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Email marketing is direct communication with customers and potential customers. Every day, millions of messages land in inboxes around the world. Some get opened straight away; others are deleted within seconds, lost in the flood. The emails that do get opened and read in full tend to share one thing: they look familiar, like something that has come from a trusted source. In short, they look like they were sent by a brand, because that’s what readers expect. A large part of creating emails that get opened and read is creating emails that look like they came from a brand people already know.
So yeah, we have all been there. Opening an email and straight away thinking that something is off. This usually is down to the design and the overall feel of the email. If an email is designed with the same visual style and tone as a company’s website, social media or even physical products, then immediately the email is recognized by the reader as being from that company. On the other hand, if the design of an email is completely different from a company’s website, social media, or even physical products, then straight away the reader will think that the email is spam and delete it.
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Trust isn’t built overnight, but it can be lost in a second.
When people interact with your brand on different digital channels (be they web, social media or email), they’re creating a mental model of your brand. The visual consistency of your brand reinforces this mental model and in turn gives your audience a comfortable sense of predictability in a chaotic feed.
So what does this look like in practice? Color scheme, typography, logo placement, and imagery all need to trace back to a company’s primary web assets, and that consistency has to survive contact with whatever tool the team uses to put each email together. Most in-house teams build and store their reusable layout inside an email builder, then export it to whatever platform actually sends the campaign. That’s what keeps a routine newsletter and a product launch email visually consistent, even though nobody redesigned either one from scratch.
A poorly designed or inconsistent email can hurt a good relationship fast. Most people’s first reaction to a poorly designed email is to assume it’s spam, which is why it’s surprising how often that first impression gets overlooked in the design process. For retail and lifestyle brands especially, inconsistent email design can create the impression that a company is in disarray.
Inboxes are packed these days, with emails arriving in split seconds. This means the visual recognition of your brand needs to be immediate, nothing like the slower pace of reading a physical letter. If a subscriber can recognize your brand within a second or so, you’ve already won half the battle. Strong visual recognition builds brand recall and helps your emails stand out in an inbox full of messages and advertisements.
To achieve this, establish clear guidelines for your email design. Keep these key areas uniform across all mailings:
Brand consistency also helps the teams involved in your email campaigns. Their work is greatly simplified, and they can get started on creating more content much quicker than they would if they had to create yet another design for every single email they send out.
Creating a design system for your email templates allows your team to create campaigns fast. Instead of starting from scratch to create each individual email, team members can focus on things like creating strong copy, picking out relevant images, and tweaking the core offer to get the best results.
But what about performance and optimization? A clear, structured approach to the design of emails simplifies the test process, as variable design elements, for example, the layout, are restricted, which simplifies testing of individual elements, such as different headline versions or call-to-action versions.
These messages do not have to be solely generated from the web page of your website and could include other touch points, for example blog posts. A smooth customer journey through email, web pages, and any other touch points is the aim for all subscribers.
If you create a simple and minimalistic button in an email and the reader clicks it and lands on a completely different-looking website, with a lot of colors and a different structure, this will feel jarring to the reader and often lead to high bounce rates.
If you’ve touched base with your subscribers recently through an email (as you should have) and then they click on a link to join an event, download a white paper, or even purchase a product, then they will feel comfortable with what they are doing. Keeping that experience simple and building an email template that’s genuinely part of your brand recognition and identity is easier than most teams make it out to be.
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Creating consistent email design requires a lot of effort and discipline, but it pays off in the long run. It can transform normal marketing messages into familiar touchpoints between a company and a customer, and help to build up strong relationships with customers.
By creating consistent email templates that are part of your brand identity, you can build up a positive reputation by creating a polished experience for your customers every time you send them an email.
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If you found this post useful you might like to read these post about Graphic Design Inspiration.
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