Design is subjective—you might like something your peers find off-putting, and vice versa. In this way, it can be hard to nail down a universal standard for what’s appealing when designing marketing collateral.
In order to avoid creating something that may be unpopular in its design, many marketers will err on the side of caution when creating something like simple marketing emails. This means falling back heavily on your branding. Unfortunately, this can have negative results and can leave your marketing message feeling disingenuous.
Instead, it’s better to strike a balance between your branding and creative design, in order to produce marketing emails that are rooted in consistency and accentuated with inspiration.
Where to brand and how to do it
Having a certain degree of branding in your emails is important for the sheer aspect of brand association. You want recipients to immediately recognize who the email is from and have that realization enforced by the underlying feel of the email. To that end, there are a few critical places to brand your email:
- Make sure your eCommerce’s logo is front and center, easy to spot and recognize. This is the core of your branding and needs to serve as the tie-in for all other branding within the message.
- Having your boilerplate is also a critical branding tool in every email and one that can help establish brand consistency. This includes things like links to your social media, a link to your website, a contact link, a small disclosure and anything else that represents a brand standard.
- Wherever possible, try to fall back on your brand’s core color scheme. Whether it’s a passive background color or the color of your header text, having consistency in brand colors means creating cohesion throughout your various email marketing messages.
- Text will be a prominent part of your email message, so make sure your font is representative of your brand. This is a simple, subliminal branding measure that will help your emails appear more professional and well-designed.
As is evidenced by the above traits, branding in your emails should be subtle and complementary. Branding plays the role in presenting your eCommerce and building its reputation.
Where to let design flourish
As much as having a core brand concept backing your emails is important, letting design take a front seat is just as essential. The right amount of design will keep your emails from feeling stagnant over time and will help you better appeal to customers via the content you’re promoting. Take a look at where design trumps:
- Use product photos when drawing attention to sales or specific items, to reinforce their individual appeal.
- Share photos from your social media sites that are focused on your product culture or company lifestyle.
- Design bold headers, banners or picture boxes that accent your text. You can also employ applicable stock photos in the right settings, to add visual appeal to text.
- Themed emails are a superb way to jump on holidays, special events and current events. For these emails it’s okay to deviate from your core brand and employ images, colors and styles that relate to the theme.
Design plays a critical role in the overall appeal of your email, and is the more “active” complement to “passive” branding.
Put the two together
The best, most effective and captivating emails will utilize branding and design elements together in tandem to produce a piece of email collateral that’s well-received. Use the tips above the next time you’re putting an email together—especially if you’re using Remarkety’s templates or easy drag-and-drop email designer!
Contact us today for your 1-1 email marketing demo and let our email professionals help you set up the perfect campaigns for your site!
