This is a guest post from Geoff Phillips, Senior Editor & Email Specialist, Email on Acid.
With an estimated 67% of emails being opened on mobile devices, responsive design for email is no longer an option, it’s a requirement for successful email marketing campaigns.
And—content creation aside—the email design process can be quite daunting. To optimize your workflow, consider the following tips:
1. Create a Suite of Templates.
Whether your company employs a dedicated email developer, or you are hiring a freelance designer, creating a suite of email templates will greatly reduce the time you spend on email development and testing. Make sure to include options for all of the functions you’ll need: transactional emails, newsletters, promotions, etc.
For the budget strapped, modular templates add a fair amount of freedom while keeping your mailings consistently branded. And, if you find templates too constrictive, consider using a “boilerplate” that includes common fixes for the foundation of your emails.
2. Determine Your Audience’s Preferences.
Using an email analytics tool, find out the most popular email clients and devices for your readership. Focus your development and testing efforts on those clients to guarantee that your readers have an optimized experience.
Once your templates have been thoroughly tested in these specific clients, your overall production time should decrease significantly.
3. Coordinate Creative and Development Teams.
To ensure a seamless process, make sure your marketing and creative teams know your templates inside and out. That way, they can write copy and select images with the templates in mind.
A plain text version of the copy should be provided to the email developer to ease the process of adding content to the template.
Finally, your mailing schedule should be planned out well in advance to give all team members enough time to create and test the email before queuing it for deployment.
Visit www.emailonacid.com or download our guide, “10 Quick Design Hacks for Responsive Emails” to see examples and learn tips about everything from pixel size to layout and hero images.