UX and Email Design: What you need to know

You may have heard the term UX being flung around when designing your website or app. However, User Experience Design is just as important when it comes to your email marketing campaigns.

User Experience Design (UX) “is the process of supporting user behaviour through usability, usefulness, and desirability provided in the interaction with a product.” - Wikipedia. In your case, the product would most likely relate to your website. This article will highlight some of the UX principles that you can apply when it comes to designing your email campaigns. These are some of the things you need to consider in terms of UX for your email campaigns.

Content:

There is only so much information that a person’s brain can handle at one time. Therefore it’s important to ensure that you don’t overload your subscribers with too much information at one time when sending your email campaigns.

MAIL BLAZE DESIGN TIPS:

• Use headings to break up content sections
• Leave enough white space around elements to ensure your content doesn’t look cramped and cluttered
• Keep your sentences short

Hick’s law:

Hick's law, or the Hick–Hyman law, was named after two psychologists, William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. The law describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices they have. They put forward that increasing the number of choices a person has will increase the time they take to make a decision. What does this have to do with email marketing? Well, you’re in the business of making money right, so you want to guide your customer to complete an action that will help you do that. If you add too many options in your email, you could be hampering your customer from making a decision quickly.

MAIL BLAZE DESIGN TIPS:

• Choose your CTAs carefully and limit them to the most important actions that you want your reader to complete
• Make sure your CTA’s are clear

Mobile considerations:

If you know your product and service lends itself more to mobile users, you should cater for this in your email design. This is not just important for businesses that offer mobile reliant services as studies show 50% of people actually check their emails on their phones. Our email builder helps you preview and design your email for mobile and easily preview your mobile design.

MAIL BLAZE DESIGN TIPS:

• Make sure your subject line has less than 60 characters
• Make sure it is easy for people to click on your links (test this when you do your pre-send tests)
• Don’t overcomplicate your email layout
• Don’t make your fonts too big or too small, a good middle is 13-14pts

Images:

There's nothing worse than opening an email and having to wait for images to load. There are lots of reasons why this could happen, but mainly we find it’s because people haven’t resized their files. Adding too many images can also cause a delay in terms of how your images display as it will take longer to appear in the way you want.

MAIL BLAZE DESIGN TIPS:

• Image sizes should be less than 1MB. Resize your images to fit the space they are being placed in (this will save on file size)
• Make sure to test your mails in different email clients: Background images might look nice but they don’t work in all email clients
• Choose images that enhance your message and don’t distract people from your main message