Do Your Emails Need to Look Good?
When it comes to email marketing, design can have a dramatic effect on your engagement…but not always in the way you think.
While there are no crystal balls, many smart people say that email marketing — a fusty old Web 1.0 tactic — isn’t dying anytime soon. (Blame its eye-popping return on investment and ease of entry.) And since email is here to stay, even cutting-edge marketing organizations are always asking how it can work harder for them.
In many cases, marketers choose to tinker with design and content, changing the way emails look in your inbox. After all, we should make emails look good…right?
In summary, it’s a bit of a trick question. Yes, they should…if your goal is to win email-design awards. But if you’re like most of us, you’re trying to fry bigger fish. Your email design should be focused on whatever it needs to in order to achieve your end goal. For many, that goal is simply to drive more clicks — and more virtuous, downstream actions after those clicks.
So how might that manifest? Not always how you might expect. As an example, check out the fascinating results of this A/B test:
The control version on the left with the red border is the client’s battle-tested template — on-brand, pleasant looking, and error free in the eyes of email-marketing veterans, featuring font hierarchy, pleasing colors, some whitespace, iconography, and a prominent call-to-action. It even has a footer with all the fluff that we email-senders include reflexively. (Let’s be honest — how many people are really clicking that Twitter icon?)
The challenger on the right with the green border was an extremely simple, text-only design. It’s a tight, left-justified piece of content that looks and feels like a letter, excluding much of what was included in the control version. While the substance of the emails is the same, the ad copy in the challenger was tweaked to nod to the letter-like theme.
So, what happened? The challenger smoked the control, touting 50% more clicks — a massive difference in the A/B testing world. While it’s fun to speculate why the challenger dramatically outperformed the control (Was it the inbox placement? The preheader? The name?), it’s more fun to simply choose what works once you find it.
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