Use Simpler Designs for Better Email Results for Your Nonprofit
Email is a key channel for fundraising and marketing, so nonprofits typically want them to be attractive and engaging. We’ve noticed a trend in which emails are being designed to look more like web pages. While sometimes beautiful, that approach can be harder to execute and less efficient.
Let’s look at some limitations in design-heavy communications and some tips to ensure your email campaigns are built with efficiency in mind.
Challenges with overly designed emails
It’s understandable that as a nonprofit professional you want to send emails that grab readers’ attention and get them to take action. But highly designed emails can lead to unintended results, including:
- Excessive time spent building and testing email messages in your email marketing tool
- Messages that display inconsistently across email clients; for example, they might look good in Gmail, but look terrible in Outlook
- Big email file sizes, which can take a long time for you to send and can result in losing recipients’ attention as they wait for the email to load
Considerations for building more effective emails
In addition to these challenges, there are other factors to consider when you’re looking to build more effective emails for your nonprofit:
- Short attention spans – There’s strong competition for your email recipients’ attention, and readers’ attention spans are short. That means you must build your email communications with brief attention spans in mind.
- Our mobile world – With so many people using mobile devices, it’s important to design your email communications as mobile-first, not just mobile-friendly. That means designing communications specifically to be viewed on mobile devices.
- Complex email clients – Email clients, including Apple’s email app, Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, manage and display email messages differently. Plus, Outlook on Windows and Outlook Mac use different rendering engines. The more complicated your email format, the more time you’ll need to spend adjusting it for email client variables.
Considering all of these points, it follows that sending more effective emails requires a balance. It involves creating messages that are attention-grabbing yet as easy as possible for you to build and send, and as quick as possible for recipients to view.
Tips for building more effective emails for your nonprofit
- Keep email formatting and styles simple.
Think of your email messages as a concise way to get your user’s attention, engage them with your mission, and drive them to your website. Try using one compelling image, write engaging and concise content, and highlight specific calls to action.Also, use single-column content because some email clients don’t fully support the same programming languages that web browsers do. Simply put, this means that design elements that might work well on a web page, such as two-column layouts, require more effort, code, and testing to use in an email format.And remember that while attractive images can help to grab a recipient’s attention, the message is the most important part of your emails. So, keep image file sizes small and messages clear and brief. You can link to web pages to provide more detail. - Make email messages easy to skim.
Given how many messages people receive, your email recipients may simply skim your nonprofit’s emails. So, organize and design your content with this in mind.For example, if you need to include longer copy, then break it into smaller paragraphs to make it faster and easier to read. Keep the number of fonts to a minimum. Also, use simple dividers and/or white space to organize and break up content. - Segment your audience.
Use the tools in your email marketing software to segment your email list so that you can tailor your messages with targeted content. This approach helps you to grab recipients’ attention with content that matters most to them, versus relying on lots of images in the hope that you will attract everyone’s attention. - Set up email templates.
Take advantage of email template capabilities in your email marketing software. You can build templates for your most common email messages, such as your email newsletter and common types of fundraising asks. Doing so will allow you to build email designs that send and load quickly without needing to create (and extensively test) a new design every time you want to send an email.Also, if you use an HTML editor to create emails, then maintain a library of pre-tested code snippets – such as buttons, image blocks, or text sections – to help streamline email-building and ensure more consistent display of emails across email clients.
Learn more about how to improve your nonprofit’s emails
Discover more tips to improve your nonprofit’s emails in the podcast, Best Practices to Improve Your Nonprofit’s Email Engagement
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by Jeni Hoyt, Developer, Cathexis Partners and Jane Kramer, Account Manager, Cathexis Partners
