party, let us know how it turned out!
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Want even more ways to become an email marketing expert? Download our eight-steps guide.
Getting Emma’s new content editor ready to go
How usability testing and private beta are inspiring changes that you'll love
How do you improve the campaign editing process that 30,000 customers use daily?
Very carefully.
That’s why we’ve built in usability testing sessions and a private beta period before Emma’s new content editor is ready for prime time.
In the winter, we invited customers to try the first prototype in usability sessions at Emma. We looked for insights into how to make the editor easier to use and nip any confusing points in the bud. Geoff’s already written a great blog post detailing how we do usability sessions at Emma, so I’ll jump right into the new editor features and what we learned from watching customers use it.
Ch- ch- changes
Flexibility is the mantra for designing the new campaign editor. You want three images in your newsletter, no more and no less? No problem. You can just drag another one in. Need to bump your first article down a few slots? Drag the whole article where you want it and drop it. Get the picture? You’re going to have drag and drop control, ladies and gentlemen.
Oh, wait, you weren’t expecting that?
In our test sessions, however, we saw that folks weren’t dragging and dropping! It just wasn’t obvious on their first use, so we knew right away that there was an opportunity to improve that first time experience.
Watch this to test your awareness.
About half of folks who watch that video “fail” the awareness test. In our case, drag and drop was practically moonwalking across the screen for our design team, but our first time users were looking for something else.
Changes that you’ll love
Based on how we saw customers interacting with the campaign editing prototype, we made a few tweaks. Now we have clear signs that get you started on the right foot quickly (and get out of your way once you’ve got the hang of it).
Ready to drag and drop content blocks into your campaign? You bet.
What else are you going to love?
- Editing and previewing on the same screen, without having to click back and forth to save
- Arranging images in a column, row or grid, without having to switch layouts
- Adding background colors and borders to individual sections in the campaign
- The same Emma style and simplicity you signed up for
We appreciated the insights from our customers in the usability testing sessions so much that we opened up the editor to a private beta period. We’re asking early testers to tell us the good, the bad and the buggy — and we’re using their feedback to put finishing touches on the editor.
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New to Emma? Learn about sending stylish email marketing campaigns.
Do you read your emails from top to bottom? Me neither.
Get readers to focus on the stuff they want to read, and create quick landing pages with your Emma account
Confession time: I don’t read most of the emails in my inbox. I open them and scan them, but if the email is too lengthy or the content isn’t organized well, I’m likely to move on to the next unread item.
Short paragraphs or teasers are most likely to catch my eye, and they often end with some linked text inviting me to “read more.” Without even thinking too hard about it, I click the link and am transported to more engaging content on a landing page, which contains just the topic or article I’m interested in. The experience feels customized and personal, even though I’m controlling my path.
Think about your own habits in the inbox. I’m not the only email scanner out there, right? Take note of what compels you to read an email and click through to read more, and apply those practices in your own campaigns. And if you’ve never created a landing page before, here’s a quick overview of the basics.
So what exactly is a landing page?
Put simply, a landing page is just the place where readers land when they click on a link in your email. The purpose of a landing page may vary:
- Promotions may link to a product page on a retailer’s website.
- Invitations may link to a registration form.
- Newsletters may link to articles too lengthy to include in the body of the email.
How do I create a landing page quickly?
Sometimes you know you’re going to use landing pages (usually on your website) before you even start creating your campaign. But what if you want to create landing pages on the fly to shorten the length of your overall campaign, and you aren’t able to move the additional content to your website? You can use your Emma account to create a quick landing page on your branded stationery.
- Create a separate campaign for each “read more” link you plan to include in your email. Each campaign will contain the full article or additional material that doesn’t fit in the email you plan to deliver to your readers’ inboxes.
- Send each one of those campaigns to yourself. Doing so creates a link to an online version on your Emma response page, and you’ll need that URL for your “read more” links.
- Access the online version by opening the response for each campaign you just sent to yourself. Just click the “Online Version” link on the left side of the screen when you’re viewing your response overview. Your campaign will open in a new tab. Copy the URL at the top of your browser and keep it handy. This is your landing page link.
- Create the email campaign you plan to send to your subscribers. Add teasers in your content, each with a compelling reason to read on, and use Emma’s editor to link the teaser text to the online versions of your landing pages.
How do I make sure my landing pages are effective?
Smart marketers know how to take advantage of every online interaction, and landing pages are no exception. Here are some easy tips to ensure your landing pages are effective:
- Highlight your brand. If you’re using your custom Emma stationery, you’ve already got a branded framework for your landing page. The key is creating a consistent brand experience across all of your online channels.
- Add some pizzazz to your landing page. Consider these tried and true design tips from Kissmetrics’ Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page.
- Include something the email didn’t provide. You want to reward your reader for clicking to read on, yes? Don’t repeat what they just read in your email; give them further details — it’s your opportunity to really engage them.
- Create landing pages for your landing pages. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Just make sure your landing pages link readers back to your website, blog or Facebook page rather than making it a dead end.
- Pay attention to what readers are clicking on. A great perk of using Emma to create landing pages is that you can easily spot which links get the most traction in your response results. Use that knowledge to better understand what your audience finds compelling.
Want to talk more about landing pages? Let us know how these tips and how-tos work for you, or if you’ve got a few tips of your own to share.
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Like this article? Read more email best practices from Emma.
Meet Emma designer Elizabeth Williams
Elizabeth shares tips for customizing your email's format and making your content stand out
Elizabeth works ... and wears her thinking cap.
You’ve designed custom email templates for Emma customers. Templates frame content nicely, but what do you recommend for arranging the body of an email (its text and image fields)?
Great question. It’s best to have your content strategy determined before you get to design. Establishing a content hierarchy is so important when making complementary visual hierarchy decisions. Here are some questions to ask yourself about the content that will help to inform the design:
1. How often do you want to send?
Sending often might mean sharing just one or two stories per email. Sending a newsletter-style monthly or quarterly email requires you to give a bit more thought to how all the stories will come together — and how your design elements will support the story.
2. What do your subscribers respond to?
Do they tend to click more on image-based links or text-based links? Do they click on stories at the top of your email, or are their clicks dispersed throughout the email? Are they mostly mobile users? The answers to these questions will determine how you should lay out your content.
3. Is the amount of content you’ve chosen easily replicable?
For example, if you have four articles each month and you want an image to go with each, do you have access to great imagery that will support each article every time you mail? If not, you may need to rethink what you want to do there, or think about having an in-house designer create images that you can re-use. Or, ask the Emma design team. We love making designs that work for the resources you have access to!
4. How does your brand use imagery, and how can that imagery best support your story via email? Could you utilize custom image-based headings?
Image-based headings really add pop and personality to an email.
5. What’s your message hierarchy?
Do you have a featured article each time? Do you have a big image up top that spans the width of your stationery? This will help you determine if you’d like to use a similar story layout each time, or if you’d like to switch it up each month, based on the news at your company.
Other questions to consider: Can you reduce the amount of copy and let some images do the talking? Or better yet, can you create teaser copy that links to the full stories elsewhere? Can you use a sidebar for quick links, ad space or smaller supporting elements (as opposed to primary/secondary items in the content hierarchy)?
I find headlines, subheadings and body text hard to balance visually. When you design a stationery that’s meant to employ consistent headline and body copy (like Emma’s Agency Insider), how do you find the perfect balance?
A good headline is powerful. It needs to entice the reader, and it should be very distinguishable from the body copy. There aren’t really set-in-stone rules for this type of thing since there are many ways to achieve a good balance between headline, subhead and body copy. Here’s one test you can do: after you style your copy, scoot back from your computer and make sure the first thing you see in the text is are the headlines. If those are somewhat distinguishable from a distance, you’re on the right track. Typically, playing with bold, italics, text-based divider lines (using dashes, forward slashes or Emma’s horizontal rule tool) and color will all help to create the right balance, but always remember to self-edit.
Choose two or three styles to make each section distinct and stick with them. Don’t oversaturate your text with styling. If you use much more than two fonts, two colors (even accent colors), more than two or three font sizes, it’ll look cluttered. And just because I have your attention — no comic sans, please.
I’ve noticed that most folks stick to a clean sans-serif font, like Helvetica or Verdana. The Uppercase email (below) is a nice exception. Mixing font choices can be tricky, though. What holds this campaign together even though it employs a number of different typeface styles and colors?
Uppercase blends several fonts and colors in their email.
Also, since that particular copy is in letter format, the serif font gives it a more classic, formal feel which is in contrast to their use of a sans-serif in the sidebar for more ad-like copy; they want to get straight to business there. Within that serif text in the main well, they’ve highlighted what they consider the most important piece of information by changing the color of the type and using bold and italics when appropriate.
I like mixing sans-serif and serif fonts in headline and subhead copy. I typically prefer the headline to be in the serif font and the subhead in a sans (Georgia and Tahoma provide a nice mix), with a very obvious font size difference. Using that mixture lends a classic sophistication to any campaign, but always have your brand top of mind when making that decision.
Oh, one last thought — using a serif font within your sans text for a pull quote is also a cool way to use the mixture and give it a more editorial feel.
In last year’s New Year’s Resolution design, you chose a striking purple color to highlight several areas, including some of the header text. I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that this is also the shade of Claire’s lipstick in the design. But which came first? Did you isolate that color from the photograph? Or did you plan the color scheme, then adjust the photo?
Elizabeth's design uses a striking highlight color in the text and image.
Pulling a highlight color from a logo or photograph is a great way to bring the email together visually. But, at least initially, it sounds a little daunting to those of us without design chops. What sorts of tips and tools do you recommend?
Since Emma’s email tools are simply an extension of your brand, I think the most daunting part is making the foundational commitment to your brand. That is, choosing brand colors, denoting the primary, secondary and accent usage cases for each, the font styles you want to use, etc. Get together with your team to build a brand style guide, then find the specific color codes for the colors you’ve selected.
If you’re working with an Emma designer, we’d love to help with color selections, and we can provide the proper color codes to input when using Emma’s text editor. If you need a free, on-the-fly “color picker” check out Eye Drop for Chrome, or Colorzilla for Firefox. You can identify the HEX code for your color, then input it in the Emma text editor.
I also like free photo editing tools like Skitch, Gimp and Pixlr. With a little practice, they become pretty easy to use.
What is the Emma design team up to now?
We’re really busy — and really excited — to be working on a new template gallery for Emma customers. They’ll be able to choose from hundreds (literally, hundreds) of free readymade templates, then customize the look of their campaigns with their logo and brand colors. It’s a lot of work, and we can’t wait to unveil the designs soon.
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