If you’re not considering how images can help you reach your customers in your email marketing, it’s time to start. Images enhance your content in ways that words can’t. We live in a visual culture, and images speak to consumers.
A visually pleasing email increases engagement and draws attention to the written content in your emails. Along with a visually appealing template for your emails, images can help achieve positive customer responses and provide valuable opportunities to link back to your site. Check out these tips for successfully implementing images in your email marketing:
Understand Why Images Work
Images have some advantages over text when it comes to engaging customers. People absorb and retain information better when it’s presented visually. Images can communicate sentiment about your brand, foster emotion in your marketing, and help show your products or services in action.
But there’s a danger in using images. If the images you choose don’t communicate what you need to say about your brand, they hurt you. Poor quality images will very quickly degrade brand value.
In e-commerce, images are the closest thing you can to do to actually putting a product in your customer’s hands. This is why ensuring your images communicate the value of your products and brand is essential. If you can’t use great images, don’t use them at all.
Types of Images
You’ve got lots of options when it comes to what kind of visual content you use in your email marketing. Each one comes with it’s own set of advantages. Think about how you can use different images to communicate with your customers:
1. Custom Images
Custom images are the most ideal kind of image to use in your email marketing. They give you the opportunity to most accurately communicate messages and build authority for your brand. Custom images should be carefully considered and developed to ensure that they’re on-brand and high quality, but it doesn’t have to be hard to create quality photos or images; you can even do it from your phone.
2. Embedded Content
Embedded images give you a great opportunity to link to your social media pages. If you choose these types of images for your emails, make sure they’re backed up by great social media content. It’s also a great idea to look to what images are doing well on your social media channels to get an idea of what content will be successful in your emails.
3. Graphs and Charts
Depending on your product, graphs and charts can be a great way to communicate value and distill data in a way that’s easy for your customers to consume. Using a chart as a complement to explanatory copy can be a great way to ensure your message gets across.
Avoid Common Mistakes
As a consumer, it’s frustrating to open a marketing email to find it full of broken images, formatting issues, and overall poor execution. If your emails look like this, it’s likely that customers are deleting the emails you send them without a second thought. And who can blame them?
The issue usually comes from sending emails to customers who haven’t added you to their address book, but it can be fixed with some extra planning and consideration. You can try adding descriptive alt text to help give readers context about what images you’ve included in your email, which is great to do for accessibility purposes anyway. You can also kindly request that your customers whitelist your emails to help ensure the images you include display the way you intend them to. However, it’s essential to make sure your email still looks good to customers who these two solutions don’t work for.
Another mistake marketers make is failing to consider what your customers want to see. While images that fail to achieve anything beyond what plain copy could miss the mark, on the other hand, sometimes what your customers are looking for in an image isn’t what you’d think. Images that include photos of your products might seem like an obvious way to convert browsers to buyers, but depending on your brand, they might not be the best choice for email marketing. Images that contain your logo or evoke emotional responses could be better choices for your business. Try some simple A/B testing to see what works best for your brand.
Consider how each of these types of images can help you achieve your marketing objectives in the next emails you send to your customers. Including images in a way that does this successfully takes some extra time and effort, but you’ll be rewarded by increased engagement and more successful communication with your audience.
This guest post is courtesy of Avery Philips.