Email is, generally speaking, awful.Not only is it severely limiting from a production standpoint, but when you actually consume it in your own life, it clutters your inbox, you get desensitized to its appearance and you end up losing track of what is important and what is not. Modern apps make it easier for people to check email every few hours, but also encourages you to de-clutter and empty out your inbox by snoozing or saving emails for later.Design can be a powerful tool that makes email attractive rather than an anxiety-riddled experience you have to deal with and get rid of. And although it might sound like a hindrance, designing emails within its given constraints allows you to identify effective strategies through a narrowed lens.
Designing Emails in 2018
According to Adobe’s Email Study last year, 40% of emails are deleted without even being read. This might lead you to believe that email is dead, and many have forecasted its demise, yet it remains an effective marketing tool. In fact, another Adobe survey found that “business email is 36 times more popular than social message services like Slack.”
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To my surprise, millennials are the largest email user base — and they have a better understanding of who will be reading their emails and how they will be reading them.
- 81% of people read personal email through their phone
- 62% of people open work emails on a desktop.
- Tablets represent less than 6% for personal or work email.
- And rarely do people check their email on their watch.
- 61% of people still prefer brands to contact them by email, but identify that promotions and sales are at the heart of the marketing when consumers would rather be better informed and educated on the brands they choose to associate with.
If your email doesn’t appeal to the reader’s personal interest, you’re just wasting an email. And, more importantly, you risk losing future readership, becoming just another thing people want to unsubscribe from.
Designing Emails for Real Estate Brokerages
So given some of these stats, we can gather that people will look at email on their mobile devices, but desktop reading is still a very realistic reading option. But how do we make people actually want to read these things? The correct copy is certainly a huge factor, which you can read more about here, but nobody is going to want to read through an email with just plain text up and down it. So images and even animated gifs can play a vital role in making email interesting and engaging.
Our own consumer-facing emails here at TRIBUS, which are provided to each of our custom real estate brokerage clients (like our Market Insights emails), are focused and full of relevant content to home searchers. Users can easily sign up for these emails with a click of a button (below, left) from your custom real estate brokerage website, and receive monthly branded emails rounding up changes in their market (right).
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They feature up-to-date statistics that allow you to shape leads’ home search processes, making it easy to navigate recommended properties in the area. It’s context-heavy, purposeful and to the point, nothing more and nothing less. It also feels personalized, as the user has chosen the area highlighted. That idea of personalized messaging is something people find desirable, as it feels less like they are being marketed to in a large crowd. Combined with consistent branded colors and a readable flow of headlines and paragraphs, these sorts of emails become easier to consume when they’re in your inbox.
Designing Emails for Any Brand
And if you look across other industries, the people over at reallygoodemails.com showcase companies that have a similar approach — showing information relevant to the consumer, through a great combination of images (they don’t even need to be large), illustrations and copy.
Email is not dead and, at least for the foreseeable future, can work wonders in expanding your reach. For that, we can help. Check out what we can do for your email marketing services here.
