Love What You’ve Done With Your Emails

Just like any eye-catching, high-circulation magazine, layout design is important to the success of your emails.

No matter how big your email list, a good layout will go a long way towards translating into sales.

Ezra has had proven success with layouts that contain:

• Image and GIFs
• Calls-to-action buttons
• Body copy (headline, sub-headline, general content)
• Link calls-to-action,
• Similar content carousel
• Promo
• Store category links
• Social icons and links,
• Contact us bar
• Snail mail address
• Reminder paragraph about value proposition and brand mission
• Preferences update option
• Unsubscribe link.

While various emails may look very different, they are all designed to contain these elements. In this post, Ezra explains how to layout your emails.

Templates can be created inside of the email CRM (Ezra uses Klaviyo, which is one for Shopify) for consistency to promote content, product launches, sales etc. 

BOOM! Email examples

 

Branded Header with a Tagline:

Ezra recommends the logo and tagline at the top of every email that you send for people to get to know and recognise your brand. What you do, what you stand for, why you were in business and what your company is about should be said in one sentence.  “Serve the world unselfishly and profit” – that’s the tagline for his Smart Marketer business. “People remember that. It’s everywhere,” he says. “I put it everywhere because … I want people to know what my logo looks like, because it helps with ad recall and a lot of different stuff, has people feel connected to (my) brand, and I want them to know my tagline. So, I stick that right up at the top. I’m a big fan of branding, building relationship and communicating the value that I have to offer with my company.”

 

Image and GIF Calls-To-Action:

Every email should include at least one image because some people will only click on images.  GIF animations also are very effective. Ezra says that GIFS can be mixed into every third or fourth email to help with the click-through rate.

Button Call-To-Action:

Different people prefer to consume content and engage with content in different ways. Some people only watch, some only listen, some only read. It’s the same with creating content: you should include videos, articles and podcasts because you want to reach the people in the ways that they consume. Some people will not click an image but will click a button. So, every email should also have a button call-to-action.

 

Body Copy with Link Call-To-Action:

Usually, the copy in the email includes a headline, sub-headline and a couple of sentences underneath. Body copy is always used in addition to images, because some people will skip right over the images and just read the copy and then click a text link call-to-action.

 

The reason that we’re sending an email is to try to get someone to click, so including these various calls-to-action gives them the opportunity to click the way they like to click.

 

Similar Content Carousel:

This is a way of saying: “If you’re not interested in this content, we have other content you might be interested in”. This works well if a great deal of content is being sent out (Ezra recommends any brand email at least one piece of content a week) but isn’t necessary if you’re only doing sales and automation emails, for example. Ezra puts the similar content carousel at the footer of the email.

 

If your business is running a sale, promotion or launching a new product, this will act as a reminder for potential customers, placed at the bottom of auto-responders in content emails – “P.S., our sale is happening” or “P.S., we’ve got this new product launch coming up”.

Store Category Links:

This works well to bring people over to your products. A store link helps them be proactive (Ezra includes this in every email unless, for example, the content is about a specific product on sale).

Social Icons:

This is to encourage people to connect with your company on social media.

Contact Bar:

This should include the business phone number, email address and mailing address.

 

Reminder Paragraph:

This is all about the company’s value proposition and brand mission. For example: “Thanks for supporting BOOM! By Cindy Joseph. We strive to provide a community of women who are excited about life and want to celebrate beauty at every age. Your participation is what fuels the Pro-Age Revolution that our founder Cindy Joseph began so many years ago. We’re a family-run business and emails are a crucial way for us to contact our readers and fans. We regularly provide store discounts, the latest pro-age videos, makeup tips and updates from all of us at BOOM!”

This reminds potential customers who we are and why we’re good. “When we put this reminder paragraph above our unsubscribe link, we saw our unsubscribes drop by about half, so this is really important to put at the bottom of your emails,” Ezra says.

Update Preferences:

This allows email subscribers to click to change how often they receive emails. They may want to avoid being emailed every day and opt to still receive them, but only weekly or monthly.

 

Unsubscribe Link:

This is placed at the bottom – the last thing you’d want any subscriber to do.

A Few More Conversion Tips:

• Always use deadlines for sale events:  People are bombarded by emails, text messages, Facebook posts, advertisements and videos, so you must create urgency, along with discounting and incentive: “This coupon code expires in 24 hours” or “This sale is over in three days”.
• Remember: 88% of smartphone users actively check emails on their smartphones. So you want to make sure that looks good. If you’re using a service such as Klaviyo, a version of your email is available for desktop computers and smartphones.
• And another thing … 66% of unsubscribes occur between 5 and 10pm, so send broadcast emails or automations between 6 and 9am. And you can set that in someone’s local time, inside a service such as Klaviyo.

 

Blog Post created from Ezra Firestone’s DMDU Connect LIVE 2020 Presentation.

If you would like to watch the full presentation, CLICK HERE and start your FREE 7 Day Trial.