Email Design 101

Hey there, it’s Philip from Inbox Insider 👋

With Black Friday around the corner, I figured it’d be good to go over some of the fundamentals.

At the end, I share 2 email designs my team recently made.

Email Design 101

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen simple design changes to a brands emails result in monumental improvements in CTR and overall conversions.

The layout, button placement, colors, graphics, and offerings in your emails directly affect the results you’ll see.

Email design is pretty straightforward, you just need to know what to focus on.

Let’s get your emails up to speed 👇

Keep It Focused

We’re about to enter 2025. If you follow my content across other social media (inboxphil on instagram and youtube 😉), you've definitely heard me say this before: the modern consumer has the attention span of a goldfish.

The days of sending a super long “weekly email” including a million different topics and various updates on your brand is over, in fact it was over years ago. Nobody has the time or attention span for that.

Your emails need to be direct, to the point, and no fluff.

ONE email should focus specifically on ONE topic.

New product push? Don’t mention anything other than that product.

Sending a blog educating users on how to clean their sneakers? Don’t include any other topic.

When your emails focus on 1 single topic, readers don’t have to go on a scavenger hunt for the point, they get it as soon as they open it up.

This will increase the amount of people your message gets across to, and decreases the amount of people who click off after they’ve been intimidated by the mass of content.

Aim for Scannability - Avoid Lots of Text

Think about it, the average consumer checks their inbox in passing. When they’re waiting in line at a coffee shop, eating breakfast, on the toilet, etc.

Oh and another thing, the average consumer’s inbox is flooded with brands just like yours.

Similar to my previous point, your emails need to be quickly scannable.

Big text-blocks are a no-go unless it’s an educational email, then you can get away with small text-blocks.

The #1 way to improve scannability of your emails is to use more infographics, icons, and images to explain different points.

Here’s a section of an email we designed for a client 👇

It would have been much easier to simply write everything out in the traditional paper format.

We could have done this directly within Klaviyo and called it a day. We instead used icons to organize each point and make them easier to digest.

Button Placement

Where you put your buttons matters.

I normally see 2 main issues:

• Bad button placement

• Not enough button placement

You want your buttons to be as easily accessible to the reader as possible.

One common mistake I see is placing your CTA button too far down in the email. Readers shouldn’t have to scroll too far down to find it. That means extra work for the reader, and remember, we want to make their lives as easy as possible to keep them engaged.

Example of what not to do 👇

Umm..where’s the button?

The button was so far down in the email I couldn’t even fit it in the screenshot!

How far do they expect the reader to scroll just to find the button?

Something else to consider: always give your buttons room to breathe. Don’t cram them between dense text blocks or clutter them between images. They need to be obviously visible, a baby should be able to locate them.

Your buttons also need to stand out against the background of your email. Use contrasting colors so that the button is easy to spot and doesn’t blend into the design.

👇

Pretty straightforward stuff here with the buttons, just need to keep this in mind when designing emails for your brand.

Visual Hierarchy

As email marketers, we want to guide the reader into taking a specific action.

99% of the time, that action is visiting the website.

The order and layout in which you present your content greatly affects the readers understanding of what’s most important and plays a huge role in conversions.

Overall rule here: Organize your content so that the most important information is at the top (above the fold).

The most important information is generally the offer/topic of the email + the button/CTA.

The inverted pyramid structure works perfectly. Start with the main point, follow up with supporting details, and end with secondary information or secondary CTAs.

Some Example Designs

I’m gonna share 2 email designs that were made by my team recently.

Feel free to use them for inspiration.

*Disclaimer: Quality reduced

Reply to this email if you have any questions or have any specific topics you’d like to see me cover.

My instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inboxphil/

My Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@InboxPhil

Till next time,

Philip

P.S. If you’re an e-com brand owner and you’d like a 1-1 call with me ahead of BFCM, book here: https://calendly.com/philip-socialscout/30min?month=2024-10