How to improve your email marketing by using more visual imagery

Email marketing campaigns are essential to any marketing strategy. They are a powerful tool for communicating and building relationships with your clients and prospects. Email can also provide important insights, generate leads and (most importantly) convert to sales. To get the most ROI out of email campaigns, the email design needs to be cohesive with the corporate brand — including the website, advertising campaigns and collateral— to make it resonate with customers. 

Images in email are an important part of its impact. If used incorrectly or too often, images also increase load times on mobile, distort the message, or send an email straight to the junk folder.

Some points to consider:

• A high ratio of images to text may trigger spam filters.
• Many email programs block images by default. Don’t rely exclusively on images or text within images - to present your important content.
• Optimize for image-blocked subscribers. Note that optimizing emails for image blocking increases ROI by 9%
• Always use “alt’ and “title” text behind images to ensure that there is still copy appearing even when your images do not load.

Following a visual design checklist is recommended. Although every project is unique, every one of them also has a set of processes that are part of your workflow. That’s where having a good design checklist comes in. Here are some of the most critical:

1. Primary color palette is on-brand
2. Images total less than 200kb, in order to optimize email load times
3. Width of images is a maximum of 650 pixels 
4. Design uses system fonts
5. Ratio of images to text is appropriate
6. Important content is presented in html and text
7. “alt” and “title” are placed behind images to address blocked images
8. Design is responsive
9. Email is optimized for image blocking

Email marketing continues to evolve, and campaigns remain an effective customer engagement component, and 2016 will be no exception. Utilizing and understanding email marketing design is a great way to interact with your customers, and to move the customer journey forward. Ultimately, the more creative and innovative that companies are with email marketing, the greater chance they have of building stronger relationships through this important channel.