Intentional Email Design

Christina Noll — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 20:55:32 +0000

In Anne Lamott’s bestselling book Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life she recounts a story of how her brother, aged ten at the time, struggled to complete a report on birds he had put off until the last minute. Her father consoled him by explaining that the task would only get done by taking it, “Bird by bird.”

Sometimes, when we look at our list of emails that need to go out, it can feel overwhelming. But we, too, need to remember to take it “Bird by bird,” or one step at a time. When you design your email intentionally, without rushing, you produce a better email–one that is ultimately engaging to your audience and renders correctly for viewing on all types of devices.

One way to facilitate the process is by creating a template, such as the one used by Hyde Park Jewelers in the three examples below. This template started from a custom HTML email campaign that tracked good results, and the digital marketing team liked the layout. Jason Meeker, Strategic Partner for RootedELM, took his custom design and converted it into a Campaign Monitor template. Jason continues to work with the Hyde Park Jeweler’s internal designer each week on coding and design recommendations. Since then, Hyde Park Jewelers has been able to save time on design and editing because their designer uses the layout specs to create the design assets and messaging.

Once your template is in place, take each email you create and put it through the checklist:

- Determine the CTA: why are you sending the email and what action do you want your viewer to take?

- Customize your template: each email should be unique with a variation of assets and content.

- Test for rendering: just because your email looks good on your screen doesn’t mean it will look good in your customer’s inbox.

- Test links: double check they work the way they should and link to the right URL.

- Conduct an A/B split test: subject line, time of day or asset placement – which version received the most engagement? Send to your remaining audience.

- Monitor results: is the template still producing the results you need? Tweak before your next scheduled send.

As you can see the email layout is the same but the assets changed based on the goal for the email. It’s important to note that all of the text and CTA buttons are text and not images. The subscriber will know what the message or CTA is without having to download an image.

Template Talk: Migrating to Templates

Jason Meeker — Thu, 26 May 2016 16:37:57 +0000

In our first post of our template talk series, we talked about how and why we took a template developed by Litmus and converted it for our client. Today, let’s talk about taking a bespoke HTML campaign and converting it to a template HTML format. Templates aren’t the answer to everything though. Here are four key points to keep in mind when planning for and developing your email campaigns:

1. Develop a template for each type of email you send.

Sit down and think of every email you’ve sent over the past year. Now add to that any additional campaigns you’re wanting to add over the coming year. This is the minimum number of templates you’re going to need.

Each of these templates are going to look similar while addressing the layout needs of each individual campaign. This allows you to focus on the content of the email without trying to re-invent your email design every time.

2. Templates can be broken.

Just because you now have templates doesn’t mean you no longer have to worry about specifics. Even the best templates can be broken.

You can place content in the wrong areas, include images of the wrong size or change the suggested font sizes and or colors. Some outdated ESP’s don’t allow for fine grain control over templates because their template language wraps your input. If this is the case for your ESP, then your template might not be able to control font sizes or colors and you might be better off entering your content as HTML instead of through your ESP’s WYSIWYG editor.

If your template needs an image that is a specific dimension, most ESP editors allow for you to place an image of any dimension. Depending on the design of your template, placing the wrong size image could do everything from making the design of your email look bad to breaking the email completely on multiple devices. It’s important to take note of the dimension your images should be and stick to those dimensions.

3. Create one template that is mostly free form in nature.

There’s always going to be an email that doesn’t exactly fit into the templates you have available. Having a template where only the header and footer of your email are defined permits you to create free form emails. The header and footer for these open templates will adhere to your branding, ensuring the campaign ties in with the other emails you send.

4. Sometimes a bespoke email is the only way.

Even with an open format template available there will be times – whether it be a holiday sale or special event – that a bespoke email is needed.

In these cases it’s important that the email still retains some of the branding and style from your template campaigns. By keeping things like your font families and sizing of your logo consistent with your template emails, your custom email will look special while maintaining your overall identity.

In Summary: Moving your production from bespoke emails to templates has multiple benefits: it can save you time, provide consistency to campaigns and keep you more focused on content. However, following these key points for creating templates, as well as knowing when to use your templates and when to use a custom design is important to the overall success of your email marketing.