When the suspicion that the designs of your marketing emails are a bit bland starts to form, it’s almost impossible to ignore. You convince yourself you’ve fallen behind the curve and that most of your subscribers are thinking that you’ve lost your cutting edge. Before investing in a process of redesign, compare what you are sending out to your subscribers with that of your competitors. If it’s still cool, let it go. 

You will like your current design; after all, you chose it. And surely you have a lot more urgent things to do than just mess around with how it looks. Many of us like the idea of an annual change, just for the sake of it, but it’s nothing more than self-indulgence. That’s no reason not to go for it of course. 

If you conclude your design does not excite your subscribers, change is required as you are missing one of the major encouragements to purchase. We need to focus on emotion. It’s the major thing that sells. Anything else is just fluff. It’s not a process to be entered into without a significant degree of planning, and probably a certain bravery is required as well, but it can be enormously satisfying. 

There is no set order in how to go about changing the design of your email marketing campaigns but you need to decide whether to feed in changes one at a time, such as a new logo or overall colour scheme, or to give into the temptation to do it all at once. Whichever you choose, you need to know what the final design will be, meaning the first thing you should do is to hit the list of free email marketing templates and come up with your new style.

A complete change, coming all at once, might create something of a stir in your subscribers. Some will be entranced, others enthusiastic. Pick the response you want and target the redesign, but remember that most people are disturbed by change.

I prefer doing a bit at a time, feeding in the changes so that only the most observant pick up on the process. This, hopefully, means that those scanning the marketing email won’t be disrupted as we want them to concentrate on the purchase and not the process. In any case, experience has taught me that few will notice in any case. It’s a bit of a downer; there’s no option other than to get used to it.

You might even get direct feedback from the subscribers to your segmented email marketing lists. You will be pleased of course that your efforts have been noticed, but here lies danger. You might get a lucid and coherent criticism, perhaps even distruction, of your new design and the temptation is to accept the criticism. Don’t give in to this temptation and look to the data to see whether you’ve been successful or not. Just modernising the look of your marketing emails might be sufficient for it to be a successful exercise if modernising was your main intention.