We know how it goes: You’re trying to get a killer email out the door on time, but you can’t seem to get the background color just right, the header image is a little too big, or the font isn’t quite on-brand. All these small snags add up to a lot of wasted time and, potentially, lost sales or leads.
While the world of email marketing is ever-changing and evolving, you can stay one step ahead and reserve your valuable time for more pressing endeavors by creating email templates. While it might take some time up-front to create the perfect eye-catching template, we guarantee you’ll thank yourself later when you simply pull up your template and feel confident in your on-brand, professional email template that you didn’t have to spend hours creating.
Here are a few tips to get you started.
1. Know what you want included
Before you embark on your template creation adventure, we recommend you take a few minutes to sit down and write out everything you want to include in your template.
Making sure you’re sending out an on-brand, eye-catching email is important. With roughly 306.4 billion emails being sent and received daily, it’s vital that yours are consistent with your brand so your recipients can distinguish them from the myriad of others they are likely receiving.
Don’t let that large number hinder you, though! It might be tempting to think with the rise of social media and the large quantity of emails sent daily that it’s not worth your time, but email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media. Not to mention you own your email contacts, unlike your social media following, which leaves you at the mercy of the hosting platform. Plus, there’s something to be said about delivering something tailored directly to your audience—not just put out into the social media ether.
With that in mind, here are a few things to prioritize while looking to build a professional email template:
Font
Make sure the template that you build has the capability to use the font that you associate with your brand. You also want to pick a font that is easily read so as to dissuade your audience from simply taking a quick glance and taking no further action due to its lack of readability.
Additionally, you’ll want to consider utilizing the same font for headers as for the body to help create a more professional email layout and one that is more easily digested. Plus, the more web fonts you include, the longer your email will take to load, giving your audience one more reason to click through to the next email in their inbox.
Colors
While you don’t want to go overboard with colors in your email—think two to three main colors—you want to make sure you use the same colors that are associated with your brand. Colors have been found to increase brand recognition by up to 80 percent. Ensure the template you build has the capability to host your brand colors.
CTA capability
Including a CTA (call-to-action) in your email is a vital step to bringing your audience out of the email and onto your website or landing page. A CTA is arguably the most important part of your email campaigns and is an absolutely necessary component to take into account when choosing a professional email template.
2. Pick a responsive template
It’s more important than ever for your email templates to be optimized for mobile. In fact, 81% of all emails are now read on mobile devices and 80% of emails that aren’t optimized for mobile are deleted.
The template you build to represent your company should automatically respond to the size of the device that it is opened up on. This, along with the other tips included in this post, will help you get one step closer to ensuring your ideal audience not only opens your email, but is interested in what you have to say to them.
3. Keep it simple
Lastly, while email is a great way to interact with your audience, keep your emails simple. While you may have a strong desire to give your audience lots of information—and no doubt it’s good information!—with the increasing urgency that most people are living under, it’s likely that your emails are getting skimmed and not read.
Nielsen tracked 1.5 million eye movements of 300 Web users and found they tend to read in an F pattern, skimming the important things on the left-hand side and not paying much attention to the right. Therefore, try to treat your email like a homepage: get people away as soon as possible and onto your website/offer/etc. by placing the most relevant, easy-to-read information at the top. Leave out unnecessary pictures and blurbs.
Building a professional email template might seem like a scary endeavor, but if you have the right information you should be able to create a template that not only showcases the best your company has to offer, but one that stands out from the crowd.
Email Templates That Convert Crazy Good
Wrap Up
Follow these 3 time-effective tips to design HTML emails that witnesses high conversions. Got any tip to add? Comment below.
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