Tips for Designing Good Emails: Images
In the last blog, we talked about how challenging good email design can be. Here are a few more things to keep in mind when designing emails with images.
- Use your company logo. Place it at the top of the email, and design it so that it doesn’t take up valuable space, but still has visual impact. Keep this logo and its placement the same from email to email. By using this consistent placement, if you switch up other aspects of the email from mailing to mailing, the email is still quickly recognized as being from your company.
- Image to text ratio. 30/70 images to text is a good mix. If you create image heavy emails, or emails comprised of a single large image, you increase the chances you’ll end up in the junk folder. Also, single image emails work very poorly when images are turned off…the recipient basically gets a blank email.
- Keep the images under 25k. Larger images take longer to load and you might lose your more impatient readers who will skip to their next email.
- Use moving images sparingly or not at all. Moving images pull focus—this is great on a busy website, but on an email it’s distracting and can make your email look like a circus. Either use the moving image carefully or design your email so focus goes where you want it to go without having to resort to an image that moves.
- Make images clickable. People expect to go somewhere when they click an image. Fulfill that expectation; put a link behind your images. Put your homepage behind your logo.
- Use call to action buttons. In addition to having embedded links in your text and links from graphics, include buttons like: Buy Now, Click Here, Sign Up, Check Availability. These create a more compelling call to action and can increase your click through rate.