#144. The Do’s and Dont’s of Email Design | Podcast

Vira: 0:16

Hello, hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einstein, the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vera Sadlak. I’m a marketeer at an agency called Flowium and here at Flowium we are a bunch of ecommerce email marketing geeks. We really love what we do so we want to share our insights with you. And today’s episode is special because we will be joined by yet another Email Einstein. This time our special guest is Emily Ryan. Emily is a self-proclaimed email geek with nearly a decade of experience heading up her email marketing agency called Westfield Creative. So today we’re gonna do a deep dive into the dos and don’ts of email design because Emily, she does know a lot about email design. And considering that readers will only spend an average of 10 seconds looking at your email, understanding the design is crucial. So today we’re gonna be talking about all things email marketing design to make sure that your emails get your message out Quickly and clearly. Let’s do this. Let’s do a quick blitz Q&A just like to get to know you better. Okay.

Emily: 1:51

Awesome.

Vira: 1:52

Cool. So East Coast or West Coast?

Emily: 1:54

Oh, I’ve lived on both coasts. I’m an East Coast girl. I was born in North Carolina. So I’ll say East Coast.

Vira: 2:01

East Coast. Yay. Early bird or night owl?

Emily: 2:04

Oh, also hard. I’m actually an early— oh God, I’m neither.

Vira: 2:10

An early owl.

Emily: 2:12

Yes, I’m gonna say early bird because I’m up with my kids at the— oh, even before the crack of dawn. And I usually I crash by like 10 PM every night. I’m just like done so, so early.

Vira: 2:23

Same. I don’t even have kids, but I’m the same already. So yeah. Okay. Texting or calling?

Emily: 2:29

Text always.

Vira: 2:32

Yeah.

Emily: 2:32

I just don’t like phone calls anymore.

Vira: 2:35

Like, I don’t do them anymore. Yeah.

Emily: 2:38

No. Yeah. It’s— I feel like phone calls are, are in the past.

Vira: 2:43

Who needs a call? Totally agree. Okay. This one, I feel like I know the answer to this one, but still, you’ve got a mail or sleepless in Seattle?

Emily: 2:51

Oh, You’ve Got Mail. Best. That’s like one of my— and not because I love email, but because that’s like one of the best movies ever. And it actually—

Vira: 3:00

Totally agree.

Emily: 3:01

You’ve Got Mail made me want to move to New York City. I lived in New York for many years. And that movie like kind of made me want to move there because it was just— it’s just the best.

Vira: 3:10

I know anything with Meg Ryan, honestly, I’ll take it.

Emily: 3:13

Oh my god, we’re like the same person.

Vira: 3:15

Yes, I know. Okay, tacos or pizza?

Emily: 3:18

If you follow me on Instagram, you would know that I am like, I talk about tacos like every other story. Tacos, tacos forever.

Vira: 3:26

I kind of, I kind of knew that, so that’s why I included it.

Emily: 3:30

Cool.

Vira: 3:30

Okay. The last one. If a theme song played every time you entered a room, what would it be?

Emily: 3:36

Oh gosh, I need, I need to think about that. Maybe like Everybody Dance Now by CNC Music Factory.

Vira: 3:44

That’s a good one. That’s a solid, that’s a solid choice.

Emily: 3:46

Something fun, like fun and silly.

Vira: 3:50

For sure. Okay. And this one is not a blitz Q&A question, but I just found— but I just saw it on your Twitter and I saw— and I thought it was hilarious. So a few days ago, your 7-year-old said to you, Mommy, who got me the Pokémon stuffed animal for Christmas? And you said that Santa did it. And your child was like, well, then why did I see it at Target today? What did you— what did you reply? What do you say to that?

Emily: 4:12

Oh my gosh. It was— it was one of those moments where I did not have the answer. And I was like, oh gosh. But I— but I saw it at Target. I saw the same one. And I was like, right. Well, we’ll see. I said, well, Santa has some toys at Target as well. Some oversize, you know, some— he has some stock there, you know.

Vira: 4:33

So cute.

Emily: 4:35

Oh my gosh, that was crazy.

Vira: 4:36

So cute. Awesome. Well, let’s go to some like serious email marketing questions, although I would like to talk about You’ve Got Mail and Meg Ryan movie about with you, but let’s go to some juicy questions. I wouldn’t want to do a huge amount of like talking here because you, you’re the expert here and I want to hear directly from you. I want to hear directly from the source. But Emily, can you like briefly tell us about yourself and how did you get into email marketing and like what are you doing now?

Emily: 5:08

Yeah, yeah.

Vira: 5:09

Awesome.

Emily: 5:10

Well, well, as you can probably hear, there is some background noise because I have some small children in this house, but I work from home. I started an email marketing agency about 7 years ago. So we’re on year 7 and we specialize really solely on Mailchimp email marketing.

Vira: 5:28

Mm-hmm.

Emily: 5:28

You know, I started doing email in Mailchimp and I just kind of never left the platform and really decided to become an expert in the platform because I saw, you know, a lot of people I was working with needed— they were all using Mailchimp at the time. And I was like, well, I better learn this platform. I actually kind of started as a virtual assistant and saw the need for email. But basically I started in— I lived in New York City many and I was working for a startup and it was a nonprofit startup. And one day that the CEO was like, you know, I think we should send an email to potential donors. And we had never done that. And he was like, Emily, can you like figure that out? And I was like, yeah. And so I, you know, I had heard of something, you know, that’s how a lot of people find Mailchimp. ‘Cause they’re like, oh yeah, there’s something about a chimp. I know there’s a service about a chimp and Mailchimp.

Vira: 6:14

Yeah.

Emily: 6:14

And so I literally just signed up for an account and we sent an email and it was super fun to create. And we ended up getting a pretty large donation from that. That email and I was blown away. I was like, this is crazy. So we kept, we kept sending emails and that’s kind of how I first got started with it. Years later, I became a Mailchimp partner and I actually got to go to Atlanta. I was invited to do something called Partner Lab where they invite like 10 to 15 partners from all over the world. And we came for a couple of days to Mailchimp headquarters and that really helped solidify like my love for the company and the brand. I had like the most amazing time and they were just so wonderful. Like the people were so humble and smart and creative and it just, I don’t know, I just have always loved the company. So yeah, so I was like, all right, I’m going full on Mailchimp. And I eventually became a pro partner, which means I just manage a lot of Mailchimp clients. And yeah, so we run a small agency here. I have one other person full-time, which is my sister, my older sister, who is super techie and she codes and she actually comes from a tech background. And then we have several subcontractors and designers that we, we work with and we do email for our brands, large, large and small. You know, we have some beverage companies, we have lawyers, we have, you know, hardware stores like you kind of name it and we probably served that industry. It’s a wide range.

Vira: 7:41

But yeah, that’s the beauty. That’s the beauty of Mailchimp is like platforms like Klaviyo, they work only with like physical product stores. In Mailchimp, that’s like pretty much like a platform for everything. You can be selling like online courses, services, socks, mattresses, whatever. You can use Mailchimp.

Emily: 7:59

It’s wild. And I actually, I tweet a lot, like when we have an interesting lead or a client that is some random industry, it always just blows my mind. We once had—

Vira: 8:09

What was your favorite?

Emily: 8:11

Oh gosh, well, I have so many favorites.

Vira: 8:13

Like, what’s the most like random one or like industry you didn’t even know like existed?

Emily: 8:18

So this one, we had a client that made a product that was pigeon birth control. And that’s literally what it was called.

Vira: 8:27

What? Like, so seriously?

Emily: 8:28

Yes, because pigeons, pigeons are a problem. And it’s actually, I ended up learning so much about it, but he would sell to big industries, like really big factories that there are tons of pigeons around and they can’t have them around the factory. And so it was a product that he called pigeon birth control. And I was like, what is this? This is crazy.

Vira: 8:48

That’s so random. Like, it’s in the niches.

Emily: 8:52

I know, it’s crazy. But no, the range is so wide with the types of clients, you know, that I mean, we do get a lot of real estate and lawyers and people like that, but the range is just very wide.

Vira: 9:05

The weirdest one that I had was, and surprisingly, it’s also the bird sort of industry. It was the feather plucking bird collar.

Emily: 9:13

Oh my God.

Vira: 9:14

Apparently that’s a problem with when like parrots get anxious or something, they start like plucking their feathers. And one of my clients, they were creating this like really beautiful felt like plucking bird colors. That’s like so random, but I learned so much about anxiety in parrots.

Emily: 9:31

Oh my God.

Vira: 9:32

The things, the things you can learn. It’s amazing.

Emily: 9:36

Yes, that’s— yeah, that’s the cool part is I, you know, you get to learn a lot about different companies. We’ve worked for sure, you know, a pipeline company and we worked with, you know, just some crazy type things. So it’s really fun. It’s really fun.

Vira: 9:49

Yeah. Yeah. The part of my job that I love a lot, definitely. So, Emily, recently you posted a really cool article on Inc.com and The article was about the 5 things to ask yourself before beginning email marketing. I really loved how you summarized that 5 big things, and I think they are crucial. Can you just briefly explain what they were?

Emily: 10:10

Absolutely. So the article was for Inc. magazine, and I was really thrilled to have contributed to that. But it was the 5 things that you should do before you ever start, before you begin email marketing. There are kind of some things you should think about or do. So I think one of the first ones was, you know, do you have the right email platform? Are you in the right ESP, whether it is Mailchimp or, you know, whatever it is, Constant Contact, Klaviyo, whatever, like, are you using the right ESP for what you want to do? All ESPs have kind of pros and cons and things that they do well and other things they don’t do well. So I think that’s a good question to kind of start with, making sure you’re on the right plan in the right program. And then we also talked about, you know, your email list.

Vira: 10:53

Mm-hmm.

Emily: 10:54

Can you rely on your email list? So if you have a brand new email list, making sure that that data is, is accurate, is verified, making sure you have a nice kind of clean list to get started. There are programs where you can, you know, run your email list through data, you know, data verification, making sure you get rid of disposable emails or, you know, spam trap type emails. So just really making sure it’s clean so that when you go to send those first emails, you’re gonna, you’re gonna get a nice sender reputation to start out. You know, you really want to have a great deliverability from, from the start.

Vira: 11:30

Super important. Yeah, we do recommend actually doing this sort of like a list warmup almost. We like to all of our clients that we work with, we recommend first launching the flows because they are more like targeted. You know, usually they have higher open rates, higher click-through rates, higher engagement in general. And only after that, we recommend starting doing the campaigns because in minds of many people, like email marketing is just like bombarding your list with campaigns, which is most certainly is not the only thing that you can do with email.

Emily: 11:59

Exactly. Yeah. Warming, warming up your domain, warming up your, your sender score is super important. And we also ask like, are, you know, really think about, are, you know, are you, are you in it to be consistent? Like, are you going to be able, whether you do an email once a month or once a week, you know, consistency is just so important in email.

Vira: 12:20

Yeah.

Emily: 12:21

And you really like have to say, okay, like, you know, I’ll even take myself for an example. I send a weekly email out on Sundays and I told myself years ago, I said, listen, this, I am gonna commit to sending this one email out every week. And of course some weeks I don’t, I don’t make it, but, but you have to really Really be in it for kind of the long haul. That’s, that’s a great question to ask. Yeah.

Vira: 12:41

Yeah.

Emily: 12:42

And then, and then we always say, you know, make sure to plan out kind of, are you sending emails that the people that are on your list, that they’re going to expect to get? When people sign up for your emails, they are expecting a certain thing. Make sure you are, you’re following through with that. There’s, there’s nothing worse than like signing up for something and then you’re getting totally different different, you know, for sure.

Vira: 13:05

For sure.

Emily: 13:06

Yeah.

Vira: 13:06

And I really love that. Yeah. That you’ve also mentioned in your article the best practices. And that’s honestly the topic we probably can have like a separate, separate podcast about. But like briefly, what would you say are the best practices that everyone needs to follow in emails?

Emily: 13:22

Yes. And then we get that question a lot. Like, can you tell me the Mailchimp best practices? You know, I think a big one is just not purchasing emails. You know, a lot of people will come to us and say, oh, I bought this email list. And it’s, you know, I understand why people would do that. Like, yeah, you want leads, you want— there are services out there where you can buy emails and, you know, that exists, but it’s just not best practice. It has so many negative effects. You know, if you go to send an email to a list of people that have never signed up, they’re probably gonna unsubscribe and then you’re going to be landing in spam and it’s gonna be hard to get out.

Vira: 13:59

Oh yeah.

Emily: 13:59

So staying away from buying those lists, really just making sure you’re sending to people that have given their consent, that have opted in. And then just other small things like, you know, your from name.

Vira: 14:11

That’s something that people forget all the time, believe it or not. This like from field, you know? Yeah.

Emily: 14:17

Your from name should be very, you know, very clear, like who you are.

Vira: 14:22

It should, right?

Emily: 14:23

You know, people should see it in their inbox and know like, this is— they should know exactly who that is. Like, I’ve seen some emails that are just, just a first name and nothing else. And I’m like, I have no clue who that is. Like, it should say like Emily from this company or my full name at least.

Vira: 14:39

Yeah, we actually A/B tested it with my clients internally when in some cases we put just like the name of the brand and then we did like Sam from ABC Brand. And when we like actually use the name of the person, those like emails, they performed so much better because yeah, you can’t— you kind of put the person behind the brand in their minds and that’s like awesome.

Emily: 15:01

Totally. And I think A/B testing, typically we will A/B test the from name before we A/B test send time or anything like that. I love that because you can drill that down pretty quickly, like what’s best for your company, because it could be that the company name is good for your, you know, your brand. You know, we have a hardware store and obviously the email should come from ABC Hardware and it should not come from a name. But there are many instances where a name would be a much better option.

Vira: 15:27

Yeah, I agree totally. And Emily, you are like a hardcore visual email marketer. Your emails look amazing. I honestly, one of my favorites probably I’ve seen in the industry. Like, what would you say are some of the best design practices that you try to follow when you’re creating emails?

Emily: 15:49

That is so—

Vira: 15:49

I know it’s a long topic because I saw you have like a PDF, the entire PDF about it on your website, something like 49 rules or like 49 best practices or something. But how would you like summarize them? Like absolutely non-negotiables for you? Like what are the main things?

Emily: 16:05

Totally. And I love talking about email design. You know, I am not a graphic designer by, you know, I didn’t go to school for graphic design, but it’s just something I’ve always loved. And I’ve learned so much about email just by studying my own inbox, just by looking at emails. You know, there’s so many websites like reallygoodemails.com and other sites where you can use— Oh, I love them. Yeah, just go and look at what brands and companies are sending. I think it’s so important to look at your own inbox, just start observing. But I would say a couple main things. Email designers talk a lot about white space, you know, readability. When someone reads your email, you want it to be so Sorry for the baby noise.

Vira: 16:46

Yeah, no worries.

Emily: 16:47

So easy for them to read and get the, the main point as quickly as possible. And so one of the best ways to do that is to really have like space around all of your items. So space around your buttons, space around each different content block, really letting like things have room to breathe, if you know what I mean. So I really say sometimes it feels weird when you, when you’re designing something, you’re like, oh, this is like so much space, but it’s easier for people to read it quickly. And then I would say another non-negotiable is font size. So many people tend to use such a small size.

Vira: 17:25

Yeah, ’cause you try to pack as much as possible in that frigging email. That’s a rookie mistake, I’d say.

Emily: 17:32

Yeah, totally. But start noticing in your inbox what emails you find easier to read than others. And I bet you they have a larger font size. So we always recommend like 16-point and higher for the body text. Yeah, like big headlines. I love, you know, there’s so many brands that are doing just like huge headlines and don’t be scared to make something like 36 or 40 as a headline. Don’t be scared to do that. It’s easier to read.

Vira: 18:00

Yeah, for sure. That’s like a mistake that we all like made at the beginning when I like first started working in email marketing. I wanted to pack like as much as possible.

Emily: 18:10

Totally.

Vira: 18:11

forget it. Like, I wanted to like put as much text, as much like images, GIFs as possible. But thanks God we had very good designers on our team who like didn’t let me do that.

Emily: 18:23

Yes.

Vira: 18:24

But I totally agree with you. And like, especially it’s important, especially when you’re like creating for mobile devices, which I think like 70% of people or something are like checking their emails from, from mobile devices. Yeah, I think I’ve seen that like statistic somewhere. So like always, always like try to create something with like mobile device in.

Emily: 18:43

Yeah, it’s, it’s super important. And I’ve just become such a fan of really like emails that are really simple and just super clean. You know, I love an image at the top, maybe with text on it, you know, maybe a big headline, and then a little bit of text underneath. It can literally be 1 to 2 sentences, and then just a button.

Vira: 19:03

That’s all you need.

Emily: 19:05

Yeah, emails just don’t have to be— emails don’t have to be complicated. And I think that’s always been my biggest kind of spiel to my clients It says, you know, let’s stop overthinking it. Like, this is just an email. Our goal is to drive them to your website or to get them to buy something. Like, your email’s just kind of a vehicle to get somewhere else. So let’s not be crazy here and think that we need like 8 sections of content. And then of course, and make sure one of the things I forgot to mention about best practices in design, the unsubscribe, like I can’t talk enough about it and how important it is. And people try to hide it and move it and—

Vira: 19:43

Yeah, I know. I know.

Emily: 19:45

It is so important to have that in your email and just, you know, give people that option and say, hey, like, it’s okay if you need to unsubscribe, totally fine, click here.

Vira: 19:55

Yeah, you don’t want to have that like person in those like relationship with you if they don’t want to be with you, right? It’s like the same, same with the email. Like what can help with unsubscribe instead of giving them like one option to unsubscribe, you can maybe like create some sort of like a preference page where they can actually pick the categories of content that they want to receive from you or like how And they want to hear from you. That can be like super helpful with like unsubscribe rates. But yeah, definitely don’t hide that link. I don’t know about Mailchimp, but I think Klaviyo doesn’t even like let you send the email if you don’t have the unsubscribe link in it. It doesn’t let you. But I remember like back in the day when we used those like ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft, people were actually trying to like remove that link or hide it as much as possible so no one will find it. You know, they try to trick their subscribers. Good old 2000s, I guess. Yes.

Emily: 20:49

Yeah. And I think people, I think people are still doing that. And with Mailchimp, Mailchimp requires that you have it, but you can send it without. But then they end up adding, they end up adding like a second footer. So I always have this problem with, and I see it all the time where you’ll see people with 2 footers and it’s because they left, they deleted the unsubscribe. So Mailchimp adds it back.

Vira: 21:12

I see. I see. Okay. Now, now I understand why I receive those like weird emails.

Emily: 21:16

Yes.

Vira: 21:17

Okay, okay, cool, cool. What’s your take, Emily, on like plain text emails? Because that’s like the conversation or the debate, I must say, that we constantly have with my colleagues. Someone like loves them, someone hates them. Let’s talk like plain text versus image-based emails. What’s your take?

Emily: 22:54

Yeah, so I think there is definitely a place for both, both types of emails. You know, I have clients who who just do really well with the plain text emails. And usually those are people doing, you know, cold outreach or something simple. But I also think like e-commerce brands can really utilize them as well. Like what we tend to do, we’ll do a couple like beautiful promo emails in between. We’ll have the founder or the, you know, the owner of the company write a very simple plain text, you know, hey, we’re just checking in.

Vira: 23:29

Like no images, just the text, right?

Emily: 23:31

And it’s so, it’s so interesting when that happens. Like I actually saw the brand Everlane, a clothing brand. So they send these beautiful, gorgeous emails like every single day. And then all of a sudden one day I got a plain text email from them, super short. It was just like a, you know, hey, you know, we wanted to offer you an extra like 15%. Like it was just totally plain text and it really stood out.’Cause I was like, oh wow. Like they don’t typically do that.

Vira: 23:57

It does stand out. Yeah.

Emily: 23:59

Yeah. So I think there is— I think it’s kind of cool when you can utilize both with your company. There’s a place for both.

Vira: 24:06

I totally agree. Totally agree. Like in your practice, are you using the image-only emails? You know, like the emails that you like completely make somewhere like in Photoshop or like InDesign or whatever? Why not? I think I know the answer, but it’s just like interesting to see your— hear your—

Emily: 24:25

Yes. So this is like one of my, you know, they always say like the hill that I’ll die on is is telling people they cannot have image-only emails. It’s a really big problem when you create a graphic, and sorry for the noise, but when you create a graphic and it’s your entire email, there are several things that can happen. One, the image may not load if someone is out and about. And this happens to me a lot. Like I’m out and I don’t get great service on my phone and I pull up the email and it’s like, there’s nothing there except—

Vira: 24:53

Nothing, yeah.

Emily: 24:53

A footer. I’m like, oh man, that’s so sad because someone worked so hard on that graphic and it’s not gonna be seen. I mean, there are people in Gmail that have images turned off and that’s very common now. And the iPhone, there’s an option where you can, you know, turn, turn images off. And so your whole email is nonexistent. So I think it’s so important to weave in little sections of live text, even if it’s just a little bit.

Vira: 25:17

Totally agree.

Emily: 25:18

Like we, we love a big graphic. Like we always will do that big graphic at the top, but then we wanna make sure our email has, you know, other, other bits and pieces built in in case that big image doesn’t load.

Vira: 25:30

Yeah. There are some other reasons too. Like for me, one of the biggest one is that that like email won’t be searchable. You know, when you can like search in your inbox by, by some like keywords from the email, it won’t be searchable if it’s a graphic unless you use the alt text. And that’s something that you should definitely do. But still, like when you’re using the image-only emails, it can actually hurt your email accessibility as well. So there are some people who are using the— how do they call it? Like the readers, like the email readers or something.

Emily: 25:59

Screen readers.

Vira: 26:00

Screen readers.

Emily: 26:01

Yeah.

Vira: 26:01

Where they can basically listen to your email. Well, guess what? They will not be able to listen to your email if it’s the image-only email. So yeah, I’m not a big fan of them. I love those like beautiful emails, but what we do like internally, we try to create like a beautiful hero image, then do that, add the text block, then maybe create something fun in the footer as well. Or like the product blocks, we make them fun, but we always, always, always try to add at least some text to the email because that’s like super, super important.

Emily: 26:31

Yeah.

Vira: 26:31

Emily, do you have any of your, say, favorite brands that you think are doing a really good job with like email Maybe some recommendations that we can follow?

Emily: 26:40

Oh my gosh, I have so many. I have so many. So some of my favorites, like I love Chipotle. Chipotle’s emails, they’re just amazing. They’re, if you just wanna see some amazing stuff, they are super, super fun and—

Vira: 26:52

They’re really funny. Yeah.

Emily: 26:54

Yeah, they’re funny. They weave in humor, which is so important. But then I also like companies, I do like Everlane, that their emails are so simple and it just, I show them to people a lot.’Cause I’m like, your email could literally be image and a button. They’re just really simple. But I also love, you know, companies like postable.com is a greeting card company and they do the greatest promos. They send like one email a day, but they do, they have a funny GIF and it’s like, okay, browse our cards, but they always have a hilarious GIF and it’s just, they’re just fun and simple.

Vira: 27:32

Yeah.

Emily: 27:32

So those are some of my favorites. You know, I love emails that are, you know, that aren’t afraid to have fun, that are colorful, you know, people that aren’t afraid to use color. Like I’ve been seeing some companies use a lot more like neon and bright colors lately. And I love, I love that.

Vira: 27:52

I love that. I was kind of tired of those like minimalist looking emails too. I love that look, but I just need some color in my life. And that’s actually the trend that they are seeing in like interior design as well after COVID, you know, like before that we all wanted that like like earthy, that like simple white minimalistic look. And now people started to bring like more plants into their interiors, more like colors, just because we spend like so much time in our, in our houses now. Well, same with email. You don’t want your email to look exactly like, like everyone else’s, even though it might be very like popular. Yeah, you still want to be on brand though, but just like don’t, don’t be scared to experiment with color.

Emily: 28:32

Exactly.

Vira: 28:32

That’s what I’m trying to say. Yeah. Emily, what’s, what sort of like technology are you using? What’s your technology stack? What’s the behind the scenes? Yeah. I’d like to create those emails.

Emily: 28:43

I love that question. ‘Cause I’m always interested in how other people do it as well. But we definitely use a mix. I mean, I love working within Mailchimp as much as I can, because many of our clients, they, you know, they’ll come to us for a template and I want them to be able to use it. So if I’m designing something in Photoshop, they’re not gonna be able to edit that going forward. So I love creating kind of a nice template in MailChimp, but we definitely use Canva for a lot of things.

Vira: 29:13

Yes, I love it.

Emily: 29:14

It’s just brilliant. I mean, I don’t use their, their like templates, the Canva, like Canva designs, but we’ll use it to like remove the background really quick. Or, you know, it’s so interesting. My sister is a Photoshop whiz. Like she used to be a photographer. She’s like knows Photoshop in and out, but she will go to Canva ’cause she’s like, it’s just quicker. It’s just easier. So we’ll use Canva a lot. We do use Illustrator for some clients if we need to do a certain, like a GIF or graphic. We do GIFs in, or GIFs, who knows what’s right, but—

Vira: 29:46

I don’t know, honestly.

Emily: 29:49

Apparently it’s GIF, but I just can’t say GIF.

Vira: 29:52

I say GIF all the time.

Emily: 29:53

Yes. But we will do our GIFs in Canva a lot too, ’cause you can animate graphics.

Vira: 30:00

Wait, you can do them in Canva? I didn’t realize you can do that. create GIFs. They also like introduced the video. Like I used Canva maybe like 2 years ago and ever since they introduced the video, all bunch of like cool new features and everything. Oh my goodness. I should—

Emily: 30:14

There’s so much.

Vira: 30:15

Restart my membership.

Emily: 30:17

Well, we had to, just yesterday we had to do a US map for a client that was opening stores across the US. And little did I know, I went in Canva and I searched US map and there was like some editable US map graphics that were amazing. And, you know, I could, you know, use the brand color for it. And it was just so cool.

Vira: 30:36

That’s what I like about it, that they not only have like images that you can use, but your images are editable. You can change the colors, you can change the like the tones, the lines and everything. That’s amazing. And I’m not the Photoshop person myself, but I need sometimes those like images. So Canva is— God bless them.

Emily: 30:56

Honestly. God bless whoever.

Vira: 30:58

They are amazing. Whoever invented it, right?

Emily: 31:01

It’s changed so much for people. So yeah, definitely Canva. And then, you know, of course we’ll use the Adobe Suite some. But one little, one little fun thing we use is called tinypng.com, like the PNG files. And so what we tend to do is, you know, with email, you want your photos to load as— your images or graphics to load as quickly as possible. So I’ll go there and it compresses your PNG file without just like, without compressing the quality. So I’ll sometimes go there and, you know, get a smaller version of my graphics. So that’s a cool site.

Vira: 31:34

That’s actually super important. That’s actually super important because I think when the emails are longer than, heavier than, I think it’s like 120 kilobytes or something, they’re getting clipped, right? Have you like noticed it? Yeah, it’s a big one. And yeah, so basically what it means is that the customer will only receive sort of like a portion of your email and to see the full version, they’ll have to click on view in the web or something like that, right, Emily? I think that’s how it works.

Emily: 32:04

Yeah, exactly. Like trying to keep the file size of the email as small as possible is really important.

Vira: 32:10

Mm-hmm. Yeah, obviously without like losing the quality. But the bad thing with that was like that clipping email is that sometimes it clips the unsubscribe link and instead of like unsubscribing from your list, the people can like send you into the spam folder and that’s a problem.

Emily: 32:27

Yeah.

Vira: 32:28

So you—

Emily: 32:28

I never thought about that.

Vira: 32:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s something that I’ve seen like a lot with like other brands and it’s actually a problem. So try to make your emails as small as possible. So tiny PNG. I’m like taking notes as we speak.

Emily: 32:42

Oh, there’s so many like fun tools. Uh, you know, I love this new site, emailpreview.io, that someone from Twitter created. And, you know, we, you know, when we have new potential clients we’re talking to, they always ask for samples. And I use that a lot to like get a quick, um, you know, quick PDF of our emails. It’s like real, it’s just a neat little, um, a neat little site if you If you want to get a quick snapshot of your email.

Vira: 33:08

Nice, nice. I’ve never heard of this. Yeah, I’ve never heard of this tool before. I know that like internally our team is using Email on Acid a lot. Have you heard of them? They’re like, they are big honestly, but I think you can like test like the same sort of like email for different email services. So like how your email will in like Gmail and like Outlook and stuff like that. And like you can also check your— I’m not sure about the sender score, but it shows you what’s basically wrong with your email if it’s not accessible or if it doesn’t look good in like dark mode. It has like a lot of functionality, Email on Acid. I know that our people love it a lot.

Emily: 33:49

Yes, no, they’re huge and they have a great like weekly email that they send as well.

Vira: 33:55

Oh yeah, oh yeah, it’s great. We actually had a girl from Email on Acid on on our podcast lately. But she’s like, I mean, she was a part of their team, but now she uses them mostly for like accessible emails because that’s probably like the best tool there is.

Emily: 34:09

Just so important. And I, you know, I’ve just in the last year learned so much more about accessibility and it really is so important. And, you know, that has to do with making your emails, you know, if someone is colorblind or, or if they are blind and making your emails just accessible to all people. And you’d be shocked at, there was some crazy statistic about how, what percentage of people are colorblind and it’s pretty high. So like making sure—

Vira: 34:35

I didn’t even think about it honestly, like until like a few weeks ago.

Emily: 34:40

Yeah, no, and it’s crazy. Like, you know, I learned like underlining a link, ’cause like people that are colorblind can’t see that that’s a link ’cause they can’t see the color. So like doing other things to make your links stand out, like using arrows or using an underline, like little things like that. I have some really interesting little tricks That’s so interesting.

Vira: 35:00

I never thought about it. Yeah, because like when you think about accessibility, you don’t think about like colorblind people for some reason. Like at least I didn’t. Yeah, but then it’s an issue, especially like when you’re like creating colorful emails. No, that’s, that’s huge. And I think email on asset can be a big help with that.

Emily: 35:16

Exactly.

Vira: 35:17

Honestly.

Emily: 35:17

Cool.

Vira: 35:19

Emily, so you work with a ton of different brands from all kinds of industries, as we already know. What’s sort of like common issues or like problems you’re seeing when you first start working with them? those clients? What are they like missing or like ignoring? What are the typical issues they might have?

Emily: 35:36

Totally. You know, I think, I think people just— the main thing is they’re overcomplicating their emails. You know, I’ll pop into someone’s account and they’ll say, you know, can you have a look? And I’m like, no wonder it’s so hard for you guys to send an email because you’re sending a novel once a week. You’re sending a long, long email. And people, you know, I can’t say it enough to people, like the average time a person spends reading an email is 10 seconds. Like that’s—

Vira: 36:08

Really? I didn’t realize that.

Emily: 36:10

Yeah, if you Google like average time reading an email, like it was like 11 point something. Now it’s like, now it’s 10 seconds. And I think it’s less. Like I pull up an email and I’m like, why am I reading this?

Vira: 36:21

Honestly, I think it’s less. Now when I think about it, how I go through my emails, unless it’s like some important work, email, I don’t spend more than probably like 5 seconds in it. No.

Emily: 36:31

And so that is so— I mean, if you really think about that, what, you know, you need to make your headline huge, make your copy really short, and have a gigantic button, you know, it’s like, so that is—

Vira: 36:44

yeah.

Emily: 36:46

So I usually say, you know what, the emails are just too long, or, you know, you can simplify things with a nicer template, that’s just going to be easier for You know, but there are other things that I’ve been seeing a lot lately. You know, a lot of people are asking about like, how do I clean my list? And, you know, so we get a lot of requests for people. People are like, I don’t know how to clean up. You know, I know I have a lot of bad emails, but like, how do I get rid of them? What do I do? And so lately I feel like we’ve been doing a lot of kind of cleaning and maintenance, which is really important. You know, like you mentioned, Sender Score, like it’s really important.

Vira: 37:24

Yeah, I feel like one of the common mistakes that that I’m seeing with like my clients is that they wanna send the campaigns to their entire list. So like we have 10,000 people, why not email all of them?

Emily: 37:35

Yes.

Vira: 37:36

I’m like, no, segmentation is where the money is. And that’s like surprising. It’s almost like counterintuitive, but the segmented lists bring, I don’t know, few times the money that the non-segmented email would bring you, which is like super important.

Emily: 37:52

Yeah, people are not utilizing the power Yeah. The power, like segmentation is so powerful. And I had a call with someone yesterday where I was kind of showing them all the options in Mailchimp that you can use to segment. And it’s, there are so many things you can do with, you know, people that did click on an email, people that are located in New York City, people that, you know, joined your list in the last 2 months or have not made a purchase. Like there are just so many incredible things you can do. never be blasting your entire list pretty much ever.

Vira: 38:27

Yeah, no, for sure.

Emily: 38:28

Yeah, you can always— and I think you’re right. Like most people don’t know that. Like most, most clients don’t really understand like how to get started with segmentation.

Vira: 38:39

Yeah. You don’t want to exhaust your list in the first month of sending. That’s, that’s for sure. Like to me, email marketing comes down to segmentation and automation. Campaigns are great, but I think flows like automated flows is where the money are. Like, yeah, because they’re so like targeted. Yeah, why wouldn’t you have it? Why would you like miss this opportunity? So that’s—

Emily: 39:03

Yeah, and that’s what’s so powerful about it, that you can set up something, you know, even like a simple abandoned cart email you can set up in, no lie, under 30 minutes. And that email could potentially generate you thousands and thousands of dollars for Yeah, a year. Like, it’s crazy.

Vira: 39:22

It’s crazy. Yeah. It’s like, I remember we discussed that like 75% of checkouts are abandoned at some point. If you can recover even portions of it, why you wouldn’t, right? So, and there are like so many opportunities for like automating your emails. It’s like, think about it as your like little employees that are like working for you, even if you’re like when you’re not Yes, exactly. Yes. Oh, I’m so glad we could talk today. Honestly, I feel like we are on the same sort of level, that we’re talking the same language.

Emily: 39:57

Yes, yes. It’s fun to talk with people that understand email and it actually is really fun to learn. And I’ve watched other people kind of get started and then a couple of months later, they’re like talking A/B testing and talking, you know, really detailed flows and triggers and all the, you know, all the words, all the funny words. But it is pretty easy to learn. There are so many courses out there and, you know, ways you can learn.

Vira: 40:31

Emily, if people want to like learn directly from you or like see what you are doing and talk to you directly, directly, where can they find you?

Emily: 40:39

Yeah. So honestly, Instagram is probably probably the quickest way to find me. I’m on every day, sadly, way too much. But I’m Emily Ryan Likes, like likes your photo over on Instagram. And I’m new. I’m over on TikTok as well. And I’m Emily Ryan Talks. And there’s my 4-year-old. And yeah, and our website is westfield-creative.com. But yeah, like reach out anytime, tweet me, you know, DM me. And I’m always like down to chat, email, or Mailchimp. Or whatever.

Vira: 41:14

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Emily, for coming to our show. It was a pleasure talking to you. And guys, we will definitely link Emily’s Instagram profile and her website in the description box. So scroll down and go and check out her social media. Thank you again for coming. Thank you.

Emily: 41:32

Thank you. This was so fun. Thank you so much.

Vira: 41:35

We should do it again someday.

Emily: 41:36

Yeah, let’s do it.

Vira: 41:38

Let’s do it. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I hope you learned a thing or two about email marketing designs. I know I learned a lot about designs and best email marketing practices from Emily. If you want to learn more about Emily or about what she does, we will link all of the resources and her social media in this podcast description. So go ahead and check out her work. And as always, if you like what we do, please be sure to be a subscriber. And please don’t forget to rate and review our podcast. And if you leave us a review and if you send us a screenshot of your review, we will send you some special Flowium gift. Spoiler alert, it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be branded and you’re going to love it. So yeah, please leave us a review, send us a screenshot of your review, and we’ll be sure to send you something nice. Thank you again for listening to this podcast. We hope to see you here next week. Bye.