The look of your email is key, many brands will dedicate a lot of time to designing email campaigns that reflect their brand message and image.
Ensuring that this design then translates in your audiences’ inboxes is crucial, especially as many recipients will delete it if it cannot be viewed properly. There are a number of elements to consider when optimising your emails, to ensure that your emails are optimised to their full potential, take a look at the three important areas of optimisation included below.
Optimise for Light and Dark mode
If you’re unsure on the difference between the two mode, light mode is dark text against a light background, this is usually the default display in your mobile or desktop. Dark mode is where the colour scheme is inverted, with white text displayed against a dark background. Optimising your emails for both light and dark mode is something that has only come around in recent years, whilst it’s a relatively new feature on many email clients, it doesn’t mean that it can be disregarded as a fad as it’s important to respect your audiences’ preferences.
With dark mode becoming increasingly popular, there are a number of email clients who support it, these are:
Mobile Clients
- iPhone Mail
- iPad Mail
- Outlook App (iOS)
- Gmail App (iOS)
- Outlook App (Android)
- Gmail App (Android)
Desktop Clients
- Apple Mail
- Outlook Office 365 (MacOS)
- Outlook Office 365 (Windows)
Web-based clients
- Outlook.com
With that in mind, let’s look at how to optimise your emails to suit both modes:
Use images with transparent backgrounds
In most cases, email providers that offer dark mode as an option, will automatically change the colour of background colours and text, however one element they won’t change is the colour within the images. Therefore, if you use e-shots and imagery with coloured backgrounds, it won’t automatically alter to suit the dark theme.
To navigate around this issue, when including imagery make sure that it is created with a transparent background, this way the image will change to reflect the audiences’ preferred display mode. Remember to be mindful of the colours you choose to include in a transparent image, too light and they may be lost against the background of light mode, too dark and the same will happen when in dark mode.
There is a large choice of photo editing software available that you can use to do this; we use Adobe Illustrator.
Optimise your logos
Following on from this, if your logo features dark colours, it may not show up well against a dark mode. To combat this, why not try adding a white stroke around it, this way it will stand out no matter what mode your audience selects.
Use images in place of buttons
As most email clients will automatically change the colours of everything in the email, apart from the images, this will also affect the colours of any buttons you may have included. This may not be ideal, especially if your buttons are in specially selected brand colours. Similar to the first step, you could create an image (with a transparent background) that resembles the button you wish to include. By adding a link to the image, it will work like a button, but will remain unaltered whether in light mode or dark mode.
Optimise for mobile
Research suggests that 46% of all emails opened are open via mobile, therefore ensuring that your emails optimised for mobile is crucial in catering to potentially just short of half of your audience.
There are a number of things you can be doing to optimise your emails for mobile:
Focus on format
Make sure you keep your email layout clear and simple, this way’ when viewed on a smaller screen, there won’t be any difficulty in viewing the content. To do this, consider using a simple stacked layout, rather than including multiple columns, this will allow your customers to view everything with ease.
Following on from this, prioritise the content that you would like to appear at the top of your email, as your recipients will have to scroll down to see the full email. Including eye catching visuals or attention-grabbing written content will help to engage them from the get-go.
Include a clear CTA
A clear CTA is very important, it should have a strong message that compels your audience to click on it, ultimately leading them to your end goal. However, it shouldn’t just be clear in message but also in the way that it is presented to the reader. As the majority of mobile devices are touch screen these days, users will scroll and click with their finger, therefore meaning that your CTA has to be large enough to click on it without your users struggling, but not too large that they keep accidentally clicking when they are trying to scroll.
It can be presented in the form of a button or a link, either way it is imperative that you make it stand out so it will catch the attention of the viewer. Use brand colours, and leave lots of breathing room around the CTA, this will make it noticeable to your audience.
Optimise Images and Videos
The visual side to your emails can be just as important as the message you are trying to convey, so making sure that the images and videos you include load correctly is vital.
Use high quality images
If your images don’t look great, then it can immediately have a negative effect on how someone may view your email. You have to make sure that your images aren’t appearing blurry or cropped in an odd way, as this could give the impression that the email has been crafted with little thought or care. To avoid any issues, set your images with a resolution 72 DPI (dots per inch), likewise make sure your images are in RBG colour values rather than CMYK (as this is for print and won’t translate well online).
File sizes
This can have a big effect on the loading time for your emails, too many high-quality images will slow you down. This could lead to your audience deleting it from their inbox before they can even view the content to its full extent. It is a good practise to keep your image data between 600-800k per email.
Embedding videos
If you are able to embed videos into your emails, then it will aid in grabbing your audience’s attention. It provides a new dimension of content for your readers and through embedding them, they are not redirected to an external website before they can finish digesting the emails message.
Round up
Incorporating these optimisation methods into your routine when creating emails will aid in creating brilliant email campaigns. You are catering to the needs of your subscribers, by giving them viewing options with both light and dark mode and mobile optimisation, as well as allowing them to get the most out of your videos and imagery.
