How to Optimize Your Email Marketing Campaigns with the Right UX Design

Whether in the physical or digital world, an emotional and/or intellectual reaction is aroused in the consumer based on how it looks, feels, and works, and will dictate if they have a positive or negative experience, with expected effects on your sales. For online business a positive UX has increased their sales by more than 35%, which is quite fantastic.

It is important to note that UX does not just refer to web or mobile app design. It refers to all your digital collaterals, not the least of which are the emails you send out to your subscribers.

A majority of all marketers (89%) consider email the most effective tool for generating leads, so you can imagine why you should give your email marketing campaigns due attention.

Here is how to optimize them with the right UX design.

The Email-UX Connection

UX expert Jakob Nielsen states that the average user spends just 51 seconds on a marketing email, most (81%) simply scanning it instead of reading it through. This is because most users are inundated with so much information that they have to skim through most of what they receive and only give time for content they find truly interesting or important.

If your email is text-heavy, hard to scan, requires a download, and/or loads slowly, then the UX leaves much to be desired. If you want subscribers to read it, you have to pay particular attention to some key UX issues. Let this UX guide show you those issues.

Send Only Relevant Content

You may not immediately connect content with UX, but user experience refers to the whole of it, and that includes how much satisfaction you get from opening and reading the message. No one likes to waste their time on an email that doesn’t have any relevance or value to them, so you have to make sure your email content has both for your recipients.

Highlight Your Call to Action

The main purpose of your email is to get your readers to do a desired action, such as clicking on a link or button. Make sure your call to action jumps out at the reader as soon as the email is opened. Readers are more likely to read a bit more of the text so that they can decide whether to answer the call to action or not.

Focus on Typography

Because marketing emails tend to be mostly text (or text-graphics) you have to pay special attention to your typography. You have to make sure the text is easy to read and the background is not too busy or distracting.

Visual content is always a winner, but you have to make sure it will not slow the loading time too much, or your hard work may face deletion.

Test the Links

You may feel that double-checking that the primary link in your newsletter actually works borders on OCD, but it is a necessary part of your UX. In fact it should be part of the SOP for email marketing campaigns. Links in your email are not going to generate leads if they don’t work and will also give the recipient a poor opinion of your company.

Link to a Relevant Landing Page

Sure, you can send your email recipient to your homepage. However, unless you actually have something there that your readers will want to see, you are forcing them to search for the relevant page in your website in connection with your email.

Instead of the homepage, link your newsletter to a landing page directly connected to your email message, and make sure you give more information than is available in the email and with the appropriate call to action.

Check for Typos

Another seemingly obvious practice which is often overlooked is proofreading and editing your work to check for grammatical, spelling, or typing errors in your copy. Misspelled or sloppy content elicits a negative impression on your readers, and emails with these gaffes will be (mostly) confined to the trash.

Design for Mobile

Did you know that more than half (54%) of all email is read on mobile? If you have ever tried reading anything on a smartphone, you know how frustrating it can be when not all of the content fits into the screen, so you have to move sideways to see everything.

Do you think most people would bother to read an entire email message, let alone click on the link in that situation? Would you? Follow these tips for mobile-friendly emails and you will improve your click-through rates immensely.

Keep Your Design Consistent

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. While this typically refers to gender equality, the same idea can be applied to email marketing. Make sure the look and tone of the email message is consistent with the branding on your site so that it is instantly recognizable. Use logos, colors, fonts, and visual content that reflects your brand.

Make it Accessible

When designing your newsletter, you should think about accessibility. Some of your readers may have poor eyesight, so you want to make sure the text has good contrast with a good amount of white space, and the fonts are readable. You should also make sure your call to action buttons or links are nice and big, so it is easy to find and click even on a mobile device.

Test it for UX

Perhaps the best way to make sure you have a good email-UX connection to make the most of your email marketing campaign is to send test messages. Check if your newsletter works well on various devices and clients, if it loads quickly (within 3-5 seconds), and test the links to make sure they work.

Get feedback from test recipients by asking them directly, or checking the open and click-through rates. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, after all! You can also use a tool like Litmus to check if your email is compatible across different email platforms and browsers as well as devices before sending it out.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a simple and effective tool in your repertoire of marketing tactics. A positive UX can increase its effectiveness immeasurably. Follow these simple and straightforward optimization tips for the easiest tweaks ever!

Do you know of any other way UX can optimize your email marketing campaigns? Give us a head’s up in the comments below.