Best Email Design Factors That Influence Action

Posted on Jul 30 2013 - 12:38pm by Allyson Steffey

The Email

What features do the subscribers look at while willing to click, interact and open your email? From landing pages and images to subject lines, addresses and timing, dozens of such factors act as an important character to attract subscribers. Email service providers have maximum 3-4 seconds to capture enough attention of the reader such that they are obliged to access and read the mail. For an email campaign to be successful you can’t depend on a single tactic or luck. Thus in order to influence action from the subscribers you must design your email. Email design must be created keeping your subscribers preference in mind. If you sell newsletter templates then your newsletter design must be such that it attracts the attention of the reader in a way that it out stands other email newsletter design as a subscriber may have many designs of newsletters from various businesses. The marketers or designers often commit the mistake by concentrating their focus on the development of creative layout of emails. They do not account for an overall experience that a subscriber would get after accessing the mail. While a subscriber interacts with your mail he/she would go through the following aspects.

Recognition of The Sender

The identity of the sender of the mail must be revealed to the subscriber. Many a times this is the foremost thing that a subscriber looks at. The external audience looks for trustworthy email address. The “from name” must have a reputed goodwill.  Avoid use of non-friendly addresses like ‘no-reply’ that the subscriber loses his interest at the glimpse.

Block an image

Blocked images are major trouble for an email campaign as it may not leave an ideal impression amongst the clients. Combat blocking of image by ignoring all-image mails. Rather you can make use of captions, alt text or create illusionary image through coding.  Images are blocked by default by 67% of major desktop customers, 100% of major webmail customers and 80% of mobile functioning systems. To solve this problem of image blocking one of the creative approaches is to make use of background colours or create 8-bit graphical images.

Subject Line

The subject line is the major catch of a reader that would decide whether your mail is successful or would go to the trash bin. Some about 50 characters subject line must be really interesting, thought capturing and interesting to the subscriber. Do not use ambiguous language and avoid the repetitive use of your brand name.

Snippet Text

Certain mailing programs, such as iPhone/iPad, Outlook and Gmail make use of preview or snippet text just next to its subject line. Its text limit is up to 100 characters. These characters are pulled from the foremost text lines of the mail. This can act as a precious real estate for adding values, creating subject line or including a call for an action.

Preview Pane

This 300px by 400px space is also known as the reading pane that displays only a portion of email. You can make use of this pane by writing interesting content in it in order to encourage a subscriber to access the mail.

Inbox

Lot of contents can be inserted in your message that your inbox contains. But it must contain useful information to the subscriber. It must be written in readable fonts and must not be a spam mail. Also consider that the ads do not block the left hand side area.

Landing Page

Inbox is not the end of subscriber’s experience. If you feature a product in your mail, then it becomes easy to find it on the landing page. A customer gets frustrated when he finds cluttered, missed and inconsistent expectations and ultimately it will hurt bottom line of your business. Landing page will have specific information for users that they are searching. Make such pages mobile-friendly and easy to use.

Click-Through

Question yourself like: What will make recipients click the mail? If your mail provides value to the subscriber or consist a clear call-to-action it increases the possibility of getting more clicks.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Ben Grey

About the Author

Allyson Steffey is professional web designer and content editor in www.emailmonks.com which is specialized in mobile friendly email and newsletter design backed with years of experience. Email monks, offering 100+ Mobile Optimized & Tested HTML email newsletter templates for your branding. You can get me on Google+ and Twitter.