It’s no secret to marketers that prospective customers prefer marketing promotions with visual content. Why is that? Setting up a visual marketing strategy helps your brand save valuable time by conveying ideas and emotions easily and quickly. Visuals are effective in transferring information since the human brain retains more data when they come in the form of visual components. Visuals in email marketing are no different.
Leveraging visuals in email marketing is a bulletproof way to catch recipients’ attention and deliver clear ideas with email marketing promotions. This guide presents all the benefits that visuals provide, as well as the best tips on how to use them.
Why Use Visuals in Email Marketing?
No need to argue about the return-on-investment email marketing brings to the table. Now, when combined with the increased engagement visuals offer, they form a power couple that can serve as an excellent booster for your conversions and sales. Let’s see the main reasons behind that.
1. Visuals grab user attention
The average recipient receives dozens of emails in their inbox. As a result, their attention spans keep getting shorter. In fact, it only takes seconds for a reader to go through your email and decide whether or not they will act on its message. As you can tell, large blocks of text will only scare them away. Visuals, on the other hand, grab their attention instantly and motivate them to read through the entire email content.
2. Readers can process the information easily
Unfortunately, there are times when words fail us. For your emails, that’s when visual components come to the rescue to help you convey your copy in an engaging way. Visuals break up your content into smaller and visually-appealing pieces, making it easier and faster for readers to understand the information shared and retain it longer. Also, they create visual relevance, resulting in your message passing across more effectively.
3. You boost recipient engagement
After reading your email subject line, the first thing a recipient will check before reading your email is its looks. And we reassure you that this could make or break whether they will scroll through your email content. Interactive elements hook subscribers, urging them to engage with your email. Not to mention that well-laid-out and visually appealing email campaigns stay with readers after reading them.
4. Visuals make memorable emails
Visual elements in emails – or everywhere, for that matter – create an impressive impact. No matter how valuable the content, what many recipients remember from emails is a graphic element that catches their attention. Visual stimuli stay with users longer, making them remember your email promotion. What’s more, if the visual represents your overall branding, your brand will stay top of mind for more than the time it takes to read your email.
4 Tips to Leverage Visuals in Email Marketing
We have to say that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to incorporating visuals in your emails. Not every visual element works for all business types and industries, so choosing the best-performing ones might be challenging. By following the tips listed above, you’ll find yourself one step closer to creating high-performing visuals that recipients remember.
Stay True to Your Branding
We all know how crucial it is to build a strong and consistent brand identity – and it doesn’t happen overnight. You have to stay true to your branding throughout different marketing campaigns and channels if you want your customers to recognize and remember your brand. Surprisingly enough, many marketers neglect their branding in the visuals they include in their email campaigns. Elements like your logo, color palettes, image styles, or fonts should be part of your visual email marketing since they reinforce your business in your subscribers’ minds.
With email visuals, it’s essential to look at your brand’s image and stick to the consistent personality you have created across all marketing channels. The key is to follow your brand guidelines in your visual content so that recipients can recognize your brand as soon as they open the email. Creating and maintaining a clear visual identity helps your brand stand out and builds consistency, which is key for enhancing customer loyalty.
Match Visual Elements With Your Copy
Visual elements in emails offer you an amazing opportunity to showcase your unique selling proposition and educate your audience about its value. What many marketers fail to realize, though, is that they shouldn’t think of visuals as a decorative element that makes emails visually appealing. You should consider them as complementary to your email copy, working together to pass your message across in an entertaining and engaging way.
Email graphics are part of your content marketing strategy, and, as such, they must be aligned with your email copy. Otherwise, you risk causing cognitive dissonance and frustrating recipients over the objective of your communication. So, create attention-grabbing visuals but never neglect their informative nature. Add key information regarding your products or services in your email graphics. You could also use them to visualize concepts that are hard to understand in plain text form. But, whatever you do, make sure your visual elements match the message you want to convey with your text content.
Appeal to Their Emotions and Senses
Figuring out how to appeal to prospective customers’ emotions is one of the hardest things marketers have to deal with. Visual components in your emails make your life easier in evoking emotional responses from your readers and influencing their decisions. So, apart from complementing your copy, your visual content should be aligned with the specific emotions you want subscribers to experience when they read your email. To succeed in it, it’s important to determine what these feelings are and brainstorm about how to create visuals that evoke such emotions.
But it’s not just about provoking emotional responses. Visual elements are particularly powerful in appealing to the user’s senses. Captivating visual elements allow viewers to travel in time and place, picturing themselves in specific scenarios. And they won’t stop at that but will ensure to take the necessary action to make it happen. What would that action be? Clicking on your email call-to-action button or link to live the experience promised through your visuals.
Pick the Colors Wisely
It’s no secret that the colors brands choose in their marketing efforts impact the way prospects perceive their message. Studies have shown that consumers are affected by colors in their buying decisions. As a general rule, bright colors feel energizing and are associated with positive feelings, whereas more neutral tones represent reliability and peace and bring out calmness. Pick your colors of choice based on your marketing objective, and always keep in mind your overall branding since colors are a contributing factor to brand recognition.
Whatever you do, make sure the color combination is pleasing to the eye and doesn’t irritate viewers. But even more importantly, when picking out colors for the visual components in your emails, you should take into consideration different audience groups and their potential limitations. For instance, you should create designs that can be accessed by visually impaired people so that you don’t exclude any reader from your visual content.
