Although email marketing helps senders achieve the common goal of reaching a target audience best suited for their message, no two campaigns are the same. This is mainly because just about every sender is trying to reach a unique and specific audience. The right approach is dependent on your ideal readers. In this post, we will go over some easy ways you can design your email templates to appeal to a younger crowd.
Make It Cool
I’m going to lay something really heavy on you so brace yourself: the younger generation are drawn to stuff that oozes coolness. In order to get their attention, you must appeal to their senses, meaning you may have to toss some of the conventional design aspects out the window. This is okay, though, because HTML gives you plenty of flexibility to work with, allowing you to incorporate the colors, images and shapes that will enhance the experience for the younger reader. You could also use video to engage them and keep their attention. When attempting to give your email template that perfect touch of coolness, don’t forget to keep your presentation professional. While you want to impress your subscribers, what you don’t want to do is lose sight of your ultimate goal.
“Cool” is a subjective term, of course, but in an email template you can take that to mean a design that appeals to the eye and reflects a modern aesthetic. Your newsletters should always look their best, but designing with a younger audience in mind should get your mind working past your usual parameters. Ask yourself if each and every link is absolutely necessary; tighten overly long or jargon-filled phrases; keep your eyes on trending sites to match their sensibilities (and remember that these sensibilities can change from week to week). The overall design trend of the internet seems to be simplification, so if your email has multiple borders, tabs, links all over the place and gigantic images that a busy subscriber might not even display, “you’re doing it wrong.”
Keep It Focused
They say people these days have short attention spans. If this is true for adults, then the younger crowd must be working with little to no attention span at all. The importance of keeping your email template focused is even more important when communicating with the college demographic or people even younger. You have to keep in mind that some of your young subscribers may be reading your message on their smartphone. If they have one of the latest super devices, they probably could be doing hundreds of other things beside reading your email. Don’t give them a reason to ditch your message by designing a template that lacks focus and distracts the reader.
Apply the KISS Principle
KISS is a mantra often spoken in the military. What does it mean? “Keep it simple, stupid.” This is the mindset you need to adopt when designing your email templates for a younger audience. Understanding that the young crowd tends to be drawn to cool and fun designs can make it fairly easy to go overboard by incorporating too much technology. While it may be tempting to utilize impressive elements such as AJAX, ASP and Flash, this complicated stuff is best left out of the inbox. By limiting your design to basic HTML, you can ensure that your message both looks and performs its very best.
The younger crowd is a viable target audience for most email marketers. These are the buyers of the future and could be your customers of today with the right strategy. Getting them to respond takes far more than a good looking email template, but an appealing design can surely get you off to a heck of a good start.
