Email Message Design and Setup

 

Email Message Design and Setup

An email message that looks awful is unlikely to help your business. Design is a direct reflection of your brand and company, so every email message you send should accurately support your brand promise. People are very visual, and design is the first thing they see when they open your message. Make sure you choose an email marketing tool that enables you to easily create professional-looking messages. There are four factors you should consider as you compare email marketing service providers. They are templates, customization, mobility, automation, and campaign setup.

Templates

Fortunately, email marketing providers solve this problem by providing attractive templates that you can use to create your messages. You don’t need to be a designer to use them. Most often, these templates are easy to use, using a drag-and-drop editing tool. You simply move the sections around, add new sections where you need them, add your text, upload images and you're done. Look for an email marketing provider that offers a variety of templates as part of your subscription rather than as a separate add-on that you must pay for. 

It is important to note that recent studies have found plain text messages that have not been highly designed but rather look like standard, personal email messages perform better than highly designed HTLM email messages with lots of images and colors.

Customization

Templates are great, but sometimes you want even more customization for your email marketing messages. In that case, you need an email marketing tool that allows you to change all colors, move elements anywhere you want, add images and videos in any way, and modify the code used to create your messages’ designs to the tiniest detail.

You need to look for an email marketing tool that makes its application program interface (API) code available so your programmers can build and integrate exactly what you need and when you need it. For example, if you want to automate a process but need your email marketing software to communicate with your internal project management software to do it, then your programmers would need access to your email marketing software’s API to build that custom integration. Keep in mind, this is not something that most small businesses need, but if you’re one of the companies that have a need for extensive customization, it could be important to you.

Mobility

Every day, more people open and read email messages on mobile devices, so it’s important that your email marketing messages display and function correctly on smartphones and tablets. This should be a priority. With that in mind, choose an email marketing provider that prioritizes mobile.

Automation and Campaigns

Here’s where email marketing really becomes powerful. Different email service providers use different terms to refer to individual email messages vs sequences of email messages. Email automation is a sequence of messages that are sent out based on actions that people take, such as submitting a form or clicking a link. Automation includes simple email responders, such as thank you messages sent after someone submits your subscription form. Campaigns are sent manually and include one message since there are no messages sent automatically after the first.

For example, you might create an automation that goes out when someone requests you a new free ebook. The first message could include the link to download the ebook. The second message could be scheduled to go out, two days later with useful tips, and a third message could go out three days later after that with a discount on a product related to the ebook topic. On the other hand, you would send a campaign each time you send out your weekly newsletter. These are one-time messages with no follow-up messages or other automation attached to them.

Look for an email marketing provider that makes it easy for you to send one-time campaigns and automated sequences of messages. Many ESPs provide drag-and-drop tools to quickly set up automation, including what actions trigger them to start, when messages should be sent, and even what messages people get depending on what they click within the previous message or other behaviors. You can get very advanced with automation, and as your email marketing program grows, you’ll want to use these features. However, you need to choose a provider that offers them.

That’s all for now, my friends. See you all in my next article.

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