Creative frequency - how frequently should you change your email creative?
Ever wondered how often you should be changing your email creative and how to go about it?
With each email send you tend to change the design to suit the topic, which is great as it engages the recipient and also carries a narrative or direction to the purpose of the send. However if the look and feel changes dramatically will the viewer recognise your brand? Having a strict brand structure or set of guidelines is key to your marketing process. For your company to strive in your desired market you need to have a well-established and recognised brand. If brand guidelines are not adhered to it could have a highly detrimental effect on your brand. This is why big names such as Ebay tend to stick with the concept of “If it’s not broken why fix it?” hence the very similar brand refresh they did in 2012.
Making sure the overall structure or template stays the same is key to email recognition. This can be done easily by making sure your logo appears in exactly the same place every time and is prominent within the first 200px of the email. By adhering to this the people who engage with your sends on a regular basis will recognise the email and know exactly where and how to gain the relevant information. However, this would not be the case if the emails you send are totally different from each other. Now I know what you’re thinking, what if you’re sending an acquisition email and a newsletter? Yes the content differs on these considerably but you can still be very creative with both, just make sure you stick to the overall design structure as mentioned above. Keep that logo prominent within the page!
A good example (but bad in terms of design engagement) is this generic email design below. Travel Company is a made up company, as I didn’t want to name and shame anyone in this blog but the mistake they have made is a common one. Travel Company have an amazing newsletter email, which is very brand focused and also aesthetically pleasing for the inbox.
However when you receive their standard acquisition email, the frequency of the design is dramatically different.
You can see from both examples Travel Company have tried to keep the brand logo in the same position, however the email design is totally different. To keep the frequency of the email design there needs to be some consistency. Although these emails serve different purposes they still can mirror each other visually, this will not only make the brand presence much stronger but will also look like they are sent from the same provider.
Key frequency takeaways...
• Email layout – if you’re going to change it keep the fundamentals of your email i.e. logo, headers and credits in the same position. The recipients will engage with the email better as it’s something they are used to seeing
• Colours and designs – use the same colours for the backgrounds and the copy. This is just a small thing but colour has such a huge impact into design and it’s likely that people already associate your brand with certain colours, it would be risky to change them