UX in Email Design

by Nick Babich

You spend months creating a product with an amazing UX. Doesn’t matter if it’s an app or website. You’ve put a lot of effort into creating something awesome. So why aren’t you giving any thought to the UX of the emails you’re sending about your product?

Badly timed or out of place messages get poor engagement. The less targeted they are, the more they teach people to ignore you. But even if you hire a copywriter to write the perfect copy, content alone does not make a good user experience.

Three Circles of Information Architecture

You should strike a unique balance on each project between business goals and context, user needs and behavior, and content.

Essential properties of good email design

Useful

Every email you send should be useful. And that doesn’t just mean useful to you, the sender. It should be useful to the recipient. If your message isn’t sent to the right audience it’ll feel like spam to whoever gets it.

Usable

Usability is necessary but not sufficient. You email shouldn’t be a hot mess (this especially true for HTML emails). So test compatibility. Use an email testing tool like Litmus to test your emails in all of your target email clients and browsers. It’s not good enough to just look at your email in a browser or in one or two email clients.

Findable

“Findable” should be an equivalent of “not ending up in the spam folder”. Spam filters analyze your content. There are no magic keywords to enhance deliverability, but limiting the use of risky words — such as free, buy, promo, etc. — reduces the likelihood of your emails landing in the spam folder. So check your email content using special tools(like Mail-Tester) to be sure that it doesn’t look like a spam for filters.

Accessible

Accessibility can be a greatly overlooked area of email design. But there are simple things you can do to improve accessibility for a large number of users. One simple thing is creating a plain-text version of your email. Plain style email should be designed to look 100% manual and handwritten:

Credible

Users should trust and believe what you tell them. Credibility in email is a very important facet. Credible emails is the one which:

Doesn’t look like a spam (See Findable facet).

From a Trusted sender (Use clear, trustworthy From field names. Avoid obscure From field names, such as: “42352345@domain.com”, “noreply@domain.com”).

Have a Clear subject (Answer on the question ”What’s the context?”).

Makes it clear where links will lead (Do not use url shorteners).

Tips for Designing Effective Emails

Make Email Sound Personal

The content is rarely as important as a direct note from someone. Each email should look like it was written by you, just for that particular customer. This is a better experience for everyone, because it brings more engagement than something that looks like it was sent to the masses.

There are three simple ways to accomplish this:

Use a personal looking message (A simple thing — address your Customers by their first name)

Speak like a human (Do not use business jargon. You just want to sound friendly, natural, and personal).

Personalize your message using customer’s details (Use custom attributes in a message, which are specific for each user).

Optimize for Mobile

One of the most important things you can do is optimize email for mobile screens. We read a ton of emails on our phones. No, actually we skim a ton of emails on our phones:

So it’s important to make your email mobile-friendly (or mobile-first). If your email is mobile-friendly, then that means it’s less likely to get trashed before they’ve opened it on their regular computer to take action.

Here are some quick tricks to help you start doing so right away:

Reduce image file sizes (Images still going to load more slowly on mobile devices than on desktops. Every 1 second delay in loading time results in an average 7% drop in conversions. You can optimize your emails by using smaller image files. Use services such as TinyPNG for that).

Resize images by proportion of screen (Make sure your images fit whatever screen size your device is). You shouldn’t have something like this in your email:

Increase the size of links and click-to-call buttons (Make sure you don’t let mobile device users experience a case of the bad touch. Use at least 57x57 pixel square proportions for each CTA button).

Use responsive email templates (Create a responsive grid system). A good example for a plain email:

Test it

Your messages can always be optimised for better open, click and reply rates. And one of the greatest things about email marketing and email design is that you can do a ton of testing really easily. Test and you will see what works for your business. Turn stuff off if it’s not working. A/B testing is vital to creating the most user-friendly emails you can. Test copy, layout, images, CTAs, and anything else you can think of:

A/B CTA testing result

A/B Copy, Layout, CTA testing

Conclusion

Just because email happens outside of your product doesn’t mean you can ignore the user’s experience with it. Yes, sending better messages is hard. But email sometimes is the first introduction of your product to the client. And you must make sure she’ll have an awesome experience.

Thank you!

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