Article: 8 DIY Tips to Make Your Emails Sizzle with Visual!

 

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8 DIY Tips to Make Your Emails Sizzle with Visual!

by Audrey Howes

Have you heard? Visualization is taking over email inboxes. Making your email content more visual will help draw your readers in, drive more clicks and ultimately boost sales and retention. Today we run through some of our best tips to make your email content really pop.

1. Make a Video

Most of us don’t have in-house video studios to create videos every day. However, most of us do have a cell phone and a computer. Check out how Wistia shot a professional grade video using only iPhones! If you don’t want to shoot a video and would rather just use stills, use a service such as Animoto to take your stills to a whole ‘nother level.


Denver Rockies Game Highlights video created using Animoto!

2. Link to Your Video

So you have a video you’d like to include in your email, but emails don’t support video (yet). Open the video and take a screen shot of it. Use a free tool such as Screen Grab Pro to take a shot of just the video. Then use the image inside of your email and link it to the video. This is a textbook example of using visualization to increase your click-throughs.


Screen shot taken with Screen Grab Pro.

3. Dress Up Your Text

Text in emails can be totally boring OR a great design element. Dress up your text by breaking it down into bulleted lists for easy scanning and visual appeal. Use bolded text and a different color for your headlines and subheadlines. Italicize important quotes or facts for eye-catching emphasis. Whatever you do, make sure you stay in line with your branding and don’t go too color crazy.


Ancestry.com makes use of a lot of visualization tricks to draw the reader in.

4. Grab from Your Website

We already told you about the free screen grab tool, Screen Grab Pro. Well, here is another use for it. We often have customers tell us they want their email to look like their website. Here’s one way to make it happen. Use a screen grab tool to take shots of areas of your website such as the header or buttons. Then use these images within your template to accomplish a branded look and feel.


Screen grab from Swiftpageconnect.com and sized to use as an email header.

5. Make Images Work for You

We recently wrote about some great resources for free images on our blog. Guess what, Google images isn’t one of them. Using images from image searches can put you at risk for a copyright infringement suit. No thank you! Instead, use some of the resources we listed in our post or partner with visual companies to share content. For example, promote a friend’s photography business by using her images and giving her photo credit in your email or trade well written copy for graphics from a graphic designer.

6. Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?

One way to really draw attention to your call to action is to use a button instead of a text link. Buttons can be grabbed from your website (see above), created in a picture editing program or event made in Microsoft Office. Try out a variety of button colors and text to see what your customers respond to best.


Button created using the shapes tool in PowerPoint.

7. Spice Up Your Social

Including links to your social networks is an excellent audience builder. Take it one step further and use social media icons instead of just text links. Find icons that match your brand and have a consistent look and feel. Then, just link them to your social networks and watch your audience grow.


Example of Social Icons from an email from Spark People.

8. Run Tests to Find Your Picture Perfect

One of the more frustrating parts of email design is when your email looks perfect after creation, but images are skewed or missing upon sending. To make sure your emails are always picture perfect, test them in multiple email clients BEFORE sending the email to your entire list. Testing will save you a lot of headaches and keep you looking good for your customers.

Email marketing continues to rise to the top as one of the best ways to reach customers. Make your emails top your competitors by using some of the tips above! Remember, make them sizzle with visual!