email design – Email List

March 24, 2020

How Color Choices in Your Email Impact Engagement and Conversions

There are—quite literally—millions of colors that the human eye can perceive. That means there are innumerable color palettes people can use to communicate their feelings or desires.

Color psychology can be an effective strategy for email marketing, but with all of the possible color options and the multitude of human emotions, it can be challenging to figure out where to start.

You might be wondering how color choices in your email impact engagement and conversions. Colors can influence behavior, so it’s worth understanding how that works.

Before you craft your next email campaign, review this guide to making the right color choices in your marketing efforts.

How is color associated with feelings and decision-making?

Color psychology is a fascinating study that looks at how color influences the way people feel and act. Colors often appear differently from person to person, but each color is associated with a different set of emotions or perceptions.

In the United States, colors can be a powerful tool for driving behavior. Common color psychology associations include:

Black: a color associated with luxury and impulse, black conveys a sense of power and status.
Blue: often used by financial institutions and businesses, blue exudes a sense of trust and security.
Green: the easiest color for your eyes to process, green is associated with wealth and relaxation.
Orange: an appeal to aggressive impulses, orange is the color for your CTAs.
Pink: marketed toward traditional shoppers, pink marks romance and femininity.
Purple: sometimes associated with royalty, purple is both calming and soothing.
Red: projecting energy and a sense of urgency, red increases the heart rate.
Yellow: conveying optimism and youthfulness, yellow is the color to grab attention.

This is an important consideration for email design—it’s also something to consider for your logo, other marketing copy, products, and website.

How color choices in your email impact engagement and conversions

Beyond basic color psychology, color and email design are critical to driving engagement and conversions. They have the potential to sway customer emotions and encourage them to purchase your products or services.

Color can measurably influence your conversion rates through:

Brand awareness: your brand is critical to your business, which means your logo is too. Using the right colors in your logo and marketing copy can inspire consumer confidence, and it leads to an 80% increase in brand recognition. In some cases, brands even trademark unique colors.
Product marketing: the color of the products you sell and your marketing copy are as important as your logo. Product color is the primary reason that 85% of shoppers purchase specific products, while visual appearance, in general, is the most important factor in their decisions.
Click rates: a popular A/B test from a few years ago measured how the color of a button impacts the click rates in an email. The test looked at the green and red CTA buttons that lead to the same landing page. The green button had 21% more clicks than the red button.

With such a significant impact on buyer decisions, color psychology plays a crucial role in influencing your customers. It permeates every aspect of your business’s marketing efforts.

Examples of how color choices in your email impact engagement and conversions

Between the significance of color choices and the impact of color on emotions, you’re probably wondering how to approach email design. Review these examples of how color choices in your email impact engagement and conversions.

1. Casper: building trust and security in blue

Blue, which is a cool color that creates a sense of security, is one of the most common colors used by big brands and email marketers. However, it can also lead to feelings of sadness, so you need to be careful about how you use it. Check out this example from Casper, a mattress company whose brand uses the color blue—a nod to nighttime—in all of their email campaigns and marketing copy:

Source: Really Good Emails

Takeaway: blue, which is the color of choice for big names like Ford, Samsung, Chase Bank, and Facebook, is a popular choice for brands with a global customer base. Use it in emails when you want to build trust in your organization.

2. REI: summiting mountains in earthy tones

Not every brand is so easily recognizable by color, but they might use it wisely in their email campaigns. REI is a popular outdoor gear company that sends out marketing campaigns highlighting new products, upcoming events, and outdoor news. Since they use a lot of images that feature majestic landscapes and gear in bold colors, they stick with a neutral background and palette to keep the email clean.

Source: Really Good Emails

Takeaway: while neutral colors like brown aren’t exactly exciting and don’t call up any strong feelings, they are appropriate when you’re incorporating graphics that might clash with vibrant hues. Use your email content as a guide to choose the best palette.

3. Taco Bell: big brand recognition in purple

Though purple is one of the least-liked colors by men, that doesn’t mean it’s off-limits when you want to appeal to a wide audience. If you’re one of the few in your industry using a specific color, as is the case with Taco Bell and the fast food industry, it can help bolster your brand recognition. Take this example from what’s arguably one of the most popular fast-food chains in the United States:

Source: Really Good Emails

Takeaway: while things like biology, gender, and our attachment to objects of a certain color can impact our feelings, culture, experience, and context can all influence how you perceive color. It’s okay to break the mold and get creative with your color palettes when it makes sense.

4. Barnes & Noble: easy relaxation in green

To some people, green can inspire images and feelings associated with the outdoors, but, to others, the color is relaxing. Capitalizing on the relaxation element, Barnes & Noble uses its signature green color in all of their email and marketing copy. Since many people feel that reading is relaxing, the use of green is particularly compelling in this email example:

Source: Really Good Emails

Takeaway: the correct application of color will vary from business to business, industry to industry, audience to audience. Find ways to match your color palette with your brand’s purpose, as Barnes & Noble did by using green to inspire relaxation among readers.

Best practices for using color in your email marketing campaigns

If you’re new to using color psychology, you might be unsure of where you should start. Color can be intimidating to some people, and, if used incorrectly, it can be jarring and unappealing to your audience.

Before you create your next email campaign, review these best practices for using color in your marketing emails:

Understand your audience: Culture, texture, and context all impact how your audience perceives color. While purple represents royalty in many countries, it can represent death in Italy, for example. Gender is another area where color can make a difference. Purple is a common favorite color among women but is one of the least-liked colors by men.
Narrow your palette: Depending on factors like your logo and other images, you may want to use more than one color. This can be a great way to grab your reader’s attention, but it can also be overwhelming. A common approach is to use the 60:30:10 rule, where 60% of your palette is a single color, usually neutral, 30% is a complementary color and 10% is an accent color.
Test your email campaigns: Even the best email marketers need to see how their email campaigns perform. You can use A/B testing to determine which colors generate the most clicks and which lead to the most conversions. If you segment your lists, you might find different click and conversion rates for different lists. This is a critical step in determining your future email strategy.

These color psychology best practices will help guide you through the process of creating your next email campaign.

Wrap up

Using color to influence your customers’ behaviors can be challenging. There are thousands of shades, hues, and tones, and there are dozens of factors that impact how your audience perceives color. Fortunately, you can use these key takeaways to enhance your color psychology strategy:

Determine the tone and voice of your email campaign before you narrow down a palette.
Use color to solidify brand awareness and complement the other graphics you use.
Explore using blocks of color, vibrant CTAs, and bold buttons in your email campaigns.

Even if you prefer to send simple, black-and-white emails, you can add pops of color to help boost site traffic and improve your conversion rates.

Want a tool that can help you measure the results of your email campaigns? Campaign Monitor has powerful tools you can use to A/B test your email color choices.

The post How Color Choices in Your Email Impact Engagement and Conversions appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

January 7, 2020

How to Use the Newest Graphic Design Trends in Your Email Marketing

This is a guest post from Ryan McCready at Venngage.

Keeping up with the latest graphic design trends in your email marketing can be exhausting, especially if you aren’t a designer and have other tasks that take priority.

But keeping up with new design trends is the easiest way to signal to your audience that you’re a modern, innovative, forward-thinking company. That’s why so many tech companies have great design—users expect to see a level of newness within their product.

And, while you want to keep your brand looking fresh and hip, it’s hard to tell which trends you should follow and which trends are best left on the Pinterest boards (that’s why Venngage pulled together the top 8 graphic design trends of 2020).

Read on to discover easy-to-manage, actionable ways to incorporate the newest graphic design trends in your email marketing and branding (even if you aren’t a designer).

Want some quick ways to update your look? Our design trends can help

With email being such a direct-to-consumer, instantaneous marketing method, your email design can be a great way to show your audience just how modern and innovative you are.

Plus, if a design trend doesn’t resonate with your email audience, you can easily change it in your ESP.

1. Muted color palettes

Muted color palettes are the first trend on our list for 2020, and is also the easiest trend to incorporate into your existing branding.

If your emails are word heavy with very few graphics, this trend might not be for you. But, if you use graphics and photography to help bring your newsletters to life, you can definitely get on board.

Muted colors refer to colors that aren’t vibrant. You can easily create a palette of muted colors to work with by taking your existing brand color palette and adding elements of black or white to create more toned-down shades.

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Creating a secondary palette from your main brand colors is doubly beneficial. Along with automatically updating your look to be completely on-trend, it’s not too dissimilar to the brand your audience already knows and loves.

A complete rebrand can be a polarizing experience for consumers, so, wherever possible, you should focus on small, continuous improvements rather than a complete design overhaul.

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2. Color gradients

Much like trend number one on our list, color gradients are a great way to refresh your emails without changing too much. In fact, you may have already seen this graphic design trend in your inbox.

Gradients have been back for a while, but, in 2020, expect to see much more muted, toned-down gradients (sensing a theme yet?). Instead of an all-out background gradient, you’ll start to see them used to enhance elements of designs.

Original link: email gallery

With this trend, less is more, so focus on updating one small element of your email with a gradient. You could update your header with a subtle gradient, or use a gradient inside of block text.

If using the gradient trend, try to keep it as simple as possible. Try to use subtle gradients in small areas, rather than automatically using a bright gradient as a color overlay.

3. Abstract and dreamy illustrations

Now, you need to be a certain sort of company to pull off trend number three, but, if you can manage it, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors.

The phrase “abstract and dreamy illustrations” can scare people off, but if you’re already using a hand-drawn or illustrated style in your branding, this is the trend for you. Plus, it’s one of our favorite graphic design trends to use in email marketing.

By “abstract and dreamy,” we mean un-lifelike drawings. Think strange colors, exaggerated proportions, and absurd situations.

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Easily update your email newsletters by replacing stock photography with one of these abstract illustrations, or consider changing up your existing bank of illustrations to be weirder.

The other bonus of creating custom illustrations, alongside them looking great, is they add a special element to your marketing. Anybody can pay for a stock image, but not everybody will go out of their way to commission illustrations unique to their business.

Creating a custom illustration for customers who’ve just completed a sale, or customers who’ve joined your loyalty program can help make people feel special, and like you’re a company who cares about them as a person, rather than just a number.

Illustrations have been popular amongst SaaS companies for a while, but, in 2020, they’ll fully enter the mainstream. Expect to see big-name brands, such as Apple, jump on the trend and use stranger and stranger illustrations.

The one thing to remember with this trend is that you need to make sure the meaning of your illustration is crystal clear.

4. Heavy but simple fonts

One of our other favorite graphic design trends to use in your email marketing? Heavy (but simple) fonts.

In 2020, heavy, simple fonts will be everywhere. With the rest of the design world getting more muted, it’ll be time for the bold fonts to shine.

By “heavy,” we mean fonts that are bold or extra bold, things that don’t look delicate or hand-drawn, which was the trend last year. These heavier fonts create a great contrast with graphics and other text and work particularly well as headers.

This is a great trend to jump on, as it’s so easy to implement. The Drake Hotel does a great job of using heavy fonts in their email newsletters.

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Try this trend out by picking a heavy or bold weight to your font and applying it to header text. Increase the size of your header text and even the color, for a really modern look.

5. Beautiful flowing shapes and lines

Beautiful flowing shapes and lines might seem like an odd choice for a top trend, but, when you start to think about it, it makes perfect sense. Alongside more muted color palettes and softer gradients, the shapes used will become softer too.

Like the abstract illustration trend, this one isn’t for every company. But, if you already use geometric shapes or find yourself with too much white space, flowing lines could be the answer here.

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I searched through my entire email inbox, as well as the Campaign Monitor email gallery, but couldn’t find any companies using flowing shapes to their full potential yet, so jump on this chance to be the first.

Using these flowing blobs as backgrounds for sections in your newsletter, or separating blocks of text with a wiggly line rather than a straight one, has a lot of potential to instantly upgrade your emails to something on brand and modern.

6. Genuine and neutral stock photos

In case you haven’t noticed a pattern yet, we’re toning things down in 2020, and your stock photos are no exception.

In previous years, stock photography has tended to lean towards the bright, bold, and colorful end of the spectrum. But say goodbye to oversaturated colors and unrealistic-looking compositions.

Changing up the stock photography you use is such a quick and easy way to modernize your emails. When choosing stock photography look for images that seem unposed, think about the sort of content your absolute coolest friend posts on Instagram.

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If you don’t use stock photos but do include product shots, you can get involved in this trend too. Arrange products on interesting backgrounds, in natural settings, within a muted color palette for maximum impact.

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The key to nailing this trend is by embracing authenticity, but changing up the style of photography you use in your newsletters is one of the best design tips you can use in your newsletters.

7. Minimalism

Minimalism is a great design trend for email marketers because it’s simple but effective. Being generous with your use of white space won’t be a new concept for many people, but, in 2020, it’s time to take the trend to the next level.

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In this example from fashion brand, Monki, the images are well spaced out, with plenty of breathing room between the pictures.

The CTA button is also in white, but with a simple black border, adding to the calm look. And, finally, the product shots: all the same color scheme, all shot on a white background.

It’s not a boring email at all, but it is a minimalist one.

Try this out with your own campaigns by picking one feature color to sit alongside a plain white background, and don’t be afraid to create extra space in between your text and images.

And don’t stop there; continue the minimalism through to your landing pages to create a cohesive experience for your audience.

8. Better branded animations

You’ve probably seen animations pop up in emails in the form of GIFs. Reaction GIFs are so ingrained in our visual communication that nobody bats an eye when they become part of your marketing.

But how can you stay ahead of the game when everybody’s using the same imagery? Simple: you create your own animations.

By creating your own GIFs, you can produce animations that are highly relevant to your campaign and completely unique to your company.

It doesn’t have to be a complex animation either. In the example above, ASOS has subtly animated the background—enough to add energy to the email, but not so much that it’s overpowering.

If you do decide to bring animation into your campaigns, make sure that the motion you choose never overpowers the rest of the message.

Wrap up

Keeping on top of trends can be an easy and effective way to update the look and feel of your emails, which is why we highly encourage using these graphic design trends in your email marketing.

Especially in crowded markets, standing out from competitors is important—and having good quality, modern, and on-trend emails can be a great way to show your audience that you’re a modern company.

It’s important to keep your brand in mind when using new graphic design trends, as not every trend outlined above will be suitable for your marketing.

Ryan McCready went to the University of Arkansas and graduated with a degree in economics and international business. Now instead of studying the economy, he writes about graphic design, marketing and more at Venngage.

The post How to Use the Newest Graphic Design Trends in Your Email Marketing appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

November 8, 2019

7 Design Tips To Boost Your Newsletter Open Rates

This is a guest post from Ronita Mohan at Venngage.

Newsletter design has changed in recent years, and marketers and designers are finding new ways to optimize their designs to improve conversions.

The days of text-only newsletters are quickly dying away—people are far too busy to spend their time reading through large blocks of written content.

If you want your customers (or potential customers) to read your newsletters, you need to focus on design—making it appealing, legible, and valuable to the reader.

Design tips for newsletters

Read on to discover seven ways to use design to encourage consumers to open your emails, engage with them, and eventually to click through to further content and purchases.

These seven points are:

Branding
Accessibility
Color schemes
Bold fonts
Asymmetrical layouts
GIF use
Minimalism

Learn how to design high-performing email campaigns in our guide.

1. Branding isn’t just a logo.

Rip Curl email design example: Rip Curl uses specific newsletter design in their messaging.

Source: Rip Curl Customer Story

Brand newsletters need to have strong branding elements; that’s what makes the newsletter uniquely yours.

But simply including your logo somewhere in the newsletter doesn’t make your brand memorable—you need to think beyond that essential element of design.

Branding can include a number of other elements such as fonts, colors, personality, and voice. These need to be incorporated in your newsletter design.

Your email newsletters should be consistent with the visual brand that your company has already cultivated, even though newsletters are vastly different from most of your other marketing efforts.

Look at the advertising creatives, social media posts, or even blog posts that you’ve already created. These would’ve cemented your brand identity in the minds of consumers.

Use these elements to inform your newsletter design. Incorporate brand colors into your newsletter so that your marketing materials are immediately recognizable.
Employ fonts from your branding guidelines, or fonts within those font families, to establish a cohesive identity.

Don’t rely entirely on your logo to create brand awareness for you—a logo can be dismissed by consumers

But color schemes and fonts are more likely to stay in people’s minds and will become associated with your brand over time, giving them more reason to open your emails.

Learn about using images in email and how to edit them directly inside your email.

2. Make your newsletter accessible.

Use this Pink Unicorn realty email design example for email newsletter design tips.

Source: Venngage

For far too long, brands have failed to acknowledge the disabled community with their marketing collateral.

But, with strong advocacy over the past few years, the need for accessibility in brand communication has become a priority, and it should be a requirement when designing newsletters.

Are you designing for accessibility? Find out here.

Making your emails and newsletters accessible is something all businesses can prioritize—it’ll help grow your audience and improve click rates.

There are a number of ways that marketers and designers can move towards universal design that can be easily viewed by people who do and don’t have disabilities.

These disabilities could be related to visual impairments, hearing impairments, or mobility. Here are some things you can do to make your newsletter design more accessible.

Avoid relying on color.

People with color-blindness have difficulty distinguishing between reds and greens. If your newsletter design uses these colors, or similar ones, it’ll be lost to the consumer.

Instead of using color to distinguish information, share a particular meaning, or to show data, use text to convey the same information.

Alternately, use starkly contrasting colors to ensure that everyone can see the difference in information you’re presenting.

You can refer to the below chart for choosing the right colors for your universally designed newsletter.

Color palette examples: One of our newsletter design tips is to use thoughtful colors in your email designs.

Source: Venngage

Avoid flashing imagery.

GIFs have become a popular tool to include in newsletters, and we’ll be discussing how to incorporate them later in this article.

But, while you can definitely use GIFs and videos to maintain attention, avoid using anything that flickers, flashes, or has a strobe light effect. These can have adverse effects on viewers, even if they seem like a good idea.

Ensure that edits between images and scenes are seamless and gentle, so that everyone watching these visuals can enjoy them.

Correctly sized fonts

The fonts you use should be legible—this should be standard practice, no matter which user your newsletter is catering to.

But, beyond legibility, your fonts should be clear, even if they’re magnified.

Some people with visual impairments use a magnifier to read screens and, if the fonts in your design become illegible when magnified, you’re not catering to a segment of your consumers.

Additionally, you should break up your text with imagery or by using multiple shorter paragraphs. This will make it easier for people to read your text.

Ensure your line spacing and paragraph spacing is at least 1.5—not only is this more visually appealing to readers, but it makes it more legible for people with visual impairments and dyslexia.

We’ve got all you need to know about web fonts. Click to see the guide.

Screen readers

Consumers with visual impairments often use screen readers, which read out everything on a newsletter, including image captions or alt text.

Thus, images included in your newsletter should have relevant alt text that’ll make sense to anyone using a screen reader.

The same goes for headers—use h1, h2, and h3 headers to distinguish the hierarchy of information you’re sharing to ensure that it’s read correctly by a screen reader.

Making your newsletters accessible isn’t a difficult task and will help you reach a target segment that could significantly impact your conversion rates.

3. Color schemes

Color can convey your brand identity but it can also have strong associations with emotion. Red can be attractive, romantic, and angry. While blue is calming, corporate, and earthy.

Decide what message you’re trying to send and choose your colors accordingly.

We’ve spoken about the importance of using color contrast to make your newsletter design more accessible.

But, in general, strong contrasting colors can make your newsletters look more appealing and more memorable.

You can also use color to make your newsletter design more seasonal—orange and light yellow for fall or white and dark blue for winter.

When choosing a color scheme, you have a few options, depending on the kind of message your newsletter wants to share.

Highlight color

Not everyone is comfortable using a cornucopia of colors in their newsletters. But you don’t have to use numerous colors to share your message.

Instead, you can use a single strong accent color that highlights the message of your newsletter.

This could be used for a CTA or to elucidate a single fact in a chart.
A highlight color can make your newsletter pop and help direct your reader’s eye to the most important messaging in your newsletter.

Complementary colors

You don’t always have to use contrasting colors throughout your newsletters.

Complementary colors—colors that are side by side in the color spectrum—can add to the attractiveness of your newsletter, particularly if used in the background.

A gradual gradient encourages the eye forward when scrolling through a newsletter while making the design look cohesive and attractive.

When paired with a strong contrasting color, like we covered in the highlight section above, your newsletter design can be soothing and punchy enough to increase click rates.

Contrasting colors

Contrasting colors weren’t the most popular concept up until recently, but it has become a favored design trend in the digital sphere.

As we’ve mentioned, contrasting colors make materials more accessible to people with color-blindness, which is a great reason to use this style.

But contrasting colors are also a good way to divide sections of your newsletter—particularly if it’s a long one.

Contrasting colors are pleasing to the eye, if chosen well, and can dictate how consumers view your messaging.

4. Use bold fonts.

Want design tips for newsletters? This Fruit of the Loom email example shows how emails should be arranged.

Source: Campaign Monitor

When it comes to design, you need to look beyond colors, to how your readers interact with your content marketing.

To do this, you need to examine the fonts you’ll use in your newsletter. For one, it’s best to keep your font use to a minimum—two or three, at the most.

Your header font can be over-large—to make an impact and to help with readability.
The remaining fonts—sub-headings and body text—should be smaller, so as to not interfere with the heading.

You need to keep your brand font in mind when choosing fonts—don’t pick something that’s too off-brand or it’ll be jarring to readers.

Avoid changing your font use too often—this will affect brand recognition and leave your consumers wondering which company’s newsletter they’ve received.

5. Asymmetrical layouts

Symmetry is fast becoming a thing of the past—asymmetrical layouts are in fashion across the digital marketing sphere.

Newsletter layouts tend to have a standard flow—usually top-to-bottom or left-to-right—but that doesn’t mean you need to use that format at all times.

Be unconventional in your layout—use asymmetrical frames, remove frames altogether, or use a zigzag layout.

You can be as unusual and creative as your designing system will allow you to be. But remember to ensure that your newsletter is responsive for different-sized screens.

According to email marketing best practices, responsive design is a must in the current digital age because people are more likely to view newsletters on their phones.

So be creative with your layout but conduct extensive tests to ensure that it displays properly to the consumer.

6. Include GIFs.

If you're looking for design tips for newsletters, look no further. This gif shows that moving images can be very effective for email designs.

Source: Beauty Bay

GIFs have become increasingly more popular over the past few years, and including them in newsletters seems like a natural progression.

To keep things light, fun, and interactive, you should be looking at using GIFs in your newsletters, either in the header or as the complete design.

Not only are GIFs attractive, but they can share a great deal of information with your subscribers that a still image can’t.

For instance, you can use a GIF to show the change in data in a chart or as a how-to guide for using your product or services.

The use of GIFs in these email design examples shows how creative and fun they can be.

But it’s important to remember that your GIFs shouldn’t flicker too much, as we mentioned in our section on accessibility.

7. Go minimal.

We’ve discussed colors, fonts, layouts, and the importance of accessibility, and there’s a way to combine all those elements together to make a powerful newsletter: by going minimal.

Brands are often afraid of minimalist newsletter design—too much white space and limited text seems a waste of time and energy. How are you going to convey your message?

But a minimalist design can be cleaner, less cluttered, and make your content far more legible than traditional designs that incorporate imagery, text, illustrations, and CTAs together.

Use a set of frames in your newsletter that keeps elements of your design, such as imagery and text, separate yet connected.

However, don’t overdo the use of frames—that can make it difficult to follow your message or look untidy.

A minimalist design can improve your newsletter’s readability and lead to more conversions.

Wrap up

Newsletter design is a constantly evolving field—the design can be what you make of it and is only limited by your technology and imagination.

Focus on making your branding stand out but don’t rely entirely on your logo—optimize the use of your brand colors and fonts to improve brand recognition.

Don’t forget about accessibility—use colors, fonts, and interactive content that will be legible for everyone.

There are numerous color schemes that you can use, but decide in advance what the purpose of your colors are: to highlight inform, draw the eye, or to make content stand out.

Don’t be afraid to use bold fonts, but prioritize readability. The same goes for unusual layouts—they should still be readable and responsive.

Use GIFs to make your content more attractive and interactive. But, at the end of the day, seriously consider going minimal with your designs.

These seven design tips for newsletters will help you create newsletters that are attractive to readers and will motivate people to click on them more often.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic template and design platform. She enjoys writing about productivity, design, social media, the digital world, as well as pop culture and diversity.
Twitter: @Venngage

The post 7 Design Tips To Boost Your Newsletter Open Rates appeared first on Campaign Monitor.