One of the easiest ways to make an aesthetically pleasing email campaign is to utilize a ready-made template. They’re abundant, there are designs for every industry, they’re usually aesthetically pleasing, and many are even free. The one thing they don’t do is install and arrange themselves.
Different email clients render email messages differently. The aim of these tips is to retain the integrity of rendering and branding across a variety of email clients.
This is because a good template design makes your content easy to read and as a result, your audience understands the points better. As a matter of fact, no matter what type of platforms you’re using, there are numerous free templates that have already been created to make your job easier.
Below are a few key pointers to a good template design.
1. Balance and harmony
An email template lets you do a lot of things, one of them is the ability to incorporate graphics and images into your message.
At the same time, you should know that there is such a thing as overdoing it, so finding an optimal balance between text and content is key. Discovering this harmonious balance will benefit your campaign in a number of ways.
First and foremost, it will help increase both your delivery and open rates by allowing your message to slide through, past pesky spam filters. It will also guarantee a better performance and reading experience for your customers.
2. Keep image blocking in mind
Making a simple adjustment to your template can result in dramatic improvements for your email marketing campaign. Most email readers today have images disabled by default while others block them entirely.
You can avoid this common problem by designing the template so your message looks good whether the recipient has their images turned on or off.
3. Background
Decide whether you want a clean background or beautiful image as your background. If you don’t want to mess your visitor sight, you should choose a clean background, but make sure it is not too obvious. This may disrupt your visitors from reading your blog contents.
4. Fonts
After you are done choosing a perfect layout with a suitable background, the next thing you must consider are the fonts that the template will use. Preview the template first with sites that provide downloadable free templates.
Choose the template that has font that is clear enough to read, medium sized, and with suitable properties.
4. Colors
When we talk about colors, it can be colors for the fonts and colors for the background image. In some cases, the designer of the template will fix certain colors to the template fonts.
Make sure it is a different color from your background. It must contrast with the background color or image.
5. Follow best design practices
When it comes to designing HTML email templates, there are actually a number of methods that can be considered best practices. Some of them involve implementing consistent navigation across the layout, making sure your logos are placed in the most effective position, and including detailed unsubscribe information at the bottom of every email.
One of the best practices you can follow is creating a headline driven template with minimal copy. Even email campaigns that market multiple products have very little copy, yet maintain their effectiveness in other ways.
You can garner excellent results by putting a special focus on headlines and complimenting them with high quality images. Do it right and these two elements could be the heroes of your campaign.
Following the above tips will take any lackluster template and turn it into a strong, professional looking website and create a more solid, polished business. Use these samples of inspiration not as something to replicate but merely as examples of successful design that you can learn from and use to spark your own original design ideas.
