Email Design Best Practices

Your email design sets your outreach apart from the dozens of other emails your prospects are getting every day. Some companies over-design their cold outreach so that it looks like all the other colorful, branded emails everyone gets. But emails that look like personal messages actually see better performance metrics than these over-polished designs.

It’s tempting to over-design emails to make them look professional when in reality you only alienate your audience. But there are important steps you can take to make them look polished, yet personal. Having a professional signature, for example, will go far towards making you seem much more legitimate and established.

How to Design Sales Email Layouts

Sales emails don’t need fancy, complicated layouts. You don’t need a banner, a colorful background, flashy images, or unusual formatting. These are best left to people who are already interested, such as newsletter subscribers or inbound, qualified leads. Cold, outbound sales emails perform better when they have a less overwhelming and more personal format.

When it comes to creating a more friendly and personal impression, less is more. By simplifying and separating your ideas into just a few, small paragraphs, you end up with a much more digestible email that your leads are more likely to read. When you keep the formatting simple and similar to any other personal email, you also build trust and make your reader less likely to think that they are receiving spam.

Making Sales Emails Look Polished

Even if you aren’t using fancy formatting, you can still make some subtle tweaks toward more professional emails. These little changes may seem insignificant but can actually make your outreach stand out as more legitimate than competitors’.

Include a Professional Signature

Your email signature is your best opportunity to include distinctive but tasteful graphics in a cold, outbound email. It should have your company’s logo, your name, and your contact information. It should also include a link to your company’s website, although this is a little controversial for some people.

There are those who believe that having any links in cold emails causes them to not send correctly, or be categorized as spam by the recipients’ email providers. However, that concern isn’t borne out by the evidence you can find in your own inbox–look for yourself, and see how many of the messages you receive daily don’t just have links in the email signatures but also include them in the text itself.

Exclude Unprofessional Graphics

It’s increasingly trendy to include emojis, GIFs, and traditionally non-professional graphics in sales emails. While this can work well for direct-to-consumer messaging, it’s a very different story for B2B marketers. Emojis might seem like they liven things up, but any benefit they might have with some customers is canceled out by others’ negative reactions. Because some people, especially senior executives you should be targeting, will find emojis and other graphics unrelatable, it’s not worth the marginal benefits of catching others’ eyes.