Regardless of the niche, your business is in or the size of your organization, you have to connect with your audience. Creating a buzz around your product or service is integral to piquing the interest of existing or potential customers. Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels to establish direct communication with your customers, but to make the most of this marketing tactic, you need to make sure your email stands out. A stand-out email requires more than crisp copywriting and great content… you need a great email design, too.
Design plays a crucial role in making your email engaging, eye-catching, and hard-hitting, and minimalist design can accomplish all of it. In this blog, we’ll explore why minimalist design is an evergreen trend, and why “less is more” when it comes to email design.
Why Minimalist Email Design is Timeless
With a smartphone in almost every hand and high-speed digitization all around us, we live in an era of information overload. Since nearly 54% of emails are accessed on smartphones, and most of us are reading emails on the go in our busy lives, well-rendered and fast-loading designs are what we all need and want.
Imagine a user scrolling through your email while traveling to work or grabbing a coffee on a (probably very short) break. Will they have the patience to wait for the message to load and then scroll through lengthy text embedded in a complex design? Definitely not.
To prevent your communication from being streamlined to the trash bin, leaning in favor of minimalism is your best bet. Emails with clean, edgy, eye-catching designs have a calming effect on the reader, allowing them to engage more intimately with your messaging. A simpler design also allows the reader to be directed to the more important parts of your email faster and more efficiently, like the CTA.
While our brains get packed to the brim and our attention spans get shorter and shorter, keeping your email design minimalist will be a welcome change for your audience.
5 Best Practices for Creating Minimalistic Emails
Marketing professionals swear by minimalistic email designs. Not only do minimalistic emails deliver your message in a simple yet enticing manner, but they also help your reader understand your message and, hopefully, take the desired action. Here are 5 best practices to follow when working to create clean, impactful emails.
1. Smart Use of Negative Space
Negative or white space provides visual relief and promotes ease of reading. Minimalist email designs leverage this negative space to balance out the design elements and remove feelings of clutter.
2. Clean Typography
Using a mix of fonts in varying sizes may sound good in theory, but it often proves to be counter-productive. Clean typography with limited fonts is the hallmark of a clean and clear design. Choose a font that aligns with your brand image and place your text such that it renders well on different devices.
3. Color it Wisely
Monochromatic or neutral color schemes are a classy choice that blends well with a minimalistic approach. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot ever use bright, funky colors in your emails. If those colors resonate with your brand image, by all means, use them! But don’t go overboard. The smart approach is to use colors to draw attention to the most important elements of your message.
4. Don’t Make it Text Heavy
The whole concept of minimalism rests on the idea that less is more, and this also applies to your text. Try to keep your copy crisp and concise, and leverage infographics and icons to include additional information where you can. Infographics are eye-catching and convenient and can be used to guide your recipients toward the CTA.
5. Create a Visual Hierarchy
The effectiveness of an email rests mainly on its structure. When taking the minimalistic approach, pick a few elements, and arrange them such that your subscribers’ attention is instinctively drawn to the most important part of your email.
5 Inspiring Designs That Can Turn Around your Email Campaigns
Now that you have a better idea about what it takes to create minimalist emails, let’s turn to the pros who have been nailing this approach for some inspiration.
1. Keep it Simple
Ossa Frames has always nailed minimalistic emails. All of Ossa’s communication rides on simple fonts, eye-capturing images, and clean design, and this email is no exception. The choice of fonts and visuals coupled with their placement creates a clear visual hierarchy, telling users exactly where they need to focus.
2. Leverage Visuals
This email campaign by AeJuice is proof that you can load up on visual elements while still creating a minimalistic design. The CTA is prominently displayed, and the featured image complements the messaging of the email perfectly. This kind of email design encourages a second look. The fonts are bold, but the use of white makes it easy on the eye. The images and text have also been arranged in a way that creates a clear visual hierarchy.
3. Neutral Color Schemes
Neutral shades like whites, blacks, and greys are your best friends when creating a minimalistic design with an uber-chic appeal. Look at this newsletter from Quinn, for example. The cool greys interspersed with the generous use of whites give it a modern look appealing to the aesthetic sensibilities of the target audience. They were also careful to avoid heavy text and overpowering color blocks.
4. Add a Fun Twist with Animations
Animations can be a fun way of capturing your audience’s attention and can impact how memorable your messaging is. Minimalistic email design delivers a simple and clear message using a creative animation that is endearing and memorable. The objective is to get the target users to engage with the brand through social media shares, which they’re likely to act upon organically. The clear, uncluttered background in a bright color ensures that the readers’ attention is focused where it matters most – on the animation.
5. Smart Use of Color Blocking
What if your email has more than one principal component? Color blocking can be an effective way to separate your messaging within a single email without making it look too cluttered or confusing. It can also augment the visual appeal of your design, like in this email from NU Beauty. Here, the newsletter leveraged a mix of bright-colored blocks juxtaposed with a good amount of negative space, to convey a mixed bag of messaging and CTAs. From website clicks to retweets and brand messaging, everything is packed into a single email without making it look jarring or off-putting.
Wrap Up
Email marketing is continually evolving to cater to changing customer behavior. By embracing minimalism as an ideology, you can assume a position of dominance in your email marketing efforts. It places you in a position to control the reader’s eye movements and decide which aspects they pause and stare at. Besides, fewer elements and a clean design will save you the trouble of overhauling your email marketing strategy every time a current trend goes out of style; evergreen styles are easy and effective.