How User Experience Affects Email Marketing
UX, or the user experience, is a very technical name for what the consumer experiences or interacts with when they encounter your marketing. While UX is a popular computing and gaming term, it can also be applied in other areas including your website experience, social media engagement, and email newsletters. When creating engaging content for your audience, the UX is simply not an area to be overlooked. More than just web or mobile design, the UX will determine whether you grab their attention, manage to keep their attention, and finish the desire conversion.
In our current world of permission-based marketing, email marketing or newsletters are commonly regarded as the most valuable asset a company can develop. Building this list is more secure as it is owned by your business, allowing you to create different outreach approaches as needed. Also, getting a follower’s permission to market to them directly is not something to take lightly or to squander.
Once you get their permission, however, you must then deliver a UX that motivates the reader to follow through to your desired call to action. The call to action could be to generate more traffic for your website, increase your client list, sell more tickets to your next event, opt-in for information on your next product launch, or any myriad of other end results. The idea is to tie the strategy into whatever your current goal happens to be.
Improving Your Emails
Copywriting
Since our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, building your emails with the UX in mind is essential. A whopping 81% of readers will simply scan your text instead of reading it through. Copy that is text-heavy, not easy to scan, or requires extra steps to access is going to lose readers. Read-ability is key to get your message across in a clear, concise, and easy to absorb fashion.
Branding
If you don’t have your brand nailed down, it will be tempting to share information that isn’t relevant to your audience. This causes consumer confusion and leads to viewer dissatisfaction.
Links
Great content is a power trio of interesting and relevant content, stunning visual images and links. Regardless of whether you are linking to your call to action, to your website, to your lead page or some other bit of content, make sure those links are well-placed and test them before sending. Links are easily the bread and butter of your email newsletter.
Call to Action
Putting together great, visual content that readers want to engage with is definitely the goal, but if you aren’t incorporating a clear call to action, you will fail to convert. Not only should you ask directly for what you need to meet that month’s goals, but it needs to be included in a way that highlights the content and engages viewers at the same time. Don’t hide it in the text, or square it away in the corner, it is THE fruit of your efforts.
Design for Devices
The bulk of media consumption is now occurring on mobile devices so if your UX is not both user-friendly and visually appealing, you are missing out on those conversions. Test the content on as many devices as possible and educate yourself on how to make your emails more mobile friendly.
The user experience is not commonly a consideration when developing an email marketing strategy, but it should be. More than just an appealing design, the UX includes all the vital elements that make this approach worthwhile.