It’s the era of digital commerce and convenience shopping.
Just about every online startup and brand is sending out emails and flooding the inboxes of their prospective customers vying for their attention.
With an estimated 330 million emails being exchanged daily in 2022, how can you ensure that your emails get opened and clicked on more often than not?
One of the ways is through great email newsletter design, of course.
Your email marketing strategy needs you to design eye-catching emails that build relationships at scale whilst adding revenue and profits to your business coffers. This blog post lays bare the most important tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies to help you get your email newsletter design spot on
Let’s take a look at the anatomy of a well-designed email campaign.
The 7 Foundational Elements of a Structurally Perfect Email
Depending on the objective you intend to achieve and the target audience, every email is different. However, across niches and diverse goals, well-designed email newsletters generally tend to be structured around the following key elements:
1. Email Openers
- Subject line
- Preview text
- From name
2. Header:
- Logo
- Headline
3. Featured Image
4. Email Copy
5. Call to Action (CTA) buttons
6. Footer
7. Overall Visual Branding
Let’s walk you through these essential email newsletter design elements one by one.
1. Email Openers
Every sale begins with a click, and every click begins with an open.
Email openers are a set of elements that are more text than design but nonetheless crucial, for they influence your email open rates the most.
- Subject line: Your subject line must offer either an irresistible benefit or be curiosity-provoking for the best results. Additionally, try to adopt a contrarian approach. E.g., if everyone’s sending with short subject lines, go with a longer one.
- Preview text: Also called the preheader or snipper, the preview text is a short piece of text that appears alongside (desktop) or below (mobile phone) the subject line and works hand-in-hand with the subject line to persuade you to open the email. Avoid the common mistake of trying to paraphrase the subject line, instead, make it add more intrigue and tension.
- From name: This is the name or label that appears in the recipient’s inbox as the email’s sender. It is displayed prominently alongside the subject line and is one of the first things recipients see when they receive an email. The From name helps recipients identify the sender hence it is crucial to choose a From name that is relevant, recognizable, and consistent to increase the likelihood of the email being opened and read.
2. Header
The objective of the header section is to grab attention, establish credibility, or both. It does it through the following key components:
- Logo: Use a high-quality, properly sized company logo that establishes your branding yet passes on the rest of the attention to the headline and the rest of the email content to follow.
- Headlines: This is strategically placed right at the top of your email below the logo. Always use benefit-driven or problem statement-based, direct-response language to pique the reader’s interest whilst using larger font sizes, bold styling, or color contrast to ensure that your headline stands out visually.
3. Featured Image
The featured image is the primary and most prominently placed image in your email newsletter design. Getting this right, especially in ecommerce, can mean the difference between listening to the payment received notifications ringing vs. hearing crickets.
Use high-quality images that provide both the best visual and the most relevant representation of your brand.
4. Email Copy
This text appears above or below the featured image and tries to make a persuasive argument for a click, either by talking about a problem that could be solved or promising a benefit that could be realized. There are AI-powered copywriting tools that can help you with this if needed.
Keep your email copy concise and minimal while also ensuring that the tonality, energy, and language of your email are in congruence with the occasion and your brand voice at all times. Just a few lines are what you need when whatever you are communicating is relevant and resonant.
5. Call to Action (CTA)
Whether it’s a hyperlinked text or a highly visible button, the objective of the Call-to-Action element is to encourage the reader to take the desired action of clicking through.
Use compelling, first-person, persuasive copy for the CTA text, including strong action verbs while also including scarcity and urgency, to motivate your readers to take that action now instead of later.
6. Footer
The footer section is one of the least visible portions of your email newsletter, yet when used wisely, it can add a great deal of value to your email campaigns.
Include your contact details if you wish, inject your social media links if you plan to increase your social engagement, or even include links that you believe could be relevant and helpful to the reader.
At a bare minimum, ensure that the footer contains a highly visible unsubscribe link that allows readers to opt out of receiving newsletters.
7. Overall Visual Branding
Visual branding in email newsletters is the contextual, consistent, and cohesive use of visual elements such as fonts, logos, featured images, background images and colors, and design style in a way that reinforces your brand’s identity and messaging.
Do it right, and it allows your recipients to easily and quickly recognize and connect with your business as a likable and trustworthy brand over time.
When it comes to email newsletter design, some best practices for visual branding include:
- Using a consistent color scheme: Using a consistent color palette that’s not only attention-grabbing but also one that mirrors your brand’s visual identity is a must.
- Logo placement: Place your logo prominently at the top of your email while ensuring it is highly visible against the chosen background.
- Enable visual hierarchy: Leverage the right use of colour, placement, and proportion among the various elements to guide and lead your readers’ attention seamlessly from one element to the other.
- Establish a consistent design layout & structure: Using consistent spacing and alignment apart from simple grid structures can create a visually organized, compelling look.
- Befriend responsiveness: Always ensure your email newsletters can be read and enjoyed from different screen sizes and devices. If required, test your emails across different operating systems, devices, and even email clients to ensure that everyone sees the best sides of your business at all times when you communicate.
Well, that’s about the different components of an email newsletter. Let’s jump on to some leading practices that can help make your emails even high converting.
9 Tested & Proven Email Design Tips
Email design optimization is the process of maximizing open rates, boosting click-throughs, and enhancing conversions by improving the visual and functional aspects of your email campaigns.
Here are our proven tips to help you make your email designs profitable:
Come Up With Must-Open Subject Lines
Curiosity may or may not kill cats, but it definitely gets humans to open emails. Use emotions to arouse a compelling urge to open your emails;
Put High-Quality Newsletter Templates To Work
Most popular email marketing platforms give you ready-to-use, mobile-friendly, templates that you can simply edit and send. For instance, you can have a huge library of premade templates within Sender tool.
Using premade templates can help build those great-looking emails faster without having to write a single line of HTML code.
Optimize Images For Speed
Compress all your images, including the brand logo, to reduce the file size without significantly losing quality. This will ensure faster loading times and a better user experience.
Optimize Images for Accessibility
Include alt-text descriptions for all images to ensure that even visually challenged subscribers find your emails accessible and useful.
This is also useful if the email recipient has disabled images or when the images fail to load. It helps convey a bare minimum message.
Optimize Typography
Use fonts that not only align with your brand’s personality but are web-safe in that they are easily readable across different devices and email client softwares.
Additionally, maintain a minimum font size of 16-18px for your email body to maintain visibility and readability.
Leverage White Space
Like in graphics design, the right use of white space surrounding key elements can give clean and uncluttered designs that are also highly readable;
Personalize to the ‘T’
Deploying custom fields to personalize your subject line, preview text, email headline, and body text can lead to higher conversions;
Optimize Your Email Copy for Readability
Use a strong benefit-driven or problem-poking headline and keep the rest of your body of copy concise and to the point;
Give Your Subscribers a Way Out
Include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the footer section of your emails. This not only helps you stay compliant with email laws, but it also puts your company at the forefront as an honest business that does only permission-based marketing;
Unleash the Power of Psychology
Psychological triggers can be powerful tools in helping motivate immediate actions and upping conversions.
If using Sender for your email marketing needs, you can use simple, mobile-friendly, drag-and-drop countdown timers to convey your urgency and scarcity signals in visually powerful ways.
Test, Test, Test
Send to a bunch of test email IDs across different screens (desktops, laptops, and mobile devices) and providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Protonmail, etc) to check for mobile viewability, readability, ease of use, and more, before sending your emails to the main list;
Conclusion
Email newsletter design is neither rocket science nor requires you to grapple with complicated design tools.
With a fair understanding of graphic design principles and conversion optimization tactics, it is possible for anyone to design compelling, high-quality email newsletters that bring in both eyeballs as well as a return on investment (ROI). If you’re looking for help designing your newsletter, you can consider hiring a graphic designer. The graphic design test is a great way to screen and identify top candidates.
Whether you are offering an email marketing service for major email clients or strategizing a welcome email series for your own brand, optimizing your email newsletter design is a must.
Using a great email marketing platform can help you leverage email newsletter templates that can put your email marketing on the fast track.
Furthermore, it is even more important to adopt a data-driven approach and continuously test, analyze, and iterate on your email newsletter designs for the best engagement and conversion outcomes.
Author Bio
Skirmantas Venckus is a writer by day and reader by night. He hates talking about himself in the third person. He is also the growth hacker at Sender.net – the email marketing provider that is focused on user-friendliness, affordability, and utility.
