Email Templates 101: Your Email Template Design Cheat Sheet - iContact

• Updated on: 2018-10-10
• Read original article here

According to the Radicati Group, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will be more than 319.6 billion by the end of 2021! With so many emails being sent daily, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from all the others flooding your audience’s inbox.

While creating amazing content that your audience finds relevant and useful is the first step, you also need to have an email design that piques their curiosity and draws your readers in. This is accomplished by creating an irresistible email template design.

An email template design is a pre-formatted or pre-written email that can be re-used for multiple email marketing campaigns. This way, you can simply add your own text, images, and links instead of building a custom template from scratch.

As a result, you’ll save more time since you only have to focus on writing the content of the email and not on actually creating a template. In addition, if you’re not a professional developer or designer, it may take you longer than normal to create the template since it often involves complex code.

Additionally, templates ensure that your emails have format and brand consistency.

There are several ways to create an email template, including:

Whether you’re building your email from scratch or using one that someone else created, here’s how you can get the most out of your email templates.

Templates serve a wide range of purposes, such as welcoming new subscribers or announcing an upcoming sale. As such, you want to make sure that the template matches the message you’re sending out to your subscribers. For example, if you were announcing a holiday sale, the template should be one that directs your subscriber’s attention directly to the coupon, discount, or promotional offer.

Have you ever sat down in a restaurant and opened a menu that was so extensive that you lost your appetite? The reason could due to “the paradox of choice.”

Developed by psychologist Barry Schwartz, this is having so many choices that we experience a “choice overload.” This can create a psychological burden that eventually turns consumers off.

Make sure that your templates don’t give your subscribers an overload. Use a design that’s simple, clean, concise, and drives readers to take action. In other words, limit the number of choices your readers have to make.

Here are a few pointers on an effective template design:

While you should include images in your email templates, there needs to be a thoughtful text-to-image ratio. If you don’t, your messages may go to recipients’ spam folders. In addition, because images take longer to load, subscribers may get annoyed and delete the email without having a chance to know what it was about.

There’s no exact figure on this ratio, but some suggest that 60 percent be text and 40 percent images, while others recommend 80 percent text and 20 percent images.

Lastly, ensure that your image file sizes are 200k or lower, as message weight and load time highly affect message deliverability. You’re sending an effective email, NOT something the size of an average mp3! Compress your images through a free service such as tinypng.com to optimize file size prior to placing in your template.

Speaking of images, make sure that you set up alt text so that the images in the message appear as intended by supplying relevant descriptive text for that image, not as a blank box.

Finally, don’t forget to test your images to see which messages and templates resonate best with your subscribers.

You also want to test each template across multiple devices and email services such as Gmail or Outlook to make sure that the template looks consistent across the board.

Still not sure where to start with your email marketing templates, talk to one of our email marketing experts today.