Thought Leadership Monday Mashup: Email Design Inspirations

If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, then email should be the same for your business. However, you can’t just write a static email and expect it to nurture your leads.

When your visitors exchange their emails for your content offer, this interaction represents the first transaction that they will experience with your brand. Meaning, that this transaction is foundational before they’re even nurtured into cultivating an interest to your product or service.

Email is an intimate relationship between you and your audience. In fact:

• 57% of email subscribers spend 10-60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week.
• 91% of people check their email daily.
• Employees spend 13 of their working hours each week in their email inbox (on average).

So why not make it a worthwhile and memorable experience for them. Designing your emails with your end user in mind can help you to establish your brand identity, engage your readers and grow your business. That’s why quality and value should be the basis of your email design—creating a visually informational and engaging piece of content delivered right into your audience’s inbox.

With that being said, let’s look at some email design inspirations—embodying the quality, value, and successful popular trends that both nurture and engage an audience.

Designmodo is a company focused on creating informational resources—producing content and products that support designers and web developers. A good practice in email marketing is to provide relevant content to your audience instead of blasting them with emails that do not resonate with their needs. And Designmodo did just that in their welcome email.

One of Designmodo’s products, Qards, is a WordPress plugin that allows users who have no coding experience to create beautiful, responsive websites through pre-designed cards.

In their welcome email, Adrian, the author of the email, nurtures and delights the customer, Michael, by not only thanking him for his purchase but also providing him with resources—aiding Michael in building the website he needs. In this email, Designmodo exhibited a very simple, valuable and relevant email that targeted Michael’s needs as a new user of their product.

Relevance means knowing who your audience is and what they want from your emails. By knowing their product’s target audience, i.e., designers who have little to no code experience as well as understanding previous user experience with their own product, Designmodo provided relevant content to Michael nurturing him to continue their relationship even after the sale.

77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. So make sure that your email content is relevant to your audience—creating quality and value by fostering a deeper relationship with each of your customers based on addressing their needs.

Creating Incentive Emails: Lyft’s Welcome Email

An incentive email is grabbing a user’s attention with a motivation to act immediately, i.e., enter into this giveaway today, claim your prize now, save 15% with this code in the next 3 days, etc.

Wondering how effective this type of email is? Get inspired by the benefits with the listed statistics:

• 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.
• 7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week.
• People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers.
• 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message.
• 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to blast people with your promotions everyday. Nor should you blast them with a promotion every time you come out with a new sale or launch a new product. Relevance matters. And what builds off of relevance is trust.

Trust is fostered from knowing your audience—their needs and their activity before, during, and after the sale. So if one of your audience members is interested in coffee, don’t send them a promotion or incentive about tea. Know your audience’s habits—especially since 81% of online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email.

Nurture trust with your audience by respecting their inbox with relevance to their needs and habits. Take Lyft for example. Lyft, a rideshare company, gives out this promotion as a welcome to their new riders.

And not only does Lyft provide them with this incentive for joining their new community of riders, they also provide value by including an animated gif as to how the Lyft process works.

Lyft knows that not everyone has used a ridesharing service before—since it’s not like hailing a cab on the busy city streets. No, Lyft is all about being “your friend with a car whenever you need one.” And because they want to be your friend, they need to provide you with trust early on.

So they foster that trust with their content while offering you the benefits of their service i.e. “Never waste time waiting on a taxi or get stuck driving yourself again.”

If you’re using or plan to use incentive email marketing, remember to let your audience know they might receive updates, deals, coupons, offers, advice, news, events, or general information. Because the more work you do in informing your audience about the incentives you’ll be sending them, the more trust you’re building early on with them.

Creating Informative & Educational Emails: Plated’s Spring Favorites

Informative and educational emails are as simple as sending a newsletter, infographic, blog post, webinar or podcast. At the end of the day, what matters most is that you are providing informative and educational solutions to their needs—through your content and later your product or service.

And with 83% of B2B marketers using email newsletters for their content marketing strategies, it is no surprise that the following example best implements this practice.

Plated, a food delivery company, is all about sending delicious, chef-designed recipes with the necessary, portioned ingredients right to your door—created to suit your schedule and tastes.

In this Spring inspired email, they provide their audience with not only their new spring recipes but also information on the taste, the texture, and how to use their favorite springtime ingredients.

Another great way Plated introduced these new ingredients to their audience is through the use of this animated gif.

Animated gifs as seen in the Lyft example is a great tool to inform and educate your audience in an interactive way. Analyze the following stats to start incorporating interactive images into your emails:

• Animation can be a great way to reinforce the major point of a campaign, such as the call to action button.
• 1 in 2 marketers use animated gifs in their email campaigns.
• Emails featuring an animated GIF pulled in 12% more revenue than their non-animated version.

Finally, the inclusion of social sharing with email is a match made in marketing heaven. Your email subscribers have proven their loyalty to your brand just by signing up to your list. So when you drive them to your social feeds in your emails, you create deeper engagement, not only in your social media analytics but ultimately between you and your audience. Notice the benefits of incorporating social media into your email marketing strategy with the following stats:

• 59% of companies are integrating email and social channels together.
• Emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate.
• 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email.
• Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources.

As these statistics suggest, Plated is a good example of incorporating social media into their email strategy—displaying clearly the various social channels their company is engaged in. In more detail, Plated’s Pinterest boards is filled with different types of recipes to fit their different members’ dietary needs, tastes and schedules i.e., Quick Dinners, Vegetarian Dinners, Beef Dinners, etc.

Ultimately, in regards to informative and educational emails, remember to be solution based—allowing your audience to grow from your content and becoming avid and loyal customers.

Final Thoughts

Email design is just as important as the content within it. And just to inspire you to analyze your current email marketing strategy, here are some stats on the benefits of effective email marketing:

• Email dominates all other methods of content sharing: 88% of B2B buyers use email to share content. LinkedIn is 2nd (43%) and Twitter is 3rd (35%).
• Email remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.

If your company is one of the ones that 27% of consumers were more likely to say that their favorite companies should invest in more email, then think about incorporating these effective email design inspirations into your next email marketing strategy.