5 tips to help you improve the readability and CTR of your letters

When composing a letter that your subscriber must read, marketers often go into too much detail, focusing on the targeting and headers of letters , while forgetting about their general form.

Christine Hufman, Exact Target Design Consultant, Justin Jordan, Litmus Marketing Director and John Murphy, ReachMail CEO, told us about 5 main points in the design of letters that you should pay attention to, to improve the open rate and CTR of their letters.

1. One letter - one goal
2. Prioritize
3. Each picture must have a specific purpose.
4. In the design of the letter, use the site design
5. Constantly test and analyze

1) One letter - one goal
Before you start writing a letter and thinking about its appearance, decide on the purpose and task of the letter.

At the same time, keep in mind that letters alone rarely “sell” goods / services, “offer” to install a program, or “invite” to an event. The purpose of most emails is to provide links to special landing pages or to a website where a person finds out in detail about a product and purchases it, registers for a seminar ...
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2) Set priorities
Information in the letter and the structure of the letter as a whole should have a clear hierarchy.
Hufman says: “It is difficult for a marketer to answer the question of what is most important and what is secondary. For him, all information is equally important. ”But for the reader of letters, everything is different:“ when they shout at him from all sides, he doesn’t want to hear anything at all ”.

Therefore, the focus of the letter should be focused on one specific sentence / content, and all secondary should be muted and relegated to the background.

At the same time, the main offer / content should end with a single call to action. Do not disperse the reader’s attention by giving him a few links or CTA buttons with the same emphasis.

An exception is possible only if the purpose of your letter is to attract traffic.

Also, when structuring a letter, consider: in many email-providers, the function of previewing a part of the message (its very beginning) is available before its opening. Therefore, do not place general unnecessary information at the beginning of the letter (for example, a link to the web version of the letter). Better give a brief announcement, a catchy and intriguing detail or image of the "hero" of the letter.

3) Each picture must have a specific purpose.
Sometimes it is better to show once than to describe several times. And then the picture is a must.
So, advertising the arrival of a new collection of shoes, better give more pictures and less text. In some news, business and service letters where visibility is not needed, it is better to do without pictures, as they only distract the reader's attention from the most important.

4) In the design of the letter, use the site design
Each company has its own corporate design (colors, symbols, logos ...), which provide brand awareness. And your emails should also be consistent in this style, or at least contain the most striking distinguishing features of your company.

Murphy argues that most people, determining from whom this letter came, are primarily focused on the design of the letter, and then on the text itself.

By the way, this also applies to service messages, the design of which is often neglected.

5) Constantly test and analyze
There are basic principles and conventions for writing and writing letters, but at the core of the best email campaigns are innovation and testing.

Although, according to the Marketing Sherpa report “Email Marketing Benchmark Report 2012”, only 42% of email marketers regularly test their newsletters, and most of them are limited to the message header.

But hundreds of aspects of the letter should be analyzed: from the form of the CTA button to the location of the pictures.

Hofman proposes to draw attention to 3 main groups of aspects of the letter:

1. Design - the plan of the letter and its structure
2. Branding - text colors and font
3. User Interface — links, buttons ...

Source of Translated specifically for UniSender .

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