I have designed, developed and executed hundreds of EDM’s throughout my career. Email marketing is your most powerful marketing tool because of how targeted your message can be to a specific person as well as its affordability giving you huge ROI potential. In 2015, on average 205 billion emails were exchanged on a daily basis. And this is expected to increase to more than 246 billion each day by 2019. That is why email is so important to get right for you business. There are various tools at your disposal to set you up for success but in terms of effect email design you need to have:
– Content tailored to your audiences needs
– Something your readers want
– Something of value or purpose
– functionality across email clients, devices, browsers and versions.
Collaboration
Most of the time, you will already have a template built and designed to execute a manual email send with some small copy tweaks. However, in campaigns that need a strategic approach, sketching and sharing ideas is the best way to start the process of creating excellent emails. This way, the whole team can get involved in the development of great ideas for the EDM’s with what message you want to give your audience.
Photoshop
For new email templates, I will always use Adobe Photoshop CC to build out how an edm will look before getting into the HTML development. This way you know exactly how big the images are, where they should sit in the layout and control the file size of the images if there are a lot. Having a mock up of the final design before any development has commenced makes everything more efficient because you don’t have to wait around for key stakeholder feedback, delaying the development phase. You don’t want to dev up a whole EDM just to find out you missed the mark completely.
EDMdesigner
Going from photoshop to a working HTML file is easy these days with various providers offering EDM building web applications. Some email marketing software offer inbuilt EDM builders which is excellent but usually they will come with a price tag. I recommend EDMdesigner to get the job done quickly and easily with drag and drop technology. EDMdesigner has some of the best out of the box, device responsive, fully customisable HTML exports I have seen, so you will have HTML files that look like your finished photoshop psd’s in no time.
Customising HTML
Although you have a nice looking HTML file now, you will often need to add custom styles, tracking codes or added tweaks to your code before you begin testing. In this case, there was some header and footer styles that needed to be added, compliance disclaimer (unsubscribe codes and links) and custom merge tags (personality fields like “hello *|FNAME|*”).
Email Marketing Platform
The next step is to get your EDM into a campaign on your email marketing platform. I have had extensive experience sending email with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp and Marketo but they should generally do the same thing but with varying features, functionality, UI and pricing. This is where you assign a subject line, preheater field, check the plain text version of your code, select a database that will be receiving the email and of course, testing.
Testing
So your EDM looks great in the preview window of your EDM campaign, but looks can be deceiving. Just because it looks good in the email platform you use, almost certainly means, it does not look good across all devices, email clients, versions and internet browsers. You will be able to send a test email to an email address of your choosing, however how can we easily test this email across everything and be 100% confident the email with function the way you want. Easy! I have used Litmus for email testing for a long time now and it is excellent. I have also used Email on Acid in the past and it gets the job done too. These services ensure that your email will look how it should on every device (mobile, tablet, desktop), across every email client (Apple, Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo being the more popular clients), their various legacy versions (Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, Outlook 2007, etc) and internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet explorer). Testing your EDM is essential and gives you confidence that the recipient will receive a professional, functional EDM that speaks volumes about your brand.
You can check out the test I did on this public litmus link that I shared for this specific EDM here.
Reporting
After the email/campaign has been launched, it is time to play the waiting game. I like to check back 24 hours after an EDM has been sent to check the email report and analytics. Reporting will be included in your email marketing platform as a feature. In the report you will find a lot of statistics, for example, open rate, click through rate, unsubscribes, undeliverables and email details. This is where you can start to gather insights and locate behaviours or trends within a specific segment of your database. When you discover new insights and want to test a new hypothesis you start this process all over again and check the results!