How Visual Hierarchy Impacts Click-Through Rates in Email Campaigns
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Great copy isn't the only thing you need to succeed in email marketing. Knowing visual hierarchy, what's seen and what's prioritized, how to create balance and what order to place items in can encourage subscribers to do more, and when done correctly, great visual hierarchy grabs attention, guides the reader to the next logical thought, and increases click-through rate by 47%. Read this article to learn how visual hierarchy impacts email effectiveness and how you, as a marketer, can easily adjust rendering.
The Importance of an Email Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is the arrangement of design elements in order of importance, allowing subscribers to quickly grasp what they need to know first upon opening an email. Humans have evolved to interpret and understand visuals at a certain speed by default they read left to right and top to bottom. Harnessing the power of an effective visual hierarchy works to complement these inherent scanning habits, highlighting essential elements while seamlessly shifting attention toward other purposes. Enhance Your Email Deliverability Rate by pairing strong design with backend best practices, ensuring your visually optimized emails actually reach and resonate with your audience. Emails built in visual hierarchy are not only easier to read and understand, but they also minimize the need for cognitive load, compounding engagement and click-through rates.
Employ Size and Scale to Make Sure Important Information is Prioritized
Size and scale help to establish what's most important. Larger elements are noticed and looked at first, so by dedicating the time to scale up important headers, large images, or even sized primary calls-to-action compared to other, less significant elements, marketers can draw attention where it should be focused the most. Readers will understand what's most important immediately, the message they need to retain and what action you want them to take and reduced friction exists when processing such information. Therefore, employing size and scale for better understanding can greatly enhance email marketing click-through rates.
Use Color Contrast to Draw Attention & Create Light Separations
One of the best ways to ensure a visual hierarchy exists is with color contrast. Bright or contrasting elements demand attention immediately, making them the best option for primary messages or calls-to-action that must not be missed. Marketers seeking to their advantage should utilize color contrast to ensure major calls-to-action or must-read content is easily found; it's also effective in drawing eye attention from left to right and top to bottom, accidentally guiding them over other actionable articles and greatly improving engagement and conversion rates.
Layout/Whitespace for Intuitive Flow
Layout and whitespace for intentional design operate off of visual hierarchy elements. An email that has different sections with enough whitespace between headlines, body copy, and imagery creates a visually segmented experience. Readers and subscribers understand where one idea concludes and where another one begins. They can seamlessly traverse the content as it cohesively connects over more transitional ideas. Layouts and whitespace abound direct the subscriber to the most important CTAs without distraction.
Typography to Elevate Important Information
Typography fosters elements of visual hierarchy through font choice, font weight, and font sizing. An email that applies bolded fonts for headlines or important ideas naturally garners the reader's attention. Also, secondary information should remain in the same typeface (bolded for secondary importance) and receive secondary positioning to further the hierarchical flow. Typography teaches subscribers what is most important and provides a narrative for what they should read and eventually click through to completion.
Imagery that Facilitates Overall Visual Hierarchy
Imagery can flip the visual hierarchy within an email, too. A strong image placed well invokes attention and focuses the viewer on the centerpiece of the email's clear intention. When imagery is just as high quality as text-based elements, they can encourage readers to focus on what's around it and help solidify the overarching message. However, if images are placed poorly or too busy to make sense with other hierarchy elements, they can distract from what's important and create confusion. Images that foster true visual hierarchy will only boost click-through rates.
Create a Visual Hierarchy for Mobile to Ensure CTAs are in the Right Place
Creating a visual hierarchy around positioning your call-to-action also makes it easier for subscribers to know what they have to do. If you place the CTA above the fold including in places that flow logically afterward and use contrastive colors, whitespace, and buttons and links that are click-friendly, you rely on the way people read to get them there. Better positioning provides less friction, as people can see it, and with the emphasis, they're positioned in a helpful directional way.
Create a Mobile Visual Hierarchy
When creating a visual hierarchy, keep your mobile subscribers in mind. If you fail to create a mobile visual hierarchy, you risk pushing your non-desktop readers away. A mobile visual hierarchy relies on clean, concise messaging to avoid overwhelming. Headlines and images, as well as types/fonts, should be readable and usable on a mobile screen, while important messages should still be above the fold even when in emails. Consistency aids CTR on mobile. If it visually carries over from desktop to mobile, there will be fewer issues.
Test Visual Hierarchy to Increase CTR
Visual hierarchies can be tested for success to increase CTR. A/B tested campaigns should be sent out regularly by marketers to see what's working and measure success based on CTR. Are certain things in certain orders better or worse? Why does the smaller headline get more clicks than the larger one with more whitespace? By constantly testing what's new, email campaigns will gain historical data for the best performance in the long term without any guessing.
Increased Subscriber Trust from a Consistent Visual Language
Creating a consistent visual language colors, fonts, layouts, and photography creates subscriber trust as they're bound to acknowledge your visual language over time and know what to expect. If your emails all look the same based on consistent visuals, it's easier for them to read and process the email without questioning what they see. Trusted layouts and designs over time allow subscribers to feel confident that they know how to work with the email. The consistent visual hierarchy will enable them to trust your brand and want to engage with it over a long period.
Team Training on How to Use the Visual Hierarchy
Anyone on your team who designs the email must be trained on the concept of visual hierarchy so that it will be applied consistently. Training on colors, typography, and layouts, as well as where to position CTAs, will ensure everyone is on the same page to create well-designed emails for easy navigation and ultimate engagement. A well-trained team comes from a professionally honed awareness of the visual hierarchy that ultimately engages subscribers and keeps them satisfied while increasing CTR across all campaigns.
The Marketing Benefits of Measuring What's Improved Because of It
Measuring what's improved because of visual hierarchy offers great marketing benefits. For example, if the visual hierarchy of your previous campaigns improves CTR over time you can measure fluctuations in CTR over longer time spans you know where the extra effort paid off. Similarly, retention rates, customer lifetime value, and consistency of engagement are metrics that can be clearly measured over time. Showing value or effectiveness over the improvements made because of visual hierarchy will only support more design best practices, additional training seminars, and more moving forward.
Creating a Visual Hierarchy via Subscription Intuitiveness
When marketers know what subscribers expect, they can create a visual hierarchy more seamlessly. When marketers have access to subscriber analytics and response rates and know how subscribers generally respond over time marketers understand what they might want in a certain order. The more the visual hierarchy reflects what they would have expected, the more pleased they'll be and the more they'll engage with an email created as second nature to their desires. A visual hierarchy stemming from subscriptions allows for seamless communication and successful email campaigns over time.
Leverage Visuals That Suggest Where to Go with Their Eyes
Directional arrows, icons, or other small graphics help champion the notion of a visual hierarchy and guide someone's eye to where it should go most importantly, your CTA. Providing little indicators that give an almost unwarranted notion of how people should travel through your content makes it easier for you to get them to comply. It's the way things should be, and you must trust the process, so don't be afraid to add an arrow or two this makes for quality readability and subsequently, better engagement rates as subscribers learn to do what you want them to do, naturally.
Finding the Right Balance Prevents Overwhelm Between Text and Images
Finding a nice balance between text and imagery ensures the email is engaging without overwhelming the subscriber. Images are eye-catching upon initial open, but it's important to acknowledge that subsequent important information comes from text, and therefore, brevity is key. Furthermore, the best use of images is in conjunction with text; if you have good imagery, supportive text drives home what the purpose is. Finding a proper balance fosters clarity without overwhelming the subscriber as they understand what elements of the visual hierarchy are most important and how best to engage.
Adapting Visual Hierarchy for Accessibility and Inclusivity
When you craft your emails with accessibility (like visual hierarchies) in mind, you broaden your readership and ensure every reader can use usable, engaging content at their fingertips. Therefore, add accessible design elements, from color contrast to typography legibility to alt text for images and hierarchy structures for content navigation. Accessible designs not only benefit those subscribers who are visually impaired or require other considerations without difficulty engaging with your content but they boost inclusivity, approval, and success of email marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Visual hierarchy affects click-through rates, especially in terms of how a subscriber interacts with your email and the responses generated from it. When an email has visual hierarchy assessed and effectively executed, this implies that the marketer is using alignment, spacing, sizing, and more to arrange the content of the email in such a manner that subscribers see what's most important and are guided through a gradual progression of what's primary and secondary. Larger fonts for headlines and smaller for subheadings, images paired with white space or nested within blocks of larger text, a CTA at the end of a storytelling or persuasive email, as well as left, right, or center justified, all help readers determine how to best consume the information.
In addition, hierarchical engagement can be a result of color choices, fonts, styles, sizing vs. spacing, etc. When subscribers are given a clear way to determine how and where to look and how to consume your content through design, it greatly minimizes their time observing and figuring it all out. Improved usability increases trust as well since subscribers feel less challenged understanding your purpose vs. merely what's on the surface. The easier it is for someone to comprehend how they should act upon the intention of your email, the easier it will be for them to feel confident acting upon your recommendation.
A continual visual hierarchy assessed and enhanced from previous performance gives an opportunity for perpetual success. By looking at what has worked in past emails via A/B testing or assessing subscriber response behavior with engagement metrics marketers discover which visuals work best for which types of emails. This means that over time, marketers are learning more and more about how to more appropriately meet the needs of their subscribers so that sooner rather than later, relevancy is an ease that keeps subscribers comfortable, informed, and ready for anything from start to finish.
When visual hierarchy matters, it matters not only to fix current and acute issues of readability and comprehension but trust over time as well. If subscribers know they can depend on your emails to be well-structured and easy to access, they'll likely remain engaged with your brand, speak highly of your brand, and remain active over time. Ultimately, there will be better click-through rates as prioritizing visual hierarchy shows dedication over time to successful strategies that positively impact the experience of new subscribers as well as those already on board.
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