I had a message come in recently from a Junior Designer who has found themselves needing to learn email design in response to more and more of his agency’s clients asking for Email Marketing as an alternative to Social Media Marketing.
However
He explained to me that up until this point he has primarily been a Print Designer. But due to the nature of the business, he is increasingly working in Digital Design areas and is feeling overwhelmed by the change.
Coincidentally this is more or less the journey I’ve been on for the past 10 years. In the early days of my career, I created a lot of Logo Designs and Marketing Collateral, but over the past 6 years across both in-house and agency work, I’ve come to the point that around 75% of my work is Email Designs.
Now I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to do this alongside some great marketing teams that are experts in handling mailing list data and exporting analytics reports (not that I haven’t done my fair share of this too, of course). But this arrangement has allowed me full autonomy of the creative process.
Because of this freedom, I’ve learned all the tricks and tips you’d ever need to create an engaging campaign that not only looks great but, most importantly, converts readers into buyers.
Below is a summary of the conversation I had with this young man and some insight into my workflow when working on email marketing campaigns.
My email workflow depends on the client. I’m quite old school and feel most comfortable using Photoshop to design my emails. However, I am finding myself using Figma more often as time goes on. I think the plugin library is invaluable and has sped up my work drastically in this past year.
As far as building emails, I almost exclusively use Mailchimp. There are other good services out there but I’ve never felt the need to move away from Mailchimp as it does everything I need it to, and I’ve learned enough shortcuts to make building campaigns as efficient as possible.
I’d encourage anyone to experiment with the different services out there like MailerLite, Zoho, or Hubspot and find which you like the best.
It’s also always worth being open to working with services you’re not used to, as often clients already have an established CRM service that has email campaign capabilities, so it’s an unnecessary step to ask them to migrate their mailing list to another platform.
In regards to design principles, Mailchimp allows email templates up to a maximum of 600px wide, but I generally like to design at 1200px and export my images at 50%. I find it easier to design at a larger size, however, you need to be mindful of the size of your text when working this way. But you should always use as much live text as possible in your campaigns, rather than text as images, to ensure there are minimal accessibility issues.
When I onboard a new email marketing client, the first thing I do is work out a header/footer template and get that built as a Mailchimp template. For e-commerce clients, I generally emulate the nav from their store as much as is reasonably possible, but I usually prefer a centred logo as I feel it looks better when viewed on a mobile.
Footer is usually client-specific, some want more of a focus on social accounts, whereas others may want delivery information or special offers to be the main focal point.
For both of these parts, I build directly into Mailchimp using their template builder, using images for anything that can’t be done with text. More often than not I create custom social media icons because the default ones in Mailchimp aren’t great, but this is fairly easy to make using images and a simple HTML table to display them.
Lastly, I make my full design in Photoshop. I tend to keep my designs to 2/3 columns max and use full-width images wherever possible. Any images and fancy elements (overlaid text, infographics, etc) are exported from Photoshop as slices at 600px wide using the legacy save for web menu.
From a technical aspect, the most important thing is understanding the limitations of email services versus normal web design.
Microsoft Outlook especially is the bane of any email designer’s life. It’s not unheard of for web-safe fonts to be completely ignored, and .gifs especially rarely work as they should.
It’s a good idea to stick to the basics where you can. For instance, my body copy is almost always Arial, as it’s very rare to drop out. As anybody with any web experience will tell you, it’s practically the safest font there is.
Related to this, it’s important to alt-tag your images. This helps with accessibility for users with sight issues which should always be considered in any design you do, but it can also save you if Outlook (or any other email app) doesn’t want to play ball and won’t display your images properly.
From a creative point of view, I always try to look for opportunities to do something unexpected. Something like a background image bleeding into the main content with a nice gradient, or a cut-out image used in the foreground, or using a .gif as a header image alongside static images in the body, to add some depth to what could easily be a very static piece of creative.
It’s easy to create a flat, boring email design so finding creative executions that will set you apart from the crowd will make your clients want to use your services again and again.
It’s not difficult to impress within an email if you know how to use the limitations to your advantage.
Communication!
Remember you’re designing for customers, not for other designers. Too many designers spend too much time online trying to keep up with trends. But 99% of the time, your clients don’t care what’s trendy, they just want to communicate well with their customers.
Unlike Social Media Email is quite a captive audience, in that people have actively chosen to sign up for your mailing list (this is important for GDPR compliance), and as a result are likely to be interested in what you have to say.
That being said, you’re still fighting for people’s attention against the rest of their inboxes. Remember that around 306 billion emails are sent every day in total, so you have to make sure to grab a user’s attention in the first few seconds before you’ve lost them forever. This means having a compelling subject line that makes them want to click, and a clear hero section that properly conveys your offer without a user needing to scroll down the page.
At the end of the day, an email design is only successful if it helps your client to sell their product or service. You want the end user to be engaged from the second your email lands in their inbox, click into it and immediately be wowed by the product or offer. If your user has to scroll through paragraphs and paragraphs of text, you’ll lose them.
Always check your analytics after a campaign has been sent so you can see what parts of your email your users are interested in, what they’re ignoring and where they’re clicking through to. Use this to inform future sends and continually iterate on design and improve them.
You can only learn what works best for you through trial and error. I’m lucky in that I’ve been able to learn by failing again and again, and now I can sell campaigns that I know will be successful, and take the pressure off my clients, so they can focus on running their business.
I hope all helps to give a bit of background into the email marketing services that Glass Creative offers, and how you can use emails to help grow your own business. If you have any more questions feel free to reach out here and I’ll try my best to answer you!