Many people think of email as a strictly visual medium made up of boring old text and static graphics. But email needn’t be thought of this way. With the following tips and techniques, you can create exciting multimedia emails to delight the senses.
1. Tell a Story with Colorful Language
A text-based email campaign might not seem to engage the senses at first glance, but a storytelling writing style will soon suck your subscribers in. Think about the way that you reacted when you read your favorite novel the first time. You could probably almost taste the meals that the characters ate and feel the environment around them. The same literary techniques that authors use can be employed to bring a marketing campaign to life.
A good storytelling campaign will have all the elements of a great novel. You’ll have a narrative with characters that your subscribers can relate to. You’ll use adjectives and adverbs to bring the action to life. The stories of how your company began, how a new product was developed, or how you became involved in an event will all lend themselves to this type of sensory email.
2. Use Graphics to Excite Subscribers
Graphics are one of the most common ways that email marketers engage their subscribers’ senses, but few really exploit this medium. Whenever you use an image, ask yourself, “Does this add value to my email newsletter?” The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words holds true, but only if the picture has real value. Simply looking attractive isn’t enough. Your graphics should tell your subscribers something about your products, make something clearer, or evoke an emotion.
Get creative with graphics. Placing images around text is fine, but you can create a distinctive effect by placing a picture underneath your copy. Several images about the same topic could be grouped together in a photo collage.
Any images that you take yourself are fine to use in an email. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that anything already published on the Internet is up for grabs. Even attributing an image to its source won’t save you from a potential lawsuit. To avoid infringing copyright, search for Creative Commons images, which are freely available to the public.
Remember that your still photographs are only the tip of the image iceberg. Graphs and infographics can inform your subscribers about some topic in a more accessible, engaging way than paragraphs of text. Animated GIFs, a compression format for graphics, can add interest and draw attention to elements of your email that may have otherwise been overlooked.
3. Add Videos to Engage Sight and Sound
Videos add another sensory dimension to your emails. These elements appeal to the senses of sight and sound in tandem for greatest impact. According to digital marketing experts, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.” It’s a bold claim, but one that seems to be supported by data. For example, online distributor Shoeline.com saw its sales conversions increase by 44 percent when it started using videos to showcase its wares.
Video’s combination of sight and sound helps subscribers become emotionally invested in your brand. Just 30 seconds of video footage captures a message that would take thousands of lines of text to convey, and video makes this capture happen in a much more engaging way. That high level of engagement encourages people to share your email, which maximizes its impact.
Embedding an entire video directly into an email will make your email file too large; instead, use a thumbnail image from your video linked to the clip. Superimposing a play button onto the image will give a clear indication to subscribers that this content is a video they can watch.
4. Add Audio Content to Engage the Sense of Sound
Stripping away the images and focusing on audio content may work for some businesses, such as a record label looking to promote its latest musical find. While songs often work together with a music video, this visual medium can distract listeners from the music. Presenting the music alone using an embeddable player such as Soundcloud allows these companies to present music in a much purer form.
Music players are also an attractive way to promote artists that don’t have the budget for a music video. Some independent acts never create film clips. Instead, they email their songs to a subscriber base of fans, music bloggers, and radio stations to spread the word.
Just don’t make the mistake of autoplaying the audio file. While some marketers feel that autoplay increases the reach of an audio file, the feature is a turnoff for most subscribers. Autoplay removes freedom of choice, forcing subscribers to listen to something that they may otherwise decide to skip past. Autoplay can also be especially frustrating for people opening your email in a quiet space such as public transportation vehicles, a library, or their place of work. Trust that your content is compelling enough that your subscribers will choose to listen to your audio in their own time.
5. Add Interactive Elements to Appeal to Touch
Appealing to the sense of touch can be difficult in an email, but adding interactive elements can get subscribers clicking away. There’s a real tactile appeal to features like clickable forms, surveys, quizzes, and tests. These formats can be used to collect information you can use to improve your company or its email marketing efforts, or simply to entertain your audience. Shareable memes which tell email users which cartoon character they’re most like or which career they should pursue have great viral potential. However, make sure that the subject is relevant to your organization.
While most people think of videos as appealing to the senses of sight and sound, they also engage touch. Subscribers use this sense with your video when they hit play, pause your content, move the player back to view the action again and close the player window. Encouraging your subscribers to play with your content in this way ensures they engage with your message.
Let these ideas take you beyond text and images to create stunning email campaigns which appeal to the senses.
