Have you ever received an email that felt like it was written just for you? You can create this experience for your customers by using email templates.

Designing and implementing the right template will help streamline how your business communicates with its customers, clients, and partners, making them feel like they are the only one who matters. What’s more, templates allow you to create content that is specific to the type of business that you have, which makes it easier for people who are reading your emails to know what kind of product or service they are dealing with at any given time.

In this blog post, we’ll break down how to build a successful email template and everything else you need to know about how to make emails work best for your business.

Why design templates for your businesses emails?

Why should you design email templates? It’s simple. The less generic your emails look and feel to customers and clients, the better. Customers will appreciate how personalised the tone of your business feels when they receive an email that is directly targeted towards them and their needs. There are three key objectives when designing emails: to encourage your recipients to open your email, to captivate your audience with the email’s design, and to encourage them to take action after opening the email.

Given the number of emails the average person receives every day, not everyone will read every word of each email they receive. Instead, people tend to scan the text and retain only the necessary information. An attractive email created with a design template will encourage your audience to read more of the email, giving you longer to communicate your message effectively. This, in turn, will make the recipient more likely to take action from the email.

Tips for designing the best email for your type of business

Take a look at how different types of businesses are communicating with their customers. What do you notice about how people in these industries communicate? When designing an email, there are some key things to consider to ensure your template is optimised. It is true that each industry is unique and therefore so should be your emails, however, there are some standard ways to help create email templates that will work well across most industries.

1) Target the right audience

The first email design guideline is to understand who your audience is. You can’t design an email that appeals to everyone, so it is important to target the right (and most beneficial) people. Consider what your recipients might want or need and how you can best appeal to them. Once you know who your audience is, it becomes easier to understand what design elements will appeal to them and tailor content specifically for them. For instance, internal emails can be content heavy, while external emails can include media, etc.

2) Make your email mobile friendly

Roughly 60% of all emails are opened on a mobile device, meaning mobile-friendly email templates are becoming increasingly important to ensure people can easily read emails on their smartphones. The best way to ensure your email looks good and functions well on different devices is to use a responsive design template. This means that the layout of your email will automatically adjust to fit the screen of whichever device it is viewed on. You should use templates or design elements that are suitable for mobile devices — for instance, your email’s width should easily fit within a phone’s margins, the fonts should be legible on a smaller phone screen and the call to action (CTA) button is strategically placed for an easy click. Be sure to preview your emails on all devices before you send them to make sure they are optimised for each.

3) Use a strong call to action (CTA)

A CTA is an essential part of any email design as it encourages your recipients to take a specific action, such as clicking on a link or visiting a website. CTAs should be clear and concise, easy to see (e.g. a bold colour) and use firm yet encouraging language that will encourage the reader to act. For instance, “shop now” and “see more” are both strong CTAs that will encourage your audience to take action.

4) Pick a theme and be consistent

The best way to ensure your email template looks professional and polished is to use a consistent theme across all of your emails. This could be a certain font, colour scheme or layout that you stick to for all your templates. Not only will this make your emails more recognisable and easier to navigate, it also makes them look more uniform and organised. When choosing a format, consider who your audience is and what devices the majority of your audience is likely to open your emails with.

5) Use an eye-grabbing pre-header

A pre-header is the short snippet of text that appears beneath the subject line in an email. It’s a great place to include additional information about your email (such as a CTA), or to tease the content of your email so recipients are encouraged to open it. With attention spans getting shorter every day, first impressions are everything, and a great pre-header can really help drive the open rate of emails up. Your pre-header is also an excellent place to include personalisation: using your reader’s first name will pique curiosity and entice them.

Templates that avoid your email landing in spam

If your business’s emails are being marked as spam, you are missing out on an important revenue stream. Every email that arrives in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or any other email client passes by a spam check done by spam filters. If you’re sending emails and most of them are landing in spam folders it’s because your spam score is high. This could be for a number of reasons, such as too many images, large or overly-complicated file sizes, and a lack of personalisation. The best way to lower your spam score is by using email templates, using clean code and design elements that aren’t overly complicated or difficult to read.

Conclusion

Designing email templates can not only help streamline your business communications, but increase traffic to site and overall revenue. Using the above information, you can ensure that you are designing the best emails for each aspect of your business. Stick to a consistent theme across all emails, include a strong CTA and use an eye catching pre-header to ensure that recipients want to open your emails. If you have any questions about how Flowstate can help streamline your business communications, feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you.

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