The appearance of your emails contributes a lot to the success of your email marketing campaign. Through your sender's line, as well as your branding,...
The appearance of your emails contributes a lot to the success of your email marketing campaign. Through your sender's line,
as well as your branding, you can gain trust through recognition. Through the design that you utilize, you can project quality and distinction.
Many people consider commercial messages as spam partly because they look like spam. Even if marketing messages were sent out legitimately, emails that are sent out with little attention paid to branding, layout and design will likely be considered spam and ignored or deleted by most recipients. To avoid having your messages deleted because they're being considered spam, you need to pay attention to the appearance of your emails. Following are some tips that will help you build trust through the appearance of your emails and achieve success through your email marketing campaign.
1. Make your sender's line (from field) recognizable.
Recognition is important in gaining trust from your subscribers. This is why it's crucial that you use a recognizable name in your from field. It could be your real name, your online alias or the name of your organization, product or service. Obviously, you should choose the name your subscribers are most likely to recognize, as well as respond positively to.
2. Make good use of the preview pain.
What appears in the recipients' preview pane is what many people first encounter with your emails. Upon seeing the email's content through the preview pane, the reader ultimately makes the decision of whether to read on or hit delete. To keep your subscribers from ignoring or deleting your emails make sure that what appears in their preview pane is recognizable, as well as attractive. You may want to use your logo, a masthead, and an attention-grabbing headline.
3. Encourage your subscribers to communicate with you.
Many newsletters contain "Do Not Reply" instructions because email marketers don't monitor communications sent to the address they use to send out emails. This can also happen when emails are sent out by third party suppliers or email marketing companies. However, this can actually be detrimental to the success of your email marketing campaign. You should encourage your readers to respond with comments, suggestions or queries. By doing so you can gain a lot of insight and you will be able to inspire trust through your interactions.
4. Include your company's full contact details in your footer.
Publishing your company's full contact details in your emails allows your readers to be more trusting in what you have to say. People are more open to content from credible sources. Showing that you are a real company (with a name, address and telephone number) will enhance your credibility. Including these details in your footer also shows your willingness to accept accountability for everything you state in your emails.
5. Match your email design to your brand image.
The design of your emails should be consistent with your other marketing materials. While you don't need to copy the design and layout of your website completely, it is best to match your emails with its theme, colors and imagery. Doing this, will help you extend the trust you've built through your other promotional activities to your email marketing campaign.
Once you've created a design that suits your image best, use it as a template for all your emails. Doing so will further build trust through branding and recognition. You could even show a sample email to all new subscribers so they can become familiar with what your emails look like and know what to expect. Once they receive an email from you, they will be more likely to open it and read it.
6. Use an email design that is unlikely to fail you.
Some email marketers get too caught up designing their emails that they forget the importance of functionality. You can make use of fancy code to make your emails look flawless but they will appear far from perfect if you can't ensure that what you're using is working. Your emails don't need to look fancy to gain respect from your subscribers. You only need them to look professional and to display properly for your recipients.
To succeed with email marketing and gain trust from your subscribers you need to make sure that the design you use will work for all your subscribers. Keep in mind that any design that appears to be broken can make your subscribers feel that you don't really know what you're doing. For this reason, you need to make sure that your emails display properly in at least all the major email clients. You should also use proper alt attributes in case the images do not display.
Appearance plays a huge part in gaining trust from your subscribers. As long as you keep all these tips in mind when planning out your email marketing campaign, you should be able to establish your reputation as a trustworthy and credible source of relevant information.
