A good email design is more than how it looks. After all, a great-looking design won’t matter if it doesn’t get to your guests’ inbox! Check out the recommendations below to ensure your email gets in front of as many potential guests as possible.
Start with a concise, attention-grabbing subject
An oft-overlooked but important piece of the email is the subject line. Subject lines should be carefully considered for your audience. They should grab attention, they should be short, and they should avoid spam trigger words.
- Long subject lines not only get ignored by recipients, but also are more likely to be considered spam. Write a subject line between 30 and 50 characters (including spaces).
- Avoid using spam trigger words like “Act now”, “Chance”, “Click here”, “Free”, Please read”, “Reminder”, and “Urgent”. There are a lot more, but we see people use these more often.
Personalize the greeting for each guest
Emails with personalized messaging for individual recipients see higher open rates and higher click-through rates. Personalized emails are also less likely to be considered spam.
- Use Dynamic Elements in your email design, to populate each guest’s first and/or last name. (Additional Dynamic Elements, with event details, or ticket details, won’t help with deliverability, but do make for nice, personalized emails to your guests.)
Images and graphics are nice, but text is better
An email design should be a mix of an image (or images) and text. A long-standing rule is text should cover at least 60% of the email, and images should cover no more than 40% of the email. Email on Acid found that emails with 500 characters or less and at least one image, were less likely to be marked as spam. If your design has no images, make sure the email has more than 500 characters in the email body.
For more on email design, check out Event Farm’s Email Center Articles and Email Design Resources.
What's next?
- Email Deliverability: Overview: Get some baseline information so you know what to expect when sending emails to guests.
- Email Deliverability: Who, How, and When to Send: Sending emails is easy - driving engagement is what really takes time, thought, and effort. Here is how to make sure you are contacting the right people, the right way, at the right time to ensure you are maximizing your opens and click-throughs.