For many online sellers, email marketing is the one thing that has remained consistent in what is an otherwise rapidly changing e-commerce environment. The evolution of email has been slow and steady because the business case for making dramatic and sudden changes to a product that works well just wasn’t there.
This doesn’t mean that email marketing hasn’t changed over the years – it has and in some cases more significantly than the casual observer would imagine. Think smartphones, think marketing automation and think how comfortably email sits alongside numerous other applications and marketing channels. Even in the good, old, reliable world of email marketing – nothing stands still.
As such, email marketing best practices do need to be occasionally updated and this is precisely why iContact has just published The Ultimate Email Design Lookbook.
“Email marketing is a constantly evolving marketing channel. Many marketers continue to use old practices because, by-and-large, they still work. However, to deliver truly optimised campaigns and see real success in the competitive landscape of the email inbox, marketers need to move with the times.
iContact recently celebrated its 15th anniversary and in that time have managed the sending of billions of email marketing campaigns for our clients. Thanks to this experience, we know what a great email campaign looks like and in this guide, we’ve highlighted some of the best. We want email marketers to take these design best practices and associated strategies on-board and take their campaigns to the next level”
– John Hayes, marketing strategist, iContact
Visual Guide
The highly visual guide has been designed to highlight how email marketing has evolved from a text-only medium to incorporate HTML, then HTML with CSS and latterly to advanced CSS with animation. Compiled by experts from iContact’s in-house design team, the book sets up many different components which successful email marketing campaigns are made up of, all of which require following a series of best practices. These include:
- Animation
- Branding
- Call-to-Action
- Colour
- Content
- Layout
- Message Types
- Illustration and Photography
Post-GDPR: Design Best Practices Never More Important
Campaign optimization has never been more important than in the post-GDPR era when many retailers were obliged to shed many subscribers from their databases.
Despite the “spray and pray” techniques adopted by many marketers in the past, successful email marketing was never a numbers game. When campaigns are going out to potentially reduced subscriber bases – it’s never been more important to ensure they are firing on all cylinders.
