I only have 50 milliseconds to grab your attention.
The same holds true when you go to capture a user’s attention in an email.
User experience (UX) is important, and while there is ample content out there for anyone interested in learning more about web UX, there seems to be less when it comes to email marketing UX.
Email UX is often forgotten, ignored, or treated like the red-headed stepchild (no offense, redheads). Poorly designed emails can lead to fewer conversions, lost revenue, and erosion of brand trust. After a lot of reading and research, I’ve compiled my best advice for good UX in emails. While I won’t be getting into I’ll be exploring how to create the best UX for your email subscribers, focusing on the email content instead of the whole subscriber journey.
Email UX is about keeping the email as simple and honest as possible. What do I mean by simple? It doesn’t include any extra information, images, or text than it needs in order to achieve its goal (usually with a single click). What about honesty? The content in the email isn’t fake, disingenuous, or a bait and switch.
The most successful emails make it easy for the user to consume and act upon your content.
Most emails have a handful of elements that work together to achieve a click. If one element is out of place, it can impact all the work you’ve put into the other elements and can dilute your chances for a click or conversion.
Important Elements of an Email Campaign
Inbox Details
This is your chance at a killer first impression to get the reader to open your email. It includes the subject line, preheader text, sender address, sender name, and reply-to address.
Don’t look like a spammer.
—Matt Vernhout, quoting Unknown
Start with your company’s name as the sender and use a monitored email for your reply-to address. Trust is built when your reader quickly knows who the email is from and what to expect from the content. There’s a potential to test different senders Saudi Arabia Business Email List if that aligns with your branding guidelines, but the goal is on-sight recognition and readability. Plus, including a monitored reply-to email address completes the feedback loop.
Your subject line should answer the question, “Why should I open this email?” Keep it as short and to-the-point as possible. Crafting the perfect and may seem daunting, but it’s very possible.
Content
Better known as everything your email contains.
“When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing”
—Herschell Gordon Lewis, Effective Email Marketing
You have 11 seconds, at most, to communicate your message. Writing clearly and succinctly is difficult and is not given the respect it deserves, especially in email. This is a lengthy topic, but I’m going to touch on a few elements to improve the UX of your content.
Let’s start with the assumption that your subscribers will only scan your email.
Make it easy for them.
- Start with the bare minimum of copy that you need to get your point across. Unless your email newsletter is an eBook (which, we recommend linking to instead), limit the number of words.
- The optimal line length for body copy is 50-80 characters.
- Don’t waste your reader’s time. Get to the point by communicating value.
- Emails should have specific goals (preferably just one goal, or maybe two). If you can’t answer the question, “Why am I sending this email?” then you should not be sending it,
- If conversion is the goal of your email (click, purchase, registration, download, etc.), pay close attention to your value proposition. Answer the question, “Why should they click through?” If your value proposition is solid, the subscriber will say, “If I click, I’m going to get something out of it.”
“The average adult reader can read 250 to 300 words per minute. If the average reading time for an email is 11 seconds, then the ideal length of an email is around 50 words.”
—Tom Tate, AWeber
I want to talk briefly about cognitive load, which is the amount of mental resources required to operate a system. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, maximizes usability because humans have limited processing power.
When the amount of incoming information exceeds our ability to handle it, performance suffers. We may take longer to understand the information, miss UAE Cell Number important details, or even get overwhelmed and abandon the task. Cognitive load is the science behind why it’s important to trim your content, chunk it, and use a content hierarchy (more on that below).
