Email Marketing Design Examples and Avoiding Obstacles

How important is email marketing design? Design is perhaps the most important aspect of your email marketing campaigns. There are some interesting obstacles that I will outline and give you some tips to avoid the obstacles.

Obstacle #1: Time

Seems like time is always an obstacle. With email marketing campaigns, you don't have a lot of time to catch your reader's attention. You have so much competition because there is so much email flying around. Your reader may be receiving emails from 10, 20 or 100 other people. They only have so much time, so whose emails will they read and whose will they trash?

Tip: Cleaver and attractive design will hook people into viewing your email. If you build a history of well designed emails, your readers will continue to read them.

Obstacle #2: Email Clients

Email clients are the websites or applications you use to check your email. Iphone, Gmail, Outlook, Outlook 2000, Outlook 2001, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, your local cable company and GoDaddy are prime examples. The obstacle here is that each client renders an email message differently. In other words, opening the same email in Gmail, Outlook and AOL will likely result in different experiences. Fonts and sizes might be different, images may or may not show up without your approval or the entire layout might look different.

Gmail is very popular and you may use it for your personal account and / or business account, but that doesn't mean your email recipients are. Assume everyone will get a different experience when they open your email marketing campaign.

Tip: Keep your email design as simple as possible.

Obstacle #3: Devices

You can check your email on your computer, laptop, tablet, other tablet, phone, other phone, watch, tv and probably some other devices. It's great, right? The problem for your email marketing efforts is that each of these devices is a different size.

Email marketing campaigns are like fliers and the device is the medium. Is your flier going on a billboard, post card, 8.5in x 11in paper? If you try to hang an 8.5in x 11in poster on a billboard, no one is going to see it.

The screen on your phone is only so big and the email needs to fit without making the user scroll horizontally or pinch to see it.

Tip: Make sure your email template is responsive.

Obstacle #4: Purpose

This doesn't seem like that big of an obstacle, but the less effort you put into your purpose the bigger the obstacle it will be.

You can't tell your reader everything in an email. How much time do you spend reading an email? How many times do you not finish an email because it's too long? How often do you complain about people writing novels to your inbox?

Figure out your one sole message and build your campaign around that. Having one clear purpose will keep your reader's blood pressure down which will increase their likelihood of clicking on your call-to-action.

Tip: You can put secondary and tertiary purposes or goals into your emails as long as they are in the shadows of your main message.

Obstacle #5: Images

Your email client (mail App, gmail, yahoo, aol, etc) may or may not display images. Often you will experience the “Images are not displayed” message and will have to click "Display images below or Always display images from...”

Tip: Avoid this obstacle by adding alternate text to your images and making sure you have some plain text explaining the point of your email. Alternative text is text that will display if your images do not.

Sole solution to avoid all obstacle: Get in, get out mentality.

Create a webpage for your email and make the purpose of your email to get readers to click to it. Your webpage version of your email will 99.9% of the time be a better version of your email. Why? Websites are generally developed responsively. This means that a webpage will look “good” on phones, tablets, laptops, computer, tvs and any other device you've got. Also, your images will load without question.

More so, once you've got a reader on your website, you can hook them into other parts of your website and business.

Get your reader into your website and get them out of their distracting email client.

Well Designed Email Marketing Examples

Below are some good examples of email marketing. Notice the similarities between them.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Essentials: Logo + Company Name, Image (not actually a video), paragraph preview, link.

Bonus: Coupon, terms and conditions, Read online option.

Froont

Essentials: Logo + Alternate text of company name, Image, paragraph preview, link.

Bonus: Coupon.

Media Temple

Essentials: Logo + Alternate text of company name, Image, paragraph preview, link.

Bonus: Multiple articles (weekly letter), online link (twice).

Media Temple

Essentials: Logo + Alternate text of company name, super clean text.