Functionality considerations for email templates

Email marketing poses many conundrums for the novice, not least, how on earth do you take a simple message and dress it up to look attractive and inviting to the readers? Even those who have sent many thousands of emails in their time might find the jump from rudimentary text-only emails to vibrant, rich and colourful missives a troublesome one.

Thankfully, however, there are templates available for this exact reason. Email marketing software often comes bundled in with a number of different templates that businesses can use in order to send out good-looking emails without having to create them entirely from scratch.

This is not the end of the argument, however, but only the start, as these email templates will need to be amended in order for the company to really put their stamp on the messages. The templates are, after all, just the bones of the overall email aesthetic, meaning they will still need a little more meat on them before they’re really hitting the mark.

Brand name

Emails should always come in with plenty of mentions of the brand name to reinforce just who is sending out the message. It’s not good enough to simply have the name in the subject line or ‘from’ field. Instead, the very top of the message should show off the brand’s name and logo.

Templates will often come with free space left for users to drop in their business logo so it becomes one of the first thing users see when they open the email.

Contact information

The aim of many email marketing messages is to get a “click-through”, which is when a user clicks on a text or image link in the email, which then directs them to the business website or a page therein. For some businesses, however, this may not be the best way of dealing with customers as, for example, the product or service may need a lot of explaining or tailoring, which is best done over the phone.

Either way, it is worth adding contact details to an email in order to ensure that even those who don’t want to click on links can still get in touch, should they want to.

This contact information needn’t be as bold as the brand name and is most often found in the email footer, where those who have read all the way to the end can be prompted to call, email or pop in to a physical store. For this, check the footer can be amended and give thought to every other conceivable way a person will want to get in touch so as not to miss out on the opportunities supplementary to them clicking-through.

Colour scheme

If a brand’s colour scheme is monochromatic, it would be unsettling to go on and receive a message from them bursting with all the colours of the rainbow. Likewise, this can also work in reverse.

To ensure email messages correlate with the overall brand vision, it’s worth finding out how much the colour scheme on each template can be amended. If, for example, the colours have to remain as they are, brands may find themselves having to pick a design they’re not overly happy with just because the colour fits. On the other hand, they could otherwise end up with the right colours but on a design that’s not ideal.

Being able to amend colours, however, means a business can put their own stamp on whichever design it is they like the most.

These are just three considerations to bear in mind when choosing an email template, but knowing the outcome could make for a programme with which the user is significantly more happy.

This Article is by Annette Carol a avid reader and a grad student keen in internet marketing.

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