It's the season for awesome holiday email designs ! Email marketers are pulling out all the stops for the notoriously busy time of year. That's because inboxes are cluttered - email volume increased 25% during the 2015 holiday season - and it's time to stand out. Are your campaigns really interesting? We've put together a list of 10 design tactics every email marketer should use to optimize holiday email design and increase those opens and clicks. 1. Use text on background images (versus in-image text) Almost every promotional email we receive has some variation of great photos or artwork layered over text . Here's an example from an email we just received from clothing brand Everlane: However, when the text is part of an image in a single .JPG or .PNG, the design is not optimized for email.
Why? If the image is not showing because of the image blocking, the text is also not showing, so your message is lost . Don't take that bet this holiday season! The solution is to have plain text above a background image, and this is a new feature that we now offer for free with the BEE editor. Here's an example of an email we created (inspired by a post from Litmus) that has a real background image with plain text above it (shown by highlighting E-Commerce Photo Editing Service some of the text): Pretty cool, isn't it? If the image isn't showing, your text still will. Additionally, you can add a custom HTML background color to replace the blocked photo. Check out our How to Add Background Images in Email tutorial to start using this technique in your emails now. 2. Prepare images for mobile and retina screens The percentage of emails opened on a mobile device is often over 50% (as shown in this monthly report from Litmus). It's no surprise, then, that image rendering on smartphones is a major concern for email marketers.
And it's particularly frustrating that images on mobile devices can sometimes look blurry. What is the problem? When images are scaled and scaled to smaller screens, the change in display size may result in a blurry image. To prevent this from happening, you need to prepare holiday email design images for mobile and retina screens. Here's what to do: Do not use thumbnails. Use larger images. Compress images to reduce file size. Let your images adjust to the width. By following these best design practices, you will avoid the blurry image issue. 3. Include Simple Animation This season is the perfect time to add some extra sparkle to your holiday email design. Simple animated GIFs can make a big difference, and they don't have to be complicated.