3 things you need to stay competitive with email marketing

Recently our friends over at Campaign Monitor (CM) relaunched their email builder because they saw a revolution in email marketing taking place right before their eyes.

More and more marketers are pushing the envelope with email marketing design, sending beautiful and engaging emails.

What makes those emails so captivating? Big, bold hero imagery.

CM (one of the world’s top email marketing software vendors) says that the world’s highest-performing email campaigns are full of big, bold, full-width hero images.

The most engaging emails today have images that stretch edge-to-edge across different screen sizes. They use clear, compelling text over images with strong calls to action that motivate subscribers to act.

As marketers continue to evolve their websites with modern, responsive design, they want their emails to do the same. Marketers want their emails to look like websites because marketers want to deliver a consistent and seamless brand experience across all digital channels no matter where, when, or how customers choose to engage.

Like this example from Mazda

We agree big bold hero images for brands have become lingua franca for communications of all types. From email through to social media posts.

Today, if you want to be seen and heard you must now accompany your message with a lovely big hero image, cinemagraph, or video.

3 things you’ll need to stay competitive with email marketing

1. Big bold hero images

Start with producing or commissioning high-quality photography (or cinemagraphs), that can be reproduced as large hero images on everything from print, to the web to email.

“A picture us woirth a 1000 words”

There’s nothing like the right image to tell your story or compel your audience to read on, or learn more.

They need to be large and beautiful and your own. Be careful to avoid using junk content (stock photos, irrelevant images, over-used images, low-quality images).

2. A DAM to store and manage images

If you invest in photography or other digital content for use in emails, websites, social, or elsewhere, make sure you’re protecting that investment by using Digital Asset Management software (like Brandkit) to store, organize and distribute those digital brand assets. 

A DAM will not only protect your valuable digital assets, but also save you time finding and deploying your assets, increase team productivity, speed to market, and general marketing cadence.

3. An Email Marketing design that supports full-width hero images

Once you have your beautiful, bold hero images, you’ll want an email solution that allows you the freedom to quickly and easily put together campaigns with big beautiful images.

Your agency (if they have the good email design skills) will certainly build you a custom HTML email template that will look great (for a time) but it may lock you into a single layout or be costly to make updates to keep things fresh.

If you want to keep things fresh and make changes to layout on the fly, then a provider like [Campaign Monitor] (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/new-features/2016/01/introducing-the-all-new-campaign-monitor/), with their new approach to email building, might be just the thing.

Or, contact us to set something up for you using MailMachine™ - our re-branded version of Campaign Monitor.

Happy Branding :)