Remember our KISS principle? Keep It Super Simple? The same applies to the look of your emails.
Your goal is to create an email that's easy to read and engaging, without overwhelming the reader.
A successful email usually has a clean layout, with plenty of white space. It should look like you are jotting off a note to a friend. Why?
Once again, Because Google and Yahoo, AOL and Apple all give preference to personal emails, so it needs to look personal.
Campaign Monitor found that more than 50% of U.S. respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.
However, Litmus discovered that the average attention span for email is only 11.1 seconds and thanks to YouTube, more and more people are conditioned to give you 3 seconds, so you’ve got to stand out like a friend to keep their attention.
So what does that look like in concrete terms?
That’s a plain white background and black text – NO header logo, and just a few pictures if needed.
The images have to come after the first sentence. That’s how you don’t get ugly image descriptions in the email preview (and the providers hate that preview sentence tech and glitch it at every opportunity so I don’t use it! I don’t have to, because I put my images after my first sentence! Keep it Super Simple!)
Now here’s the Golden Image Trick!
People LOVE to click on images, so ALWAYS add a hyperlink to your images that sends them to the destination to see more about it.
You’ve wasted a click if you didn’t hyperlink the image and you’ve wasted their time, because the image itself doesn’t give them all the information that they need.
What they need (including a bigger image!) is on the webpage or your social media platform.
And this goes for videos too!
Martech Advisor reports that adding videos to your email can increase click rates by 300%, but while we've found that it certainly can give a huge bump, most are doing it wrong if they want the clicks.
NEVER embed your video in an email! Take a screenshot of the video, put the screenshot in the email and hyperlink that screenshot to the destination where they can watch the video.
Not only can they watch it better at the destination than their inbox, you can provide more information there or they can interact with you on the platform.
Remember, you are training an Open/Clicking Tribe! If they are staying in their inbox, you are not providing them with the full help that they could be receiving on your platform.
PS Are your emails building your community and moving the needle in your business? Join the Ultimate Email Blueprint Early Birds for extra bonuses>>