Email marketing is a very useful acquisition and loyalty channel. According to figures, it is the most profitable marketing lever, with a ROI that is often more significant than 300%. However, be careful to clearly distinguish the acquisition emailing campaigns that are carried out on rented or purchased email databases. The results often disappointing at the start, and the loyalty emailing campaigns carried out on your own prospect and customer.

This is a comprehensive guide with a number of email marketing design tips to help you become a savvy email marketer. On the program, all the best practices to know to design an email template, organize your contacts and your campaigns, and advice on choosing your emailing software.

Email Templates & Design Tips

We obviously want our email template to be elegant, but above all, it has to be efficient promoting clicks. The design of an email is an exercise all the more complicated as it is necessary to ensure that the email is displayed correctly regardless of the size of the screen or the email client used, not to mention the constraints at the level HTML / CSS code.

The layout of emails has a significant impact on the performance of your campaigns. By improving the design, in particular via work on the contextualization and the form of the CTA (buttons and links), it is possible to enhance the rate of reactivity of the order of 30% to 50%. The reactivity rate defines the number of people who clicked in the email among all those who opened the email and is indicative of the level of engagement of your recipients.

In this complete guide, we return to the place of the call to actions (CTA) and the importance of organizing them properly in the body of the email (contextualization, positioning, choice of words). The second part of the suggestion is about general rules for the layout of emails (number of columns, etc.). It ends with a series of examples of email templates that can be unusual sources of inspiration for your work.

The reactivity rate, the indicator to follow to measure the performance of your emails

To measure the performance of your emails, the indicator that you must monitor as a priority is the reactivity rate. The reactivity rate relates to the number of clickers to the number of openers. The number of clickers is the number of people who click on a link or button contained inside your email. The number of openers is the number of people who open your email. If 35 people open your email, and of these 10 click on a link in the email, your reactivity rate will be 10/35 = 0.29. Finally, we multiply by 100 to obtain a percentage.

You will notice that the reactivity rate does not include the variable of the open-rate (opened emails / delivered emails). The reactivity rate lets you know how many people, among those who opened your email, have clicked at-least 1 link in the email. The decision to open an email does not depend on its content, but only on the subject and the sender.

To find out more about email rates and indicators, discover our complete file on email marketing statistics (key indicators and comparison of average performance).

Therefore, you must set up a process to monitor the rate of reactivity, ideally in Excel, where you put in parallel the changes in the templates and the rate of responsiveness. This will allow you to identify the most useful templates. It should also be noted that today most emailing software offers A / B Test functionalities, which would enable the performance of two almost identical versions of the same email to be compared.

A little advice and tips on email marketing design

Emailing software all offer analytical interfaces to study the performance of your various emailing campaigns. However, none of these interfaces provide the depth of analysis of Google Analytics. This is the reason why we advise you to track your emailing campaigns via Google Analytics.

It would help if you contextualized your CTA

The position of the CTA in the email is a crucial element, as well as the questions of design, of the color, which we will talk about below. The main rule is quite obvious: you must choose a location that makes your CTA visible. There’s no point in having a beautiful CTA if you don’t see it or badly. This means placing your CTAs above the waterline, including on mobile. Your CTAs (the most important in any case) must appear before your recipients when the email is opened. Clearly, avoid positioning your CTAs too low in the body of your emails.

Email reading heat map

The absolute position of your CTAs should not diminish the importance of their relative position, with respect to contextualization. It would help if you contextualized your buttons and links, by positioning your CTAs right next to your value proposition. The “Discover” button, for example, will be clicked more if placed by itself than being placed under a large paragraph.

Take care of the design details of your buttons.

You must have experienced this if you do A / B Tests: a tiny change in the design of your buttons sometimes and even often results in significant differences in terms of responsiveness and clicks. The Digital Evolution group shows, for example, that the simple addition of an arrow could significantly improve the reactivity rate. There comes the email validation tool with the best support.

A simple layout, block by block

The constraints linked to multi-devices significantly limit the possibilities of the layout. You are much less free than when you edit the layout of a classic web page. For each email, you must verify that it is displayed correctly on the computer, on mobile, and on other devices. It isn’t delightful, but unfortunately, it’s not about an optional choice.

Obviously the foundation for any successful campaign is a good email list. And to have a good list you should validate emails in real time before they even get into your list. We hope our guide with the best email design tips has helped you. Drop us a comment or a message if you have any questions.