7 Ways To Have Good Email Marketing Not Break UX Design

Running an eCommerce can be exciting. However, you’ll need to pay attention to every detail – from the core of your business, to the most tedious details – that includes the user experience (UX). The UX design determines whether or not customers will want to visit and buy from you again.

That’s where email marketing comes in. Building a great email list is important, but so is ensuring that it doesn’t hurt your UX design. Here are 7 ways you can integrate good email marketing with your UX design:

1. Static Opt-In Form

“An opt-in form is the most basic form in eCommerce email marketing,” says Richard Wells, a marketing manager at UK Writings and OX Essays. “This form helps you keep your UX design smooth and clean by sticking on either the right side of a page, or in the bottom footer. And, if desired, you can hide the form with a sticky tab, so that it doesn’t interfere with your UX. However, you should still make it to where customers can still see the form.”

2. Popups (When Used Properly)

While popups may get a bad rap for being irritating, there are ways to make them integrate perfectly with UX without frustrating users. Here are a few different popups to know:

• Time-based popups appear after a user has been on a page for a certain number of seconds. Keep in mind: these types of popups are the most disruptive for both users and the UX design.
• Scroll-based popups are less irritating for users (since they appear after a certain amount of the page has been scrolled), but they can still disrupt your UX design.
• Exit-Intent popups are the best option – These only appear when the user is heading to the X on the side of your tab; so, it doesn’t break UX.

So, to ensure that you’re enabling popups properly, check out these pro tips:

• Use only one type of popup, so that you don’t confuse users.
• Disable popups for users who have already signed up, or had opted-out or receiving popups.
• The images, background, and tone of your popups must match your brand.

3. Sign-Up Forms That Are Interactive

Sign-up forms should make people smile, not bored. Therefore, an interactive sign-up form can help make the experience more fun for your customers. People like playing games; so, an interactive sign-up form is a fun way to entice users to take action. Best of all, gamified sign-up forms makes your UX design stand out more, since you can customize how the forms will look once they’re live. (These forms are especially ideal if you’re holding a giveaway or offering special discounts.)

4. Landing Pages

“Integrating a landing page into your email marketing strategy is helpful, if you’re doing events like a contest or sale,” says Michael Turner, a business writer at Revieweal and State of writing.

“While landing pages won’t work well for your entire site, they’re still good for showing off special events happening in your brand without disrupting the UX design. All you have to do is keep landing pages streamlined, and not have them distracting to your customers.”

When it comes to any kind of marketing, the trick to success is getting people through the funnel with the minimal number of clicks. The more clicks to be had and the more hoops your readers have to go through, the more reluctant they will be to continue. Linking landing pages in this way is a great way to cut the distance and get people engaged in your mission.

5. Optimize Your Email Basics

When it comes to email marketing, and content marketing in general, there’s no doubt that there are some hard and fast rules that you must remember to ensure you’re producing high-quality content, but these are rules that are easy to forget when you’re focusing on all the other important things you need to do.

For example, you should make sure the subject lines of your emails are short, eye-catching, and accurate (not clickbait-y), and that any calls to action within your emails are clear and concise, as well as not having more than one CTA per email.

UX stands for ‘user experience’, and all these aspects and elements of your emails come together to create the overall user experience. Have a misleading subject line in your email and it’s going to bring your experience down. Some important considerations to then think about include:

• Short and accurate subject lines
• Interesting yet punchy email content
• Bold and simple CTA
• Alt-tag your images
• Don’t overuse images that will make your emails slow
• Optimize your emails for mobile devices and tablets
• Make your emails easily shareable via social media using links and buttons

6. Use Email Personalization

Nowadays, people expect emails to be personalized in the sense that you’re using their names in the headers, and only sending them emails that are relevant to them. Imagine if you’re a 40-year-old male and you’re receiving email content from an eCommerce store about soon-to-be-mothers’ clothes. It doesn’t work and this kind of mass emailing is only going to put people off opening your emails in the future.

Instead, you need to think about gathering data about your email subscribers and then segmenting your email list by certain demographics, such as age, gender, income, sales and purchase history, geographical location, and so on.

This way, you’ll be able to create effective, targeted emails that are relevant to the people opening them and have a personalized touch that’s going to make them want to continue opening your emails in the future.

And, at the end of the day, it’s always nice opening a friendly email.

7. Use Feedback

Whether or not you agree that the customer is always right, the customer will tend to know whether they’re enjoying the reading of an email or not, which is why it’s always a good idea to get feedback.

There are multiple ways you can do this. You could add a link at the bottom of your email asking people to fill out a survey or leaving a comment on a page if they had any thoughts they had to share. You could be more proactive and run a survey on your entire business, offering discounts on the chance to win a prize once people have filled out their answers.

If you are taking this approach, then you need to make sure you’re precise with your information and the way you go about getting it. For example, most people are only ever going to leave a review for the following reasons:

• There’s an incentive to be gained
• They’re exceptionally, unbelievably happy with their experience
• They’re exceptionally unhappy with their experience

This can make your results a little biased if you’re passively collecting data, because you’re only ever going to see the opposite ends of the spectrum, but this should be obvious when looking through your results. The best idea is to step back and get a glimpse at the big picture of how people feel about your emails.

You can also use statistics and analytics to judge your email content. For example, if you have a really high open rate, then you know your subject lines are working, but if people are jumping out of your emails again within a few seconds, then you need to make your emails more attractive, especially with the opening sentences.

This leads us nicely onto our bonus tip!

BONUS TIP: Use Click And Heat Maps

Heat maps are also beneficial for allowing to see user behavior on your page, along with your website’s performance. Heatmapping consists of click maps, among other types of maps.

Click maps show you where visitors are clicking their mouse on desktop devices, or where they’re tapping on mobile devices (also known as touch heatmaps). In that case, these types of maps are color-coded (normally red, orange, and yellow) to show where users are clicking and tapping the most. And, in terms of email marketing, you’ll need to see where people are clicking and or tapping, so that you can integrate an email list into your UX design.

Conclusion

So, there you have it! These 4 ways (including the bonus tip) can ensure that your email marketing strategies can be incorporated seamlessly with your UX design. As you can see, both email marketing and UX design can go hand-in-hand, as you run an eCommerce store.

While this process can take time, it’s still important to play your cards right. As you keep these techniques in mind, you’ll create a great experience for your customers, and keep them happy from beginning to end, thus helping you build an amazing customer base.

Best of luck!