While UX design isn’t the first thing that comes to your mind as important when you first think of an email newsletter, it certainly plays a big role. The main reasons you are sending the newsletters are to engage with your users, attract their attention and maintain a good relationship – their experience with the newsletter should be good.
With that in mind, there are many elements to an impressive UX design. Here are some of them together with the best techniques to ensure reader satisfaction.
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1. Be consistent with your brand
This is one of the most important parts of an email newsletter. When a person signs up on your website, they expect to see similar things in the emails they receive.
For one, the tone of voice, how you communicate with your audience, needs to be the same in your emails. You can’t be funny and entertaining on your website, social media, and other platforms and then proceed to send formal newsletters to your subscribers. That’s not what they expect and they will not appreciate it. Stay consistent with your voice.
The design of your emails should resemble the design of your website as well. Not to say that you need to use the same colors all the time but some of the design aspects, something that is a staple to your brand should translate to your emails. The overall feel should be the same even if some of the design elements are not completely identical.
2. It doesn’t take a lot to make a design stand out
Many email newsletter designers, along with companies hiring them, think that they need to use plenty of design elements to make the newsletter stand out. However, this is not the case. In fact, it could possibly not work on the mobile version of your email, thus alienating half of your recipients – or more.
The design elements used should be down to a minimum. For instance, focus solely on branding certain colors. A good color scheme could really make an email stand out without making it too flashy and slow. Limit the number of images as well.
While it’s always nice to have plenty of visuals, images could slow the loading speed down, they could also not work well on certain devices and in some cases, recipients won’t even be able to see them.
“Try not to be too predictable with your email newsletters. It’s okay to change the style at times while still remaining consistent with the overall brand image. But with this, you avoid being boring,” says Malorie Grant, a UX designer for Academized.
3. Mind the limitations
As stated previously, your email needs to flow well from desktop to various mobile devices. This is a simple fact since more than half of your subscribers will probably view the email you send them on their phone or tablet. It’s more convenient for them but it creates more work for you.
As an addition, many clients use technologies for rendering emails that are not quite so new and modern. Your goal is to make your email as compatible with all of these technologies as possible. What this means for you is that you will have to stick to building layouts with HTML instead of much cooler HTML5 or CSS3.
“Designing email newsletters is nothing like designing a website, for instance. It requires you to make the email work perfectly with each client – and those clients often use different rendering systems or devices,” says Edward Thompson, a UX designer for Assignment Help.
4. Keep the legal requirements in mind
While ID design should be your main concern, be aware that the design and content are one when it comes to email newsletters. There are requirements as to what each email is required to have to be labeled as legal and not a spam. An address, for instance, or an unsubscribe button.
There are many other requirements and you should study the CAN-SPAM Act to get the full picture of what needs to be done in order to get your email in front of your readers.
If you are sending emails to people in other countries, look up local laws and rules as well, just to be sure.
5. Make your email newsletters fun
One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that the goal of an email newsletter is to make money and drive traffic. The truth is, the goal of an email newsletter is to make people feel happy that they signed up by offering something useful, entertaining and making them feel like a part of something.
Doing this may seem simple, but it’s not. For instance, sending welcome emails is considered to be a good practice because it really does make people feel welcome. This sets the tone of emails to come and gives a small preview – if done properly.
Create good content that is also useful to the user. For instance, if you are selling something, forget about promotions once in a while and instead send useful tips from your niche – people will be happy that they joined.
While good content is hard to write, there are plenty of ways to get what you need – employ some help from tools like Via Writing, Big Assignments or Simple Grad.
Conclusion
UX design should always be taken seriously. It can improve your open rates and engage people on a higher level. Follow these tips to create fun and quality email newsletters.
Grace Carter is a proofreader at UK Essay Writing Services and at Assignment Services, where she works with a team of writers on content proofreading and editing. Also, Grace teaches creative writing at Essay roo, academic portal.
