Your Website Needs an Email Template
June 11th, 2008 by Clay
Most of the emails bouncing around the Internet look very similar: black text on a white background in a very basic font. But every once in a while we receive an email that looks drastically different with images and color backgrounds. It actually looks a lot like a web page, which makes sense when you consider that both are constructed with HTML. Viewed in that light, it’s surprising more organizations don’t jump on the opportunity to use email as a means of extending their brand they have spent so much time and money developing.
Anyone who’s ever spent money to create a logo understands the value of presenting a consistent brand for your organization, and the more often people see it the better! How many times do you send someone a generic email that only mentions your business in the signature? That’s a wasted opportunity to build your brand!
Now I’m certainly not trying to suggest that you never send a plain text email ever again. Sometimes that is exactly the right format to convey your message. It’s perfect for internal communication with members of your organization. It’s even sometimes the right approach with potential customers (who you usually want to bombard with your brand). Imagine a discussion over email where each one of your replies took up half of the screen with a giant copy of your logo and a paragraph of marketing copy. In that case a plain email is obviously the way to go.
But what about when you send an email out to all of your past customers, announcing a new special that you’re running next month? As a general rule of thumb, your conversion rate is going to go up if you drop a few bucks on the design of that email.
Sending a message that goes beyond a basic text email is not something that only large companies can afford. True, the practice would get expensive if you were sending out a monthly email newsletter and redesigning it each time. In that case, though, you just need to design a template of what the email will look like one time. Once you have that template, you just replace the content each month and hit the send button. I usually set someone up with an email campaign manager that let’s them handle everything from their web browser. That type of service makes it almost comically easy to handle these types of mailings.
An email is just like every other point of contact in that people will form an opinion about you based on what they see. Is your business card just plain black text on white paper? Is your logo just the name of your organization in black text on a white background?
