Is Custom email design template help to grow your business?

Preeti Taneja

Entrepreneur | Posted on 21-Sep-2019

Let me answer this question in two parts…

ONE:

Yes, a custom email design/template can improve the conversion for your business.

The idea is quite simple. Your business is unique. And so are your needs, requirements, and goals. To that, you have a unique target audience – whose preference and expectations are unique as well.

So, your email design should be customized per these unique facets. If your audience is well-read, maybe including more texts in your email is a good option. If you’re targeting millennials who aren’t too much into reading, maybe putting up heavy graphics will bring you better results.

Letsdiskuss

Similarly, if you just sell one or two products, customizing the template that highlights one or two products makes sense. If you sell multiple products, you’ve got to tweak the templates to ideally showcase all the relevant products.

Meaning to say, you cannot simply pick a ready-to-use email design/template and use it. It might convert – but it won’t convert optimally. Personalizing the template per the unique needs and requirements in your case can drive you much better results.

In short, custom email design/template does convert better, which, per your question, can help grow your business relatively faster.

Plain Text vs HTML (Courtesy: Hubspot)

NOW THE SECOND PART OF THE ANSWER…

Using fancy email templates – or customizing your template in a fancy way – is a very, very bad idea today.

In fact, the founder of Convert Kit says “Beautiful email templates are bad for business”.

WHY?

Because emails are originally meant for personalized communication. So, if you’re sending design-heavy emails, as a business owner, it isn’t something the ESPs (Email Service Providers) would appreciate. They would consider this as promotional.

And in this case, if you are lucky, your email will end up in the Promotional tab of the recipients – if not, it would very certainly get filtered out in the Spam folder.

(Courtesy: GetResponse)

In either case, your open rate and CTR will be hurt; there will be less conversion. This will hurt your business growth.

So, unless you *really* need to, sticking to plain text-based emails template is the best idea. They will usually end up in the Primary inbox of the recipients. Moreover, people still appreciate such simple, non-fancy emails.