Here's Vol.4 of Email Advice in Your Inbox!

Welcome back to our avid fans, and welcome to all our new friends! I hope you're as excited to read this week's edition as I am to send it 😁
 

Here's what you can expect this week
 

• A deep-dive into 5 common email design mistakes you might be making and how to avoid these.
   

• Another quick roundup of cool email tools this week to help you become a better email marketer.
   

• This week's top 3 email marketers to follow on LinkedIn right now.
   

• The fun stuff: Getting horses to type your emails is actually a thing!
   

• Your free gift (in case you missed it last time)
   

Let's learn more about email marketing! 🚀
 

The biggest design mistakes affecting your email marketing 

In the words of a famous wizard, email design can be a dark art 🧙‍♂️

If you get it perfect (or as near perfect as possible), you have one of the most powerful tools in the marketing world.

However, if you get it email design wrong, you might summon some nasty stuff (I'm talking unsubscribes, emails winding up in junk and eventually, losing money on all that magic you've been putting into your emails).

Let's take a look at 5 of the most common email design mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Mistake 1: Designing emails that are too long

According to TouchBasePro, the ideal length of an email is between 50 and 125 words. This seems pretty short, right?

Obviously, the length of your email will heavily depend on the purpose of the email. The email you're reading will be quite a bit longer, but that's the point: To provide in-depth knowledge.

Keep content concise, to the point and easy to understand.

Another major issue about long emails is the potential size of these emails. Email providers such as Gmail will often clip emails that are too long (or too large).

The length of an email could heavily impact the size thereof, so keep this in mind. Gmail will automatically shorten email messages that exceed 102 kilobytes in size. That's not a lot of capacity, so avoid using too many GIFs, images and content in the same email.

This only encourages Gmail to clip your emails. 

Lastly, and we've spoken about this in our blog, emails often need to be designed for the short-attention economy.

If your emails are too long, you'll struggle to keep your audience's attention.

• Get to the point.
• Keep it informative.
• Don't waste a reader's time
   

Mistake 2: Not creating a visual hierarchy

Capturing and keeping your reader's attention is the primary goal of your emails. Doing this visually is almost critical.

How, you may ask? One of the leading ways to design emails that capture and keep attention is to look after visual hierarchy, particularly the Inverted Pyramid principle.

This means creating a headline that promotes the critical message of your email, before providing supporting information and imagery to reinforce this message and ending off that section of your email with a call to action.
 

Mistake 3: Not considering your email fonts

Email fonts can be, well, tricky...

You may not realise this, but only specific fonts are accepted in the various email environments, and one of the major risks you run by using complex or fancy fonts is that someone's inbox is probably going to display those as an email-safe font anyway.

There are 10 fonts I recommend that are usually safe to use for any inbox (without them breaking). You can find those here.

It's tough to stand out or remain on-brand if you can't match customised fonts, right? It's tough to create good-looking, effective emails with fonts that break or revert in someone's inbox.

If you are going to use a custom font, you're going to need to realise the risk that comes with this on your design, but also the potential effort you're going to go through to have to use these, either by coding them into your HTML or adding them as image sections in your emails.

Try to keep things simple by finding an email-friendly font that closely matches your brand and message. This will avoid frustration and the risk of you needing to go back and edit campaigns that break when you test them.

In addition to this, make sure to:

1. Stick to one font (two at most): This keeps your email neat and allows for easier comprehension and planning.

2. Ensure your fonts are legible: Keep skim readers and visual impairment in mind. Your readers will appreciate this.

3. Ensure good line and word spacing: Yes, this is a layout caution, but having a font that is tough to read with the wrong spacing can make reading a nightmare. Test these on various devices too.
    

Mistake 4: Not designing for mobile

As of 2022, more emails are being read on mobile devices than on desktop devices (EmailMonday.com)

So, how do you optimise your emails for mobile? Here are a few quick tips:

• Try to stick to a single-column layout: By doing this, you avoid overlapping columns, unnecessary shifting of images, and overflowing text, which is typical of multi-column emails.
   

• Keep enough white space in your emails: Less can often be more. If you want someone to click, especially with limited space on a mobile device's screen, make sure there is enough white space, especially around your buttons and links. Don't lose conversions because someone keeps clicking the wrong thing.
   

• Don't use too many images: Yes, this may sound counter-productive, but having to scroll on and on through tons of images can be a frustrating experience for someone reading your emails on their mobile phone. Images should support copy, not the other way around.
   

• Pay attention to your font sizes: To ensure good readability and a clear message, try to aim for font sizes of 14-16 pixels for your body copy and 22-26 pixels for your headers.

Paying attention to these details can help you drive results and create a great mobile experience for your readers.
 

Mistake 5: Not testing your email designs

Most email marketers have been there...You spend hours creating the perfect email, check all your links and text and hit the "send a test" button, only to find an absolute horror show of an email with broken images, weird stacking and a wall of unaligned text when you open the test. 😱

Now, imagine you didn't test your perfect-looking email and sent it straight to your audience because you're in a hurry and excited to get them reading.

This is the danger of an untested email. Testing your email campaigns can seem rigorous but it's critical to ensure that your audience gets the best email possible. No shortcuts.

You can make this process simpler:

• Use the right email tools: Various email platforms (I use TouchBasePro for this as their testing tools are both amazing and super affordable) allow you to test how an email campaign will render on various devices. Don't neglect this function.
   

• Test various types of inboxes: How an email displays in Gmail will be different to Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo and all other inboxes out there. Try to test across as many of these as you can whenever possible.
   

• Test for images on and off: By default, most inboxes will render emails with images off, especially the first time you send emails. Unless you're embedding inline images (which isn't the best practice either), your images will need to be "downloaded" to your recipients' inboxes, so always keep this in mind.
   

A quick recap of what to focus on

• Don't design emails that are too large

• Don't neglect your visual hierarchy

• Not considering your email fonts

• Not designing for mobile devices

• Not testing your email designs

There are tons of mistakes you can make, but starting bybeing aware these basics and revisiting them when creating emails is your first step to email success.

Want to become an email expert? We've got what you need!

Interesting email learnings this week

Some more tools and tricks to help you become a better email marketer

Who to follow this week?

As always, any email expert knows that you can always learn. The best way to do so? Learn from other experts!

Here are 3 email experts to follow this week

Some more (email) fun to make your day better

Looking to outsource your emails? Why not get a horse to do it...

This may seem like a joke, but I'm not horsing around. This genius campaign by Iceland's tourism board is one of the best things I've seen on the internet this week. 

PS - Did you enjoy my horse pun? Yay or neigh? 🐴

Watch the video

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