Email Marketing: Building Trust Through the Appearance of Your Emails

The appearance of what you send out to your subscribers contributes a lot to the success you can achieve through email marketing. Through your sender's line as well as your branding, you can gain trust through recognition. Through the design that you utilize, you can project quality and distinction.
 
Many email users consider commercial messages as spam partly because they look like spam. Even if marketing messages were sent out legitimately, emails that are sent out with little attention paid to branding, layout, and design details will likely be considered spam and quickly ignored or deleted by most people. To avoid portraying the image of a spammer and to gain trust from your subscribers, you need to pay attention to the appearance of what you send out. Below are some tips that will help you build trust through the appearance of your emails and, consequently, achieve success through your email marketing campaign.

1. Make sure that what appears in your sender's line is recognizable.
 
Recognition is important in gaining trust from your subscribers. This is why it is crucial that you use a recognizable name in your sender's line. You could use your real name, your online alias, or the name of your organization, product or service. Obviously, you should choose whichever name your subscribers are most likely to recognize as well as respond positively to.
 
2. Make good use of the preview pane.
 
Apart from your sender and subject line, what appears in recipients' preview pane is what many people first encounter with your emails. Upon seeing a new email's content through the preview pane, recipients will decide on whether or not they want to read the entire message. To keep your subscribers from ignoring or deleting your emails without even bothering to see what's in it, make sure that what appears in their preview panes is recognizable as well as attractive. You may want to use your logo, a masthead, and an attention-grabbing headline.
 
3. Encourage your subscribers to communicate with you.
 
Many newsletters contain "Do Not Reply" instructions because email marketers don't monitor communications sent to the address they use to send out emails. This is also often used when emails are sent out by third party suppliers or email marketing companies. However, this can actually be detrimental to the success of your email marketing campaign. You should actually encourage your subscribers to respond to your emails with comments, suggestions, or queries. By doing so, you can gain a lot of insights from your subscribers and you will be able to inspire trust through your interactions.
 
4. Include your company's full contact details in your footer.
 
Publishing your company's full contact details in your emails allows your subscribers to be more trusting in what you have to say. People are more open to content from credible sources and showing that you are a real company (with a registered name, a postal address, and contact numbers) will enhance your credibility. Including these details in your footer also shows your willingness to accept accountability for everything you state in your emails.
 
5. Match your email design to your brand image.
 
The design of your emails should be consistent with all other materials you use to promote your online business. While you don't need to copy the design and layout of your website down to the last detail, it is best for you to match your emails with its theme, colors, and imagery. Doing this will help you extend the trust you've built through your other promotional activities to your email marketing campaign.
 
Once you've created a design that suits your image best, use it as a template for all your emails. Doing so will further help you build trust through branding and recognition. You could even show a sample email to all new subscribers so that they can become familiar with what your emails look like and know what to expect. Once they receive an email from you, they will be more likely to open it and read through it.
 
6. Use an email design that is unlikely to fail you.
 
Some email marketers get too caught up designing their emails that they forget the importance of functionality. You can make use of fancy code to make your emails look flawless but they will appear far from perfect if you can't ensure that what you use is in good working order. Your emails need not look fancy to gain respect from your subscribers. You only need them to look professional and to render properly in the email clients that your subscribers use.
 
To succeed with email marketing and to gain trust from your subscribers, you need to make sure that the design you use will work for all your subscribers. Keep in mind that any design that appears to be broken can make your subscribers feel that you don't really know what you are doing. For this reason, you need to make sure that your emails render properly in at least all the major email clients. You should also make use of proper alt attributes in case the images you use get blocked.
 
Appearance plays a huge part in gaining trust from your subscribers. As long as you keep all these tips in mind when planning out your email marketing campaign, you should be able to establish your reputation as a trustworthy and credible source of relevant information.