In this era of technology, email marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways for businesses to reach out to their target audience and nurture them. But with the oversaturation of the inboxes, the marketers partially have the problem of trying to catch their recipients’ attention in mere seconds. This is where visual content comes in and skyrockets email campaigns from a plausible outcome to an extraordinary one. Adding visuals to your emails elevates the interaction and contributes to better click-through rates, message retention, and complete campaign success.
The Impact of First Contact
For the recipient, when they open the email, the first couple of seconds are important. Things like videos, images, and graphics fall under visual content and can leave an impressive first contact which can give context to the email message. A good and appealing product picture or a good quality header image gets the viewer’s attention instantly thus making the viewer more likely to go through with the content. Reading an email that is solely having text might seem boring and harder to focus on thus lowering the engagement rates.
Elevating Engagement and Readability
Interspersing images or icons with videos is a good way of changing the otherwise text-heavy emails into something more interesting. Heavy paragraphs are not ideal when people quickly open their emails or messages. Images, videos, or infographics provide an added advantage, making the emails more pleasant to read, and in some cases, more efficient too. Moreover, visual aids serve the purpose of directing the reader’s attention to essential parts of the copy, fortunately increasing chances for click-throughs.
Animated videos, drawn textual descriptions, or promotional emails that are fully loaded with images is one modern method of teaching. For example, a clothing retailer could provide customers with several photos of their latest collection instead of a lengthy description of the clothing they are offering. By giving the products a voice, the retailer can relay the message in the best way and motivate the reader to take proper action at once.
Reinforcing Brand Identity
There is a difference between employing imagery once and the repetition of the same imagery over an extended period in order to strengthen a brand business identity, engaging with the same color palette, typeface, and style of images. Everything from color to typography works in favor of its recipients and how they perceive them. Over time, a beautifully designed and combined email would gain trust, credibility, and strong brand recognition. If recipients receive such emails, which have good graphics design, they will develop good associations with the brand.
For example, if a company needs to reflect its ecological principles, it may opt for a simple design covered in earthy hues and use a nature-related theme. The collection of these visual components develops over time into the brand and its identity that speaks to its consumers.
Increased CTR
The main aim of a majority of marketing emails is to make the recipient undertake an activity such as ready to buy a product or register for a webinar or download an e-book. Visual content makes emails more convincing and appealing and as such, speaks more to the recipients prompting them to take such actions.
When relevant images or videos are sent with and emailed, studies have shown that such email marketing has a higher click-through rate compared to emails that do not include relevant images or videos. Video, for example, has a huge impact on promoting engagement. Recipients can be intrigued by a thumbnail with a play button so they can click on it to watch the video, while animated GIFs might give mass emails a cool effect.
Enhancing Message Recall
As visual organisms, a great percentage of a human’s brain is involved in visual activities. Studies indicate that people recall only about 10% of what they hear or read three days after the event, but when that information is presented together with an image, it is retained 65% more. This proves visual content to be crucial for any audience whose message is intended to remain in their minds.
If you’re giving out information about a new product launch, a limited-time offer, or simply want to educate the public, images will complement your words and ensure the recipients do not forget important details. Infographics, for instance, are a perfect tool to convey intricate ideas using pictures for better understanding and recall.
Boosting Social Sharing
Social media features in emails, especially social media buttons that accompany images, make emails more appealing to the receivers. This broadens the scope of the email campaign’s target audience. Putting social sharing buttons next to compelling images or graphics makes readers want to extend the reach of your email content to their contacts. This eventually drives more people to the company and creates brand awareness.
Consider a case where a travel company is offering a holiday package. The company can achieve this by providing eye-catching graphics and an easily accessible social sharing link so that the recipients share the offer to friends and family and snowball the effect of the email campaign even further.
Mobile Optimization: A Must for Visuals
As the majority of emails are now being opened on phones, it is important to make sure that images can work with smaller screens. With responsive design, all images and graphics are now of a reasonable scale so no matter what device is being used to view the email remains unaffected to the content.
For example, if images are not resized to fit mobile screens, they will show as blurry or outsize and spoil the user experience. Marketers should use low-resolution images so as not to increase loading speed and also ensure that important information can still be seen when images do not load. Adding Alt Text to images is of course another best practice as it describes the content when images fail to load. For marketers who need to quickly convert and optimize images, services like WebP to PNG can be invaluable. This tool offers fast, reliable image conversion, ensuring that your visual content is always ready for any email campaign.
Balancing Images and Text
It is obvious that images play an integral role in email marketing, however, there needs to be some balance between pictures and words. An email that focuses too much on the graphics and does not contain any text may leave the audience in confusion or not deliver the correct use case. On the other hand, an email that is filled with text and devoid of images may seem to be bleak and repetitive.
A good guideline is that when tackling texts that are paired with images, try and sprinkle some visuals to link up the article. Go through all the images and ask if the images are necessary, be it for clarifying an idea, promoting a product, or advising an action. This balance will go a long way in ensuring emails are both eye-catching and educational.
Conclusion
Given the large number of emails a consumer receives in a day spanning across a plethora of brands, being easily visible in the sea of emails is critical. Attention-grabbing visuals such as eye-catching videos and informative images will ensure that one’s email marketing reach is vastly improved. Image marketers will have a much easier time working around such quality as their job is targeting the general audience.
Remember, good email marketing is not only about nice email templates. It is also about communicating necessary things to your audience in such an easy way that they will be able to understand it and remember it perfectly. With the proper ratio of images and words, your emails can not only be read but also invoke significant behavior changes.
