I love makeover shows. There's just something about "before" and "after" photos that resonates with me in a way that few things can. When shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" come on, my designer's instinct kicks into high gear and everything else fades into the background. Next thing I know, I'm looking to apply the same themes from these shows to my own life. But my creations aren't built for families, they're built for inboxes.
Quick, pop quiz. What activities do you associate with your email program's design evolution?
Chances are you listed endeavors limited to your creative department, such as the development of illustrations, graphics, or photography; application of style and brand standards; and exploration of color, typography, and layout, to name a few. A few of you may have included marketing activities such as conversion, CTR or revenue goals, testing plans, and social media strategy. In order to truly give your program an extreme makeover, both marketing and creative need to work together. Here are a few tips on how both crews can work side by side to give emails an overhaul.
Change the way you define design
Most people think design is all about graphics and layout. Not so. A truly successful email design combines activities from both your creative and marketing departments. Strategic thinking, planning, and purpose-driven decisions are the foundation of great design. If marketers and designers want subscribers to engage with their emails (and they should!), they must join forces to combine their talents, develop actionable (and measurable) plans, and see them through to execution.
Worried that your creative staff doesn't care about business plans and reporting metrics? Any designer worth his or her salt will appreciate a clearly defined goal to work toward, especially if the marketer is responsive to feedback on what is (or isn't) working in order to achieve that goal.
What about the subscriber?
That's right, getting your creative and marketing folks talking isn't enough. You need to get your subscribers involved, too. While the integration of these departments is crucial to email design success, none of it matters until you've considered the subscriber's point of view. Designing with the user in mind isn't an entirely novel idea (Google "UX" or "user experience"), but often seems to take a backseat to the priorities of marketing executives and other stakeholders when it comes to email design.
Formal user-centered research and design techniques can add significant cost and turnaround time to projects, but it's likely your design process already includes some of them. Explore the integration of audits, wireframes, user task flows, or personas to ensure that you've considered every aspect of how your subscribers interact with your brand's email experience.
The subscriber experience
The nature in which subscribers engage with email has always provided a unique set of challenges. Assuming your email arrives in the inbox, the subscriber experience begins with the many emails fighting for attention in a crowded inbox, competing against toolbars, ads, mailboxes, folders, calendar items, to-dos, and more.
Start designing the subscriber experience from the moment your email arrives in the inbox by making sure the "from" name and subject line are appropriate, recognizable, and relevant. Put yourself in the subscriber's shoes, or better yet, develop personas to help you see the email through the eyes of different segments of your audience. Document and dissect every aspect of how each persona will open and read your email, considering copy, content, graphics, calls-to-action, and more. ExactTarget's Email Marketing Design & Rendering Whitepaper (PDF) offers more details on designing for the five stages of email viewing.
Next page >>
