Improve your Email Marketing Campaign with these Five Layout Tips
The subject line is designed to get your contacts to read your emails, but too many email marketers stop there and do not spend enough time on creating successful layouts. Most email advertisements are too cluttered and messy or too plain and boring to be effective. These five tips will help you improve the layout of your email messages and increase click-throughs and conversions.
Use simple graphics. You want to catch the reader’s attention and what better way to do that than with an attractive, colorful picture of your product or service. The problem is that most graphics can be confusing and unclear with the message they send. Research shows that you only have seven seconds to deliver your message in an email. If your graphics are too vague, too complicated, or too numerous, then you will not be successful in getting the desired response. The best graphics are simple ones.
Many email clients will disable pictures and other graphics when a reader first views a message. If you are using images as the main way to interest your reader then most of your readers will not be interested. The graphics must add to other elements in the message, and more importantly, the reader must be motivated to click to show the images. Because graphics take longer to load than text, you do not want to overload your messages with images that will take four or five seconds to load - remember the seven second grace period? Keep graphics to a minimum - limit each message to four images.
If you can encourage your readers to click on links in your email messages then the email service providers will recognize your messages as legitimate and not spam. Having multiple links in your messages will encourage your readers to click on them and thus improve your reputation as a real email marketer. Place several links in each message - as many as seven is ideal.
Just as with graphics, you want to be judicious in how you use copy in your messages. Readers are even less motivated to spend their attention span on copy than they are on graphics. If you keep this in mind then you will always remember to be quick and to the point with the limited copy that you do use. Keep things on a low reading level and do not write long paragraphs - like in this article. A few lines of well thought out copy will serve as a teaser to get your readers to follow your links to a landing page where you will have fewer constraints on your words. In email messages - use copy simply and sparingly.
Testing is a must. Run split tests on everything you do, so you can find out what your readers respond best to. Every campaign will be incrementally better if you get in the habit of always A/B testing your layouts - as well as other elements.
Another way that you absolutely must test your emails is to do a trial run before you send a message to all of your contacts. Sign up for all the main services your contacts use and first send your messages to your own accounts. You will learn two important things from this test. First, not all email clients display messages the same way. Checking to see how they appear in the browsers will prevent you from wasting a message. The second thing to look for is deliverability. If one message gets filtered by a particular client, it will likely get filtered for everyone who uses that client. This test is well worth the effort. Remember - test, test, test, both A/B and trial.
Email advertising campaigns are an art as much as a science and taking the time to work on your layout and find what works will pay huge dividends. If people open your email and then do not respond because of a poor layout design then you have missed a golden opportunity. The effort to improve layout is well worth the investment.
Want more email marketing tips, then visit Steve O’Bryan’s site and also learn how to choose the best email marketing campaign software for your needs.
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