Email marketing used to be a huge thing more than a decade ago. Most people had only email accounts to check as far as personal online data goes. But now, social media is thrown into the mix for many individuals and marketers are naturally responding by bringing their marketing efforts to these highly connected channels. With spam filters getting a lot smarter, the use of email marketing has dwindled but it still continues to be an essential part of network marketing. Email is still a central hub in exchanging information for a lot of businesses and marketing opportunities still rely on capture pages and autoresponders to build a list of email addresses. But with various Web technologies moving forward? Should you focus on making highly graphical emails? Before answering that, let’s dive deeper on the current state of email.
Checking Email on Mobile Devices is Very Common
Gone are the days of trying to design HTML emails for 1024×768 displays because many people now possess smartphones ranging from 3 to 6-inch screens and it is likely for those old HTML emails to look awful on these devices. Then you have those massive HiDPI displays on 7-inch to 12-inch tablets where poorly coded sites and email templates don’t look very well. You shouldn’t spend too much time creating that awesome HTML email design unless you are confident that it will look good across displays of different sizes.
Company Email Servers are Still Popular
Many companies and enterprises still prefer to have their email systems in-house leaving it up to them if they wish to enable rich HTML or not. This means that sticking to text is still the safest approach to carrying out a clear and concise message to as many people as possible.
The Verdict
Before you even think about making your newsletter pretty, make sure you nail the essentials which include a strong email header to encourage the reader to open the email and some solid supporting details that will capture the reader’s attention and get him or her to click. In fact, you can focus your effort on the landing page which is normally the page the person will visit from the email.
It is only safe to use to apply your graphics knowledge to emails if you take all the different devices into account. Responsive design principles must be applied if you plan to make templates from scratch or you can go for services that actively make email templates that work across all mobile and desktop clients. Creating a special text-only version of your newsletter can cater to those with business email addresses too.