Recently T324 has been doing quite a lot of email newsletter design for our clients.
It seemed for several years as if email marketing had been forgotten in the rush to social media marketing, and the big headlines were all about Facebook for promoting your business.
But now that some of the dust has settled, it's clear that email never lost value as a sales tool, and in fact is stronger than ever.
Email marketing is interesting to business owners because you know it's easier to do more business with an existing customer than to find, vet and cultivate a new one. You know how much it costs to find a new customer!
Email newsletters let you deepen your relationship with people you're already connected to, whether as customers, partners or vendors.
If you invested in your site and care about your business image, you want a good-looking email design that matches the quality of your site. Have you noticed how poor many small-business emails look? You can't afford to have a clumsy website; a bad newsletter damages your credibility in the same way.
Sometimes business owners feel that they can do it themselves using premade templates from Constant Contact or Mailchimp. It's more difficult than you might think; small changes made to the template can appear as broken design when the email is sent. Your email needs to render (appear properly) in various email clients like Google, Yahoo, and Outlook as well as multiple devices and browsers.
An email design today requires more complex coding than many websites.
Mobile screen size is an issue; historically click-thru has been much lower on devices because emails get so long. Ideally, your email should appear differently on a mobile- perhaps with headlines and just short snips of text. Buttons should appear larger, easy to tap, and pictures should resize automatically. Just as website design customers have come to demand CMS systems so they can control their own website content, businesses are looking for robust, great-looking email designs so they can control their own newsletters.
Brands need custom designs to stand out from the sea of cookie-cutter templates.
We're always researching the best solutions and developing our templates. If you're interested in talking about email design, give our Senior Project Manager Brian Nowell a call at 510-525-9510, or email info@T324.com.
